Offmessage

Forkd gets the elevator pitch treatment over at the PDA blog.  And a stumping great picture of me.  Which is nice (if you like pictures of people in suits looking simultaneously smug and stoned, that is).

I am an Internet veteran. That is all.

One of my subversion repositories broke.  Nastily.  I thought that I was going to have to rebuild it and lose the changes that came after the corrupt revision.  I googled for help, and found someone who had written a script to fix my very problem.  I ran it, it worked, I was very grateful.  I blogged about it on the Isotoma blog.

4 hours later the author of the script commented on my blog post. How awesome is that?

Well then.  We’re there.  After months and months of development Forkd is opening up to public registrations.  Feta mark 4 is released today with yet more snazzy new features, including a really rather awesome activity stream, Wordpress integration, RSS feeds, commit messages and much more.  We’ve even managed, amazingly, to bring something new to the game of tagging with the ‘tag brush’ feature.

We’re stopping development for a bit to focus on growing our user and recipe base, but the plan is to start on the next release (Gammon?) in about a month.  If you’ve not signed up, please do.  And please try out some of the tasty tasty food.

Forkd is coming on leaps and bounds (possibly because I haven’t touched the code for months now….).  There’s been another release today (this is Feta 3 now) which adds loads of cool features:

• Blog integration
• No need for Flickr
• Easier to find other people

If you haven’t already got an account please shout; we’re going to open up invites to the public soon, and surely you want to be in on the ground floor?

The above is a video done by friends Eko for Science City York. I post, simply as I rather like it, and you can see two of our sites in there somewhere

I can’t tell you how excited I am. We’ve been working on this in our spare time for such a long time now I’m amazed that we’ve actually finally made it. Forkd.com is live, in beta, and ready for your recipes. If I’ve not already sent you an invitation mail me (andy at isotoma.com) and I’ll sort one out straight away. Go for it people!

It’s finally here. Dave, Antony and Tom have been toiling away over a hot stove for the past few weeks and Forkd is finally ready for the tasting. It’s the feta release right now (d’ya see what we did there?) - if you’d like a feta tester account mail me. They’re very limited, but so is the readership of this blog… You’ll need a genuine love of food, a desire to show the world your cooking and the patience to log good bug reports and feature requests. If you’re interested please drop me a line (andy at isotoma.com will do it).

We bought a squeezebox for the office a month ago.  In so doing we took the music from being either my or Doug’s choice (we were the only two with speakers attached to our machines) to being anything anyone has brought in, democratically served up on a first come first served basis.

Things we’ve learned?

• It was a fantastic idea.  For a rapidly growing company the music we play in the office has been culture forming, and democratising it was the best thing we could have done
• Man’o'war are shit
• The new UNKLE album is ace
• Pure Reason Revolution are amazing
• Switchfoot are hugely overrated
• Early Iron Maiden is better than I remember
• Lost Horizons by Lemon Jelly is really good
• Almost all post-rock is dreary poo, except one band, God Is An Astronaut, who are very good, but I can’t quite work out why.
• No-one in the office apart from me appreciates Talking Heads
• No-one in the office apart from me will own up to liking the Fields of the Nephilim, but they all nod along when they think no-one’s looking

If you are so inclined you can see what we’re listening to right now over at last.fm, where we scrobble as Isotoma.

Today is, as all self respecting Internet junkies know, International Talk Like A Pirate Day.  The image below represents the pinnacle of our office conversation today.  I am so proud of what we’ve created.