@madpilot makes

New version of 88 Miles goes live!

For the past couple of months, I’ve been slaving away prepping the next version of 88 Miles, my simple time tracking application and now, I can happily announce it is alive! There are heaps of new features, and bug fixes, including a migration to Rails 2, a migration to a new server as well some dabbling in the wonderful world of Rails plugins. Some of the features are below:

Saasu.com integration

Many people have been asking for invoicing from 88 Miles, but since it is really outside of where I’d like to see 88 Miles go (The strap line is Simple time tracking for a reason) so Saasu | The web finance engine to the rescue! I wrote the the Rails plugin that talks to Saasu.com, and I’ll be releasing it shortly after making a few cleanups (There are some parts of the API I’m not using in 88 Miles that are still a little rough around the edges). The plugin will allow users to sync companies and contacts as will as create invoices straight from their timesheets. I’m pretty excited by this feature.

OpenID support

88 Miles is now OpenID aware, so you can use your third-party OpenID to login to 88 Miles. Just between you and me, OAuth will be coming soon (as soon as the rails plugin and ruby library settle).

New REST endpoints

There has been quite a bit of work on the REST API — it should now be much more consistent (i.e the data that the server sends and the data that the server expects is the same). I’ve also removed the /api in the endpoint URL, as it was becoming a nightmare to maintain.

New Server

Finally, the biggest change is our new server! We have moved over to a Joyent accelerator, which are specifically tuned to the Ruby on Rails platform. This means everything will be quicker. The old Media Temple server, whilst great didn’t really allow for much customisation, and with the Christmas special of two years for the price of one, it was kind of hard to pass up.

It’s been a fun ride – this project is always a great learning experience for me – and it helps that there are others out there that like it. Go and try it out if you haven’t before (or even if you have) :)