While we’re on our company retreat in Malaga, Spain, I wanted to catch up on some important announcements. Our team is continuing to grow and we’ve recently add two more great people to our Philadelphia office.
First, welcome Russ Thompson to the team. Russ will be in charge of web operations for Postmark and Beanstalk, making [...]
Welcoming Russ Thompson & JP Toto to the Wildbit Family!
Why we shut down a product that was $75,000/year profitable
Shutting down our first product
You may have heard or read about Wildbit shutting down Newsberry, our first product on January 2nd. Chris wrote about a few reasons behind it, but I felt like we needed to be totally honest about how we got to this decision. This was a tough time for us, personally, as [...]
Justifying difficult customers in support
In my past life I was working in health insurance. Insurance works in a method called pooling. 10 people pay $10 each, and when one has an accident that costs $80, the insurance company can pay the claim, and still make some money. There’s the reverse of course, where health insurance companies collect $100, but [...]
Philly.rb Hack Night at Wildbit HQ
One of the best parts about having our new office in Philadelphia is having friends over to visit! We love getting drop-ins from all of the awesome people who work in our building, including Indy Hall, Damage Control, and iFractal.
On Monday November 21st, we’re excited to be hosting Philly.rb, our local Ruby user group, and [...]
A difficult day
It’s with mixed emotion I’m here to say that we will be closing down Newsberry on January 2, 2012. As many of you know, this was the first product that we built at Wildbit. That was over seven years ago, when we were mainly a consulting firm, and had a need for email marketing for [...]
News: New members of the Wildbit family and a new office!
It’s been a really busy few months here (it feels like we’re always saying that!). We have a few really exciting announcements I want to share.
New members of Wildbit!
We were sad when Daniel Crenna left Wildbit two months ago, and started to look for someone to help support Postmark. After a few weeks of interviews, [...]
Mercurial API for Ruby — delivered!
As you know we are currently working on adding Mercurial support to Beanstalk. We released a beta recently and our best friends and beta testers are currently helping us get it ready for a public release (thanks guys!). While it’s awesome it’s not ready for a grand announcement yet, but I’ve got something a little different for you today.
At Wildbit we like open source a lot and we use open source projects and libraries every day. So when I started working on Mercurial this summer I thought: Why not make a Ruby API for Mercurial (that we had to build anyway) as an open source project? Really, no reason not to do it. So, here it is!
Designing a status page for Beanstalk
Since the early days of Beanstalk we have been using our Twitter account for status updates and maintenance notices, but it became obvious that a separate status page was needed for better communication. Twitter is a great way to learn about problems or maintenance, but only for people who check it all the time. People who are not on Twitter or don’t follow us have to check our Twitter stream which can be cluttered with replies or retweets and not clearly display the current status of our services.
How to get better email content previews in Gmail
Does this look familiar?
You might not have even noticed, but Gmail previews the first few lines of text in an email right after the subject. Normally, this is great, helping you peek inside an email to determine if you want to read the rest. But we realized that for our newsletters, the preview piece was [...]
Responsive design for email – the largest mobile audience
A month ago, Wildbit released a mobile-optimized view of Beanstalk which is very handy for code-collaboration on the go. While researching for this project, I was surprised to find that mobile usage is slowly passing usage of IE 6-8 at Beanstalk. It’s like a dream come true!
Mobile isn’t just in the browser
David Greiner from Campaign [...]
Wildbit Product Support is Getting an Upgrade!
We’ve been making changes over the last several months to better support our customers at Wildbit. As the products grow, so do the requirements for our time and tools that can help us provide support quickly and effectively. For the entire life of our products, we have always answered support on our own. The whole [...]
We’re hiring a Rails developer!
We’re looking to hire a Rails developer to help grow and support our apps: Beanstalk and Postmark (with a primary focus on Postmark). A minimum of 2 years experience in building Rails apps is required. Email jobs@wildbit.com or continue reading.
Open Source Friday: Metrics and Bantam
It’s not often that you see a presentation or a code repository that blows you away. That’s why this past month was a stand-out. I found two incredibly useful projects floating in the Java/Scala community, that compelled me to write idiomatic ports for C#.
Bantam
Robert Nystrom wrote an interesting article about the benefits of Pratt parsing [...]
Wildbit Retreat 2011 – Spain!
We just returned from our retreat in Barcelona, Spain. It was by far one of the most fun and productive retreats we’ve ever had. As with every Wildbit retreat, you can expect a ton of renewed energy and releases from us really soon. I want to sum up some of the progress and goals.
We spent [...]
Announcing Wildbit Total Web Services Solution (TWSS)
Today, we’re extremely proud to announce our Total Web Services Solution (TWSS for short). Since we started building products back in 2006, we’ve learned a lot about the things that you need – and don’t need – in order to run a successful webapp company. We’ve kept up with the curve of running systems in [...]

