Wildbit

It’s been over 6 months since we moved into our office in Old City, Philadelphia. Our office is beautiful, and as our team has grown we’ve loved having an official headquarters, but we’re software design experts – not office design experts.
The folks at Turnstone have launched a video contest that will result in 5 [...]

Beanstalk is a mature product and during its’ 5 years of existence the design and UI have been changed a lot. Our CSS grows accordingly and lately it consisted of 5 files, 14,211 lines and 290 KB of code. We handcrafted our CSS from the start but more recently it had become quite hard to manage. With [...]

Building a high quality product takes time and effort. But as hard as it is to build it, it’s even harder to maintain that quality throughout the years.
We work very hard to maintain the quality of Beanstalk and Postmark with a beautiful web interface and powerful, easy to use features.
Powerful and easy is easier said [...]

Why we didn’t sell Newsberry
When I first sat down to write the story about shutting down Newsberry, it was very therapeutic. I wanted to get it out there, all the real, honest thoughts behind it. What I didn’t expect was the amount of interest in our decision process, the amount of support and also the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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!

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]