Wildbit

Hi! I’m Dima Sabanin, Rails developer at Wildbit. I’ve been working on some cool new Beanstalk features that we’ll be releasing today. Let me give you a short guide on what we’ve added and changed.

It was about time that we finally redesigned the public site of our Email Marketing application, Newsberry. I’m very proud that I had the chance to do this – I kind of lurked on this task since I started working at Wildbit.

A new look for Newsberry’s public site is coming next week, along with some exciting new features. Here is a sneak peek, so be sure to check out the site next week and follow us on Twitter for the announcement.

We have released a great new update related to sub-lists feature for Newsberry, which will allow you to control even more efficiently than before to whom you would like to send the email campaigns. From now on, you would be able to create sub-list of all opened, unopened, bounced emails (even by type of bounce) and sub-list of email addresses of subscribers which clicked a link in the campaigns they received.

Here is a nice write up from Jason Schrader on deploying Rails apps with Beanstalk and Passenger. Jason explains how to use Beanstalk’s deployment feature to quickly and easily release to his server.

The last couple days were pretty rough for Beanstalk and our customers. We experience very high load across all of our slices, eventually determining that the performance problem was on our GFS drives that store our application and SVN data. Since we host with Engine Yard, we have nice Nagios warnings about high load, which started to come in on Tuesday. After lots of digging and help from the Engine Yard support team, we were able to narrow down the problems.

Beanstalk has been booming ever since we launched it. We’ve learned a lot in the last 18 months about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promotion and advertising. I’d like to share some our experiences.