When we built Staction we decided that all information should be flat. One single long linear line of posts. No hierarchy, no clicking to get to nested folders of information. It’s the simplest paradigm of navigation, and everyone gets it instantly.

But this left us with a problem. How do you see groups of related posts that occurred at different times on the same screen? The project tags that are at the heart of Staction were the first step, but we thought we could push it further. Keep Reading

A few days ago a (potential) customer asked if we had a case study on how we use Staction. While we’re not sure this qualifies as a case study, we thought we could provide some insight as to how Staction helps in the everyday work life at Paste. Keep Reading

Hosting companies have problems. Even the best hosting companies have problems… We try our best to use top-of-the-food-chain hosting for our apps where affordable, but even then we run into problems.

When things do go wrong, are all your chickens in one egg? Wait-all your chickens in one basket? -ahem. Are all your eggs in one basket?

We have a very simple but useful tip… We use multiple hosting accounts on multiple hosts. Plus we have alternate ways to get information out when needed…

• We keep our blog, and our apps on 2 separate hosting companies servers. They’re remote from each other, and totally unrelated infrastructure-wise. The chances of both going down at once is as remote as we could hope for.

• We keep our backups on S3 also. While our most recent backups sit on our own machines, we also push our backups nightly to our S3 account. This way the pieces that change nightly get pushed to backup servers dispersed around the world, just in case.

• When all else fails, we have Twitter! For months now, we have been making an effort to follow, and to get followed by our users. If the backup that backs up the backup should fail, at least we have a way to spread the information.

We’re advocates of not overbuilding infrastructure in your web apps. But with the cheap hosting, and free communication tools available today, there’s not much excuse for not having several backup plans.

You’ve probably heard, but the people at TechCrunch had a dream squandered. Their project, the CrunchPad was ripped apart and used as confetti two days before it was supposed to launch. Can you imagine? They spent almost a year and a half on this, and had it swept from under their feet.

Hearing this made me stop and think about the emotional process of building a brand new app. Your heart and soul goes into it; you put your time, talent and brainpower into making this thing work. Endless conversations about how to keep it simple, efficient, powerful, and extremely useful get you more excited by the day. Even though you may have developed an app before, you still find yourself learning something new with every turn of the project. Keep Reading

Here’s what’s flowing through Joe’s earbuds right now…

1. Panic Switch – Silverson Pickups

2. Heads Will Roll – Yeah Yeah Yeah’s

3. Stir It Up – Bob Marley

4. Dreaming of You – War Tapes

5. Games for Days – Julian Plenti

What’s this? We decided you might like to know more about the people behind the apps at Paste. Periodically we’ll post little bits about us. No worries though, we’ll stop well short of TMI.

If you’ve used Staction, you probably know we’re keyboard people. The mouse is great, but nothing flies quite as fast as our fingers on a keyboard. If you work in the web-dev industry, you probably feel the same. 

Outside of design related tasks, there’s very little that can be achieved with a mouse that can’t be achieved (usually faster) with a keyboard. Knowing your key commands improves the speed and fluency of interacting with your computer.

On that note, we thought we would share some of our favorite indispensable key commands. We bet you know a lot of them- but we also bet you don’t know all of them. So for the 5 seconds a day, 2.5 minutes a month, and 30.4 minutes a year we just saved you, you are most assuredly welcome.  Keep Reading

Of all the things to worry about, the name of an app is probably most agonized over. And rightly so. It’s the first, and last impression. The reason the app sticks, or doesn’t. A great app with an awful name has two strikes against it before it even approaches the plate.

A really great name is essential to a great app- but you don’t need to wait on development to find the perfect name. When we begin a new app, we pick a code name. Something we can call it. Something friendly, and neat. 

We try not to burden the codename too much with being perfect, we just pick one of the best of our first ideas that seems acceptable. Keep Reading

In Staction, get straight to the point and communicate directly with the person you need. By typing a name in the meta-information box, you’ll keep the conversation between you and whomever you specify, cutting through the general workflow talk.

When we launched Jumpchart, it wasn’t to resounding applause. We didn’t max out a server 25 minutes after throwing the switch. We didn’t watch gleefully as money gushed into our bank accounts. When we turned on the homepage very little happened.

When we sent out the launch email we got a little traffic. When we sent out notifications to the few bloggers we had made contact with during dev, we got a little traffic. When we sent out our quasi-press release to a few websites, the ones that covered the launch sent us a bit of traffic. When the slight arch created in Analytics was over, we were back down to nearly zero. Keep Reading

Here’s an innovative way to use knowledge of code to do something good for the world. It’s a disaster relief code jam. They’re using technology to “identify key challenges to disaster relief, and to develop solutions to these critical issues.”

They’re calling the project Random Hacks of Kindness. They’ve been around since May, 2009 when they had their first Crisis Camp in D.C. It all began as a competition, but when “representatives from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! agreed that some matters supersede competitive concerns,” the objectives changed. Now, they’ve partnered with NASA and The World Bank to create code that actually helps the field along in its widespread goals. Keep Reading