A lot of the service the Radiant Machine will provide is related to infrastructure—setting up a site, configuring the server, adding monitoring, etc. Like it or not, this is an area that I’m not all that savvy with, nor do I like tinkering with it. I usually just set up the bare minimum and call it done. Luckily, there are plenty of sysadmin experts out there, and one such group of them has produced a great open-source product: Chef.

Like Puppet, Chef is a systems configuration management tool. However, unlike Puppet, Chef “recipes” are in pure Ruby and the codebase is MUCH smaller and easier to understand. This makes it much easier to get into from a programmer’s perspective—you just need to know Ruby. Furthermore, Ezra Zygmuntowicz posted a nice tutorial on how to get started with chef-solo, the miniature version that doesn’t require all the setup. Ezra and his team are using Chef in their newest product, EY Solo, and I’ve heard that 37signals is looking to add Chef into their sysadmin workflow as well.

As a result of my tinkering with Chef, I’ve already contributed a couple patches. I hope to increase my participation in the future as I work out more of the Radiant Machine setup.

Stay tuned to this blog for updates – big things are coming soon!

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Sorry for the delay, but the holidays can make it hard to keep a regular schedule!

I spent Wednesday and Friday working on the subscription and payment infrastructure. I’ll give you the short version since I can hardly remember the long version. The short of it is, processing payments online is very complicated. You have to navigate not only the various costs associated with processing credit cards and eChecks, but also the different programming interfaces and industry regulations. You need a processing gateway, a merchant account, and all the software to back it up. Furthermore, regulations are such that the last thing you want to do is have any credit card information stored in your system, because then you have to implement some really tight controls.

As the 37signals guys often say, I decided “judo” the problem. I threw out a bunch of code that keeps track of subscriptions and receives credit card payments and instead went with Spreedly. Spreedly does all of the hard work for you of managing subscription-based payments and exposes a nice programming interface that is dead-simple to integrate with. Furthermore, Spreedly doesn’t litter the payment screens with UI that would distract customers, but has a simple, neutral interface that you can brand with your own logo.

Here’s how the Radiant Machine payment screens might look:

Best of all, Spreedly is run by my friends and colleagues at Terralien, who were very helpful to me in making this decision.

With that out of the way, I’ll be working a few days next week on some sexy features for the Radiant Machine instances that’ll make them even easier and more fun to play with!

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Today was an interesting and varied day – part coding, part planning, part phone calls, emails and instant messages. Late last night, I struggled with some problems that were the result of some really entangled and brittle code, but this morning I was able to get my entire test suite to pass again, after ripping out a bunch of unneeded code.

Once the bugs were fixed, I was able to progress forward in implementing and mocking up various parts of the management interface. This is where you’ll be able to see what sites you have registered, edit your personal profile, adjust your billing, and check payment history. Below are some screenshots from what I’ve been working on.

Keep in mind that all of this is tentative – nothing has been decided on plan features or pricing.

Enjoy!

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I’m spending this week working on a lot of features for Radiant Machine. I’m so excited to be able to take this time that I just had to share some of the output of my first day:

I know it’s just a login screen, but one of the things I want to take pride in with RM is attention to beautiful design. The rest of what I did today was boring code stuff.

Critiques welcome!

UPDATE Added another screenshot showing our super-easy signup process.

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I’m proud to announce that Natalie Jost has joined the team as our designer. She has some awesome designs in the pipe, so look soon for changes around this dusty place!

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