October 2011
2 posts
On what's next.
I’m really, really excited to be writing this post today. Big things are afoot at Forrst, and I’d like to share a few of them with you.
I am pleased to announce that Forrst is part of the latest 500startups Accelerator batch. Dave participated in our seed round in March, and when he asked us to come out to Mountain View this October, it was quite simply an offer we couldn’t...
Fenced code blocks, heck yeah!
We finally rolled out fenced code block support on Forrst. Gone will be the days of messy, incorrectly formatted code in your posts and comments. To add code, just wrap it in three or more tildes (~~~) like so:
~~~
your code
goes here
you don't have to indent it!
hooray!
~~~
Enjoy!
— Kyle
July 2011
1 post
Stats!
Everybody likes stats, so here are some neat/awesome/boring stats about Forrst.
Since launching about 14 months ago:
31,000 registered users, 40% of whom are active each month (and that’s more than just logging in)
nearly 90,000 posts across four types (code, screenshots, links, and questions)
350,000 comments
17,000 folks waiting for an account (something we’re working on...
June 2011
1 post
New Moderation Tools
Part of what makes Forrst unique is its highly focused set of Guidelines — we feel that without focus, Forrst would devolve into not-so-great a place. I’m pleased to report that we’ve just rolled out a new set of tools that aim to make moderation more streamlined for all parties involved.
If your post is flagged for a valid reason*, we’ll immediately unpublish it and leave a...
May 2011
3 posts
Acorn pricing has been updated. →
We’ve just pushed a significant update to Acorn pricing:
Acorns are now $1 apiece, down from $5.
There’s a minimum purchase of $5 required when buying (mostly to help defray PayPal fees on low transaction amounts)
We’ve adjusted the amount of impressions they buy accordingly — Acorns are now worth 100 impressions each.
Supporters will still get up to $20 in Acorns each...
On the Forrst invite system.
I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just launched a substantial update to Forrst’s invite system.
We’ve employed an invite-only model since the early days of the site with a nice degree of success; it’s helped keep the community highly-focused, and ensured that only developers and designers are able to gain access. It’s also helped maintain our growth at a...
Update on Snaps
Late Friday evening we had to disable the ability to post new Snaps, due to high error rates when pushing to Amazon S3. While we work through this issue, there is a work around.
If you can upload your snaps to your own hosting provider, you can embed them in ‘Question’ or ‘Link’ type posts. You can then reference your image in the post description using either Markdown,...
March 2011
3 posts
Regarding Reputation Decay
We recently made some changes to the way the reputation points decay on Forrst, and a lot of you have obviously noticed. The short of it is, every day, you lose all points that are over thirty days old. Everyone Does.
What this does is level the playing field for everyone, and encourages constant activity from you to keep your reputation up. (Foursquare recently did the same thing with...
Downtime Post-Mortem (03-26-2011)
On 3/26/11 Forrst went down from around 7:00pm CST and stayed down until around 9:45pm CST. It appears that somewhere around 7:00pm last night our Redis server became unavailable to our front-end server for around 45 seconds. We’re still investigating the cause for why Redis went away, but for whatever reason, it was gone.
In most normal situations, you would have all seen the Error...
Forrst Architechure Redux
I wanted to take a few minutes at write an update to the Forrst Architechure (http://blog.forrst.com/post/616614116/on-forrsts-architecture). Lots of people reference that post, it’s almost a year old, and lots of things change in a year.
First, the basics. Forrst is still a PHP (5.2+) app, however, it is no longer written in CodeIgniter. We (read: Kyle) wrote a rad new PHP MVC framework...
February 2011
3 posts
A quick note about Promoted Posts.
When we launched Promoted Posts back in December, we had no idea they’d become so popular so quickly. (Un)fortunately, that put us in an interesting position where the initial system we’d built quickly became inundated with posts — a good problem to have, certainly, but not necessarily for our users. We’ve been working extremely diligently over the past few weeks to re-architect...
On our recent changes to the Forrst Guidelines.
Howdy, folks. As of this morning, there are a few notable changes to the Forrst Guidelines I wanted to mention briefly.
Be proud of your posts. Please don’t post just for the sake of posting, or post things like “I was bored, LOL”. When commenting, try to say more than just “Great” or “Hate it”; the more thorough your feedback, the more reputation you’ll...
Forrst: One Year Later
I thought it would be fun to do a quick post in honor of Forrst recently having its first birthday. Coincidentally, our birthday falls in January, which means I can be exceptionally lazy and combine “happy birthday to us” and “year in review” posts into one.
Now, without further ado, here it is.
Some interesting numbers since going online in January 2010, one year...
January 2011
2 posts
WatchHooray! Thanks to the wonderful guidance of @abraham, @kylebragger built out an OAuth2 server for Forrst in anticipation of our upcoming API.
On Reputation.
There has been some chatter around Forrst and IRC lately about reputation, so we thought we’d take a moment to write up exactly what reputation “is.”
The reputation system is in place to ensure the Forrst is filled with quality content. Just about every action that you do on Forrst in someway contributes to your reputation score. However, you are not the only one that can...
December 2010
2 posts
Forrst v3, one week later.
Hard to believe that Forrst v3 launched a mere seven days ago. We’re extremely proud of the product and community we’ve built, and wanted to share a few updates since launch.
Fixes and Support
We’ve rolled out literally dozens of bugfixes and subtle tweaks since launch. You should rarely, if ever, come across our dear friend, Error Bear, but if you do, rest assured we’ll...
The New Forrst
I am extremely proud to announce that version 3 of Forrst has officially launched today. It is the culmination of more than three months of hard work and almost a year of learnings, not to mention the hundreds (if not thousands) of emails and posts from our community filled with suggestions, praise, bug reports, and critique. I’d like to share some of the highlights of Forrst v3, give a few...
November 2010
1 post
A quick note on the Forrst Guidelines
I’d like to take a moment to go into a bit of detail regarding one of the Forrst guidelines, as it seems to be one of the most frequently overlooked on Forrst:
Posts should have detailed titles and descriptions, and be well-formatted so other Forrsters have a clear idea about what they’re looking at.
We ask that all posts have clear, thoughtful descriptions and that they are...
October 2010
1 post
We've just released a new set of Forrst Guidelines →
We just released a vastly revised set of Forrst Guidelines. The new guidelines are composed of two parts: six core guidelines for Forrst posts and the behavior of its members, and a second part designed to act as a reference for types of posts that probably aren’t a good fit for what the community is about.
I hope that you’ll take a moment to read them, and feel free to contact me...
September 2010
3 posts
A post-mortem of today's downtime →
Tumblr somehow posted it to my personal blog instead of this one. Alas.
Forrst Invites Redux
Update as of January 1, 2011, the invite system is based on your Forrst reputation; the users in the 93rd percentile or higher will receive between 1 and 3 invites, commensurate with their standing on Forrst. Reputation is listed on your profile, and may be earned through positive contributions to the community. We feel that this is by far a better way to hand out invites compared to just looking...
Forrst App Contest Results
Forrst users have voted and the winner of the first ever Forrst App Contest is Kippt! With DuctMail coming in a close second. Honorable mention Eval and FormBakery. We would like to thank all the teams whom competed and we can’t wait to do it again. All of the final teams will receive copies of HTML5 For Web Designers from A Book Apart and the Kippt team will also receive Forrst Survival...
August 2010
3 posts
Forrst App Contest
It’s been a long time getting to this point but the final stage of the Forrst App Contest is ready to begin. For those whom don’t know the Forrst App Contest was an event held at the beginning of the month for Forrst members to team up and create awesome web apps over a weeks time. Out of the contest we ended up with 5 complete apps from four different teams. The theme for our first app contest...
Advertise on Forrst →
We’re now accepting advertisers for September 2010 on Forrst. It’s a great place to advertise your development or design focused product. Check out traffic stats and rates here.
Welcoming Mike.
Forrst has been growing by leaps and bounds since its relaunch at the beginning of May. We recently crossed the 10,000 user mark, more than doubled traffic in July, and the site is bustling with activity — users are more engaged than ever. I’m ecstatic to see developers and designers diving in and helping each other improve their craft. It’s a humbling feeling.
Now that the site is...
July 2010
6 posts
Advertise on Forrst →
Now accepting advertisers for August.
Forrst Meetup, tonight 7/9 in NYC
I’ll keep this short: The details:
Pizza at Saluggi’s around 6pm tonight, July 7.
325 Church St. NYC (directions)
After, we’ll probably head to Nancy Whiskey Pub (1 Lispenard St; directions) for some beers.
If you’re in NYC tonight, you should come! Kyle, Adam, and Pasquale will be there in top form.
How we deploy new features on Forrst
A few people have asked recently about how rolling out new features is handled at Forrst. While the answer is nothing spectacular, it is something I think is hugely important to consider implementing when you’ve got a fairly active site. Flickr wrote about a few tricks they use — called feature flags and feature flippers — when building and deploying new features to the site. Flags dictate...
Pasquale D'Silva - Animation & Illustration:... →
Before the jabber, a little history:
Long before the opening leg of my tour, my good pal Chris Kalani introduced me to a little project named Forrst. While it was a quickly slapped together prototype, Kyle Bragger was definitely onto something, as people started to chatter about his…
Forrst is looking for a NYC-based developer intern... →
The Web Life wrote about Forrst →
June 2010
5 posts
Mashable: Forrst: Microblogging for Designers and... →
Got some Mashable love over the weekend.
ReadWriteWeb: Forrst: Stack Overflow Meets Tumblr →
We’re honored!
Announcing a new feature on Forrst: Public Posts
I’m excited to announce a new Forrst feature rolling out today: Public Posts. In the past, all posts on Forrst were visible only to existing, logged-in members. Starting today, you’ll be able to selectively make your posts public with a new option on the new and edit post screens.
Public posts are visible to anyone who knows the URL, logged-in or not. Here’s an example of a...
4 tags
Caching counts with PHP and Redis
Forrst displays a lot of counts throughout the UI — comment and like counts on posts, follower and post counts on users, and so forth. Here’s an example post sidebar showing comment and like counts:
Initially, we could simply do queries like SELECT COUNT() FROM comments WHERE post_id = 1234 whenever necessary to populate the associated comment_count attribute in our Post model. As the...
May 2010
4 posts
On Forrst's architecture
I’ve been getting a few requests for a write-up like this from curious Forrst’ers, so here goes nothing.
Hardware:
We’re on three MediaTemple (ve) boxes: one database, one staging, and one web frontend. They’ve each got 2GB RAM, 10,000 RPM RAID-10 disks, and all of that good stuff. I recommend you check out (mt)’s site for more juicy details on our hardware...
Just a quick reminder about Forrst feedback
I wanted to quickly clarify where to send questions, bug reports, feedback, etc. about Forrst, since many are posting them as content to Forrst. Unfortunately that’s not really the best place to do so, since I might miss it and not be able to respond in a timely fashion. For faster support and response, please use one or more of the following:
For bug reports — kyle AT forrst.com
For...
Everything you've ever wanted to know about...
The first batch of invites have just been awarded to a handful of awesome Forrst users. You may be wondering, “I’m on Forrst! How do I earn invites?” Well, glad you asked.
Update: We’re floored by the amount of interest in Forrst! As such, we decided to do something a bit different than previously mentioned; you’ll now have a chance to unlock an invite daily, but...
Forrst featured in Smashing Magazine's 2010 Web... →
We’re honored!
April 2010
2 posts
Hey followers, this is a little experiment for...
Reply to this with your name and something quirky about yourself. Awesome?!
1 tag
Into The Forrst: The Forrst app contest!
Once upon a time, a couple of Forrst users self-organized an informal app contest. It was slated to run for 1 week, after which I was supposed to anoint one of the apps Winnar of the Contest™.
Well, it’s run a tad a bunch of weeks longer than that, mainly because I’ve been swamped getting Forrst ramped up as my full-time thing, so I’ve decided to highlight all of the neat apps...
March 2010
2 posts
The state of Forrst
Forrst came online on January 25, 2010, and in less than two months has already grown into something truly amazing. The people in the Forrst community are both talented and helpful, and I’ve seen some pretty incredible content come through my dashboard. I can’t count the number of great discussions and peer feedback I’ve seen, too.
However, at the end of the day, Forrst is...
Now testing: New comment notifications
If you’re on a Forrst post page (like this one: http://forrst.com/posts/simple-forrst-1920x1200-wallpapers-the-zip-file-b-By) you’ll now be alerted of any new comments on the post in near real-time:
Clicking the dark grey bar will load up the latest comments without leaving the page. Let me know how it works for you — kyle AT forrst.com
Enjoy!
February 2010
6 posts
The Forrst app contest!
If you’re already on Forrst, a couple of your fellow Forrst members have organized an unofficial official Forrst App Contest; starting tomorrow (2/24), and running through next Wednesday (3/3), your job is to build the neatest app possible in a week’s time. At the end of the contest, the winner(s) will be awarded a special badge for their awesome work, and we’ll all celebrate...
Hi all, sorry for missing last week’s Wednesday update — lots of awesome things happening with Forrst I can’t wait to announce. Two big things I can talk about are the new settings page (http://forrst.com/account/edit — see below for a preview), and a new header and navigation design coming soon.
-Kyle
Forrst - a place for designers and developers to... →
Ok, so, Billy convinced me to open Forrst up for a little bit — that means no invite code required, just sign up and start posting. If you’re a designer or developer, I’d love for you to try Forrst out; it’s still very young, but you’ll have a chance to not only be an early user of the service (and get the username you want!), but also be influential in its direction....
Wednesday updates - 2/10/10
Time for your weekly dose of Forrst Wednesday Updates. Here’s what’s new this week:
Forrst bookmarklet! Quickly post snaps, links, and code from any site - you can add the bookmarklet from your sidebar
Post “subscriptions” - any post you comment on you are “subscribed” to; you’ll then be notified of any new comments on that post via email
Lots of...
Hello new followers!
If you’d like invites, email kyle AT forrst.com and let’s get you set up.
Wednesday updates - 2/3/10
Here are some things new to Forrst in the last week:
Lots of UI improvements (especially the new/edit post pages)
Added the ability to like a post from various activity streams
You can edit your posts now o_O
Notification emails for following, likes, and comments
Comments
Lots more to come. I’ll be giving out some more invites in the next week or so.
Thanks for being awesome,
Kyle