Go Open, our website and billing systems

By Bjarni Rúnar 2011-03-27, 16:47

Last week was another busy one.

I flew to Norway on Monday morning, to attend the Go Open conference about free and open source software in the Norwegian public sector. I presented PageKite, handed out some stickers and had quite a few interesting conversations. Unfortunately I had to leave on the morning of the conference's second day, so I didn't manage to connect with all the people I had hoped to. Next time, maybe.

Some highlights:

• I learned that version 3.0 of Varnish will probably support streaming, which means we may be able to use it to add caching to the PageKite service. The current releases don't work for us.
• The panel discussion about FOSS communities was fantastic.
• I had a nice conversation with Simon Phipps about PageKite, open source businesses and the FreedomBox project.
• Norway is frighteningly expensive, but people kept buying me beer so I didn't manage to break the bank.

Free beer is always nice when you're bootstrapping - every penny counts. :-)

The rest of the week, Ewelina, Már and myself worked hard on giving this website a face-lift. The front page is now much cleaner (and prettier!) and a lot of the text has been greatly improved. And if you want to get to know us a bit, our photos and brief biographies are now on the About Us page.

It's a never-ending job, of course, but we've finally reached the point where we feel pretty presentable and will be more actively seeking attention on-line... so to kick things off I submitted a question about marketing PageKite to Hacker News, to see if it would drum up any interest or any clever ideas we've overlooked. The discussion has been pretty slow (it is a weekend after all), but as usual the people who actually take the time to try PageKite seem pretty happy with it.

We also quietly launched our store and can now officially accept money from customers! Hooray! So if you want to show support, you can now click the "Get more" button on your account page and buy some quota. Monthly subscriptions will be available as well, sometime in April.

Note that the billing systems are still very new, so we are monitoring everything pretty closely to see how it behaves. There are sure to be some minor snags, so please let us know if you have any trouble.