servers and stuff

I am en route now back to Australia - had a great time for the past week working with my developers, as things always seem to get done a little faster when I am with them, rather than remotely. This is because any ideas, problems can be discussed and resolved immediately, rather than wait for everyone to be online to discuss.

We set up the rack of servers a few weeks ago with Level 3, since they are down the road from us in Virginia, but they haven't lived up to their promises, so this week we are moving them over to Hurricane Electric in Silicon Valley, where our current stack is set up for vtc.com. We've never had any real problems with Hurricane, so we'll stick with them for now. I'm looking at using Amazon S3 for storage expansion if we need it. I have no idea really how much we'll need, I guess that depends on how busy we get :-)

This week, I've been thinking on integration with other sites such as slideshare.net, splashcast.com and zoho.com, asking for the API to hook into tutorom. It should be straightforward, and means users will be able to use other services to create content and bring them together in a course. Slideshare in particular, is good for uploading powerpoint slides and your own content to create great looking presentations. Splashcast, with an all flash interface, looks pretty good as well. Be good to hear about feedback on these and other sites you want us to integrate with.

Once we get the servers moved over early this week, I'll be sending out the beta url for the site to everyone who asked to test the site, and uploading the educational content for viewing.

tutorom progress

I'm in India right now, working alongside my developers, with the very capable Sajith leading the team here. We are a week away from giving out a private URL to everyone who has registered for the beta, then the site can get hammered a bit to sort any obvious issues.

So far, we have 3 lesson types that can be used..a single/multiple page editor with automatic navigation bar, URL type, and media type (flash, quicktime, etc). The collaboration side has the forums, chat and groups side but not the Wiki yet...there is a todo list as long as my arm, but first things first..:-). It's all looking quite good so far, a lot easier to use than our previous LCMS. All the movies from VTC are in there, and there will also be about 400 educational school movies, and a new course on Accounting Fundamentals, which will be in the Business & Finance Channel.

Next week I shall be at VTC Australia, there for a couple of months, and I shall email out the private URL and post it in this blog. Hope to get lots of feedback from everyone.