Featured Site: Loot 2012 Rentals
This time around, we are featuring Loot 2012 Rentals. We have talked to Jake Scott (@jakescott) who works for loot.com. Jake is in the process of rebuilding loot.com and he has used the Loot Rentals site to test ideas and try out new technology.
What is loot2012rentals?
The tag line is "Find or rent a property for the London 2012 Olympics" - so basically it is a very basic site for listing your rentals as well as finding a place to rent during the Olympics. We've tried to make it easy for users to find somewhere to stay based on venues, events and locations.
How many users do you have?
At the moment we have less than 10 as we have just gone live. But we are going to do an email marketing campaign to drive some traffic and interest to the site. We are also going to be placing ads on Facebook as well as using the http://opengraphprotocol.org to try and get people to share adverts on Facebook.
Why did you choose AppHarbor?
Because manual deployments suck and are a huge waste of time! I think that deploying early and often and testing out new features on the actual hardware that your live site will use is very important. Using appharbor you can setup a staging and a live application, then use git remote to add them as remote repositories, and then push to staging or live in a matter of seconds! Its fun :)
Which technologies is loot2012rentals built on?
- Asp.net MVC 3.0 with Razor. I got started quickly by reading the code for nblog
- Autofac
- SquishIt - I think I will use Sass and Coffeescript in the future!!
- ServiceStack.Logging.Log4Net - I just log to the database and extended it like this.
- Elmah
- RazorEngine for email templates
- Amazon Simple Email Service to send emails
- Amazon Amazon Simple Storage Service for image hosting and storage of resized images.
- SQLServer, Full Text Search, Geography
- NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate - I regret this now and it caused a lot of grief. I ported the entire site to MongoDB for fun in 2 days, I would hate to try and do the reverse. In the future I will use something simple:
- jQuery UI Aristo Theme
- Formalize CSS
- Geocode with Google Maps API v3
- jQuery multi-accordion
- jQuery Ad Gallery
How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?
I love the fact that I don't have to worry about the hardware and infrastructure side of things and can have a site live on the very first day of development. I think its more fun and agile to be adding features to your site every couple of hours using continuous deployment. There is no 'go live' day as the site just evolves and is done when its done. Life is too short for all that bureaucratic nonsense.
How often do you deploy new versions?
During development I was deploying the site every few hours as I added new functionality. I rebuild the database on app startup and populate it with dummy data. Its really easy to update marketing and SEO copy which everyone knows is a pain in the butt for developers!
What did you like the best? Where could we improve?
Deploying with Git and the command line! I am using Mecurial and Git side by side without any worries.
I would love to see AppHarbor partner with other cloud services so that we can ensure fast network access to NoSql databases like MongoDB, and Redis (since talking to Jake, we have launched add-ons). Search tools using Lucene, RavenDB or elasticsearch would also be awesome! Also IP address based SSL is coming so I think we will be enabling that as soon as it arrives.
I think it would be nice if the Build queue screen was updated via AJAX so that I don't have to refresh the screen while waiting for the deploy :D
Anything else?
Would like to thank that AppHarbor team for building such a fantastic service and would like to wish them all the best for the future!
Thanks Jake, for taking the time to answer our questions!
