The New Hashtags

This will be the first in a series of posts about the pending release of our complete rewrite of Hashtags. Why did we rewrite it? Simple, it started out as an experiment and the traffic has grown. What start out as a thought experiment with two people now has a team of four behind it. Unfortunately two of the four know ruby and the person who originally wrote it developed it in python. In order for all of us to contribute we found in necessary to move it over to ruby, specifically Merb. This allows us to a better work flow to optimize the site as well as work on new features, which we have a lot planned.

So what can you expect from the new site? Well for one, it’ll be faster. We’re using memcache to cache most of the pages as fragments and also caching slow running methods, like creating the nifty graphs. So hopefully we won’t see the slow downs that have happened on the current site. What else? Well we’re now receiving the xmpp public feed, this means we’re now tracking every message. There have been some ui tweaks as well. We’ve layout out the messages on the main page a little different, we think for the better. We’ve also changed up the navigation to make it easier for us as we start adding features.

The other big news is now you can have Hashtags user accounts. Why is this good? It’ll will allow you to track certain tags and then have a custom page that will display message from those tags. We’re also looking at the ability to recommend tags or users based on which tags you are tracking, so look forward to that.

We’ll keep you updated as we get closer to releasing it, we’re shooting towards the end of may for now. Also we’re looking for some beta testers, so let us know if you’re interested.