Yesterday I bought and installed FogBugz to run here at Sampa, a product by FogCreek (you know, the Joel on Software guy).
I was looking for a bug tracking system for a while. FogBugz surprised me because it also tracks Features (although any bug on any system can be flagged as a feature). And they have this even more impressive integration with customer emails.
FogBugz is not a support/ticket system, but it seems to do some of that work. I still need to activate that feature.
The installation wasn't a breeze. It had some issues with my Domain Controller and it didn't give me the option to create a new Virtual Site on IIS (I had to quit the setup, create it and start again).
Once I have a better grip into the product I'll post more.
When I told a friend I was using CVS for source control, he immediately asked "why?"... And I said "Why why?", he says "'cause Subversion is much better". Damn.
I looked at a couple of sites comparing them both, and... Subversion *is* much better. I don't know how easy it is to install, manage or integrate with Visual Studio, but the feature list is really good.
To be honest I wish I was using Visual Studio Team System, but I can't afford thousands of dollars for a source control system that will be used by 2-3 people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is much more than source control, but still thousands of dollars.
I looked at the Subversion FAQ and install guide and it looked ugly. Let's see how that goes.
I'm in the process of installing Subversion at Sampa for us to manage our source code. I decided to replace CVS with Subversion because it has more features, and it is a product that still evolving (while CVS seems to be stuck in time).
Now process of installing Subversion is not smooth. This is not the first Open Source software that I use, but by far it summarizes all fear that people have from Open Source:
Poor pre-sale documentation: Ok, I didn't buy Subversion, but before I start using a piece of software I like to know how is it compatible with my existing softwares, I'd like to know how to works (not how the code works!) and how my team can benefit from it. Subversion page is a mess. Too much text and too much giberish.
Poor setup documentation: This is the worst. I had to find information on 3 or 4 different places to get things going.
Poor compatibility: The latest version of Subversion has to run with the latest version of TortoiseSVN, but it won't work with the latest version of Apache because nobody had the time to compile the libraries. Uh?
1-click setup: It takes about 2,000 clicks. You have to edit many configuration files, jump into the prompt and do a ton of stuff to get it to work. And if it doesn't "...look at the log files...". Argh!
Subversion per se is an amazing piece of software. But software is not only the bits that does the core task, but the entire experience end-to-end. Open Source cannot have widespread usage while users are expected to deal with these kind of problems.
On the last 2-3 weeks my blog has received a much higher number of Trackback spams (or Comment spam). Sampa uses a pretty good detection system for those and most of them don't even reach me, but some get through the system.
These Spams are different. They don't look like your typical viagra / casino / poker blog-spam. Most of the time they contain religious or spiritual titles. I think people are trying to increase their PageRank, but hey, that is stupid because we use "rel=nofollow" on our comment's links so that won't do anything for them.
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September, 2007