The sqMash Blog

After 3 months and 3 sub-versions later, I am proud to announce that sqMash is now in public Beta and has achieved the 0.9 status. It's official, and it's awesome. So many changes, so many updates, fixes and patches.

It's been brilliant so far and I would like to thank all the private beta testers who have helped making sqMash stable as it is today.

sqMash is still in Beta, so please expect a few bugs here and there we might have missed during testing. v0.9 is still fresh out of the oven and we will strive to patch and make it bug-free by v0.9.1

We can now gear up to introduce new features and hope to receive similar love and feedback you'll have been giving us in the past 3 months.

PSST: You can read the v0.9 changelog here.

bug fixes

• Fixed a bug causing certain profiles to be rendered as blank
• Fixed rendering of the settings page in a certain versions of Chrome
• Fixed loading of the default avatar when a new account is created.
• Fixed bug preventing loading of paged activity in certain versions of Safari.
• Fixed bug causing "image/jpg" mime-type files to be not recognized when uploading a new avatar.

patches

• Patched several API methods to perfrom faster and leave a smaller footprint.
• Patched the main application to perform faster and use two new servers for better performance and low latency connections coming from the Indian sub-continent.
• Patched load-balancer to act independant of other servers. This should allow users to still reach sqmash.com or it's subdomains when the main server is down.
• Patched Juggernaut and it's now active and serving static files for connections coming from the Indian-subcontinent.
• Several API POST methods have been patched and are near production ready.

changes

• A completely refreshed UI and better layout.
• Better modals to provide more information to the user of certain background activity for slow connections.
• Notification toggles page is now an independant section under settings and is no more a modal view. This is to allow us to add more toggles efficiently without having to load a long modal window.

• (API) Added the user/activity method for user specific activity.
• (API) Improved duplicate activity removal in the main Activity Method.

• Patched user profiles, where in it showed "Usernamehas" instead of "Username has".

This has been one highly anticipated version, especially for the devs using the API. Here's the change log:

• (API) Updated activity method to include avatar URIs, event names, usernames, where ever necessary so alternate API calls to retrive such information can be avoided.
• (API) fixed bug causing empty event objects to be returned creating fake counts on profile pages.
• (API) User token a.k.a utoken has been implemented for improved secure calls between consumers and the API. Requests no longer rely on the user's encrypted password. Instead, the public utoken will be used.
• (API) New Auth method introduced that returns the user's utoken upon successful authorization. The utoken will be required for retrieving specific information and for as POST calls.
• (Web) Activity Page renders much faster due to reduced simultaneous API calls.
• (Web) Profile pages show correct counters for User created and attending events in the sidebox.
• (Web) Improved Authorization techniques for secure browsing.
• (Web) Entire codebase is completely based on the API and no database calls are made from the web app. This is to enhance security and decrease injection attacks via various forms available throughout the website.

Several other tiny patches were applied to improve stability and performance, especially will browsing through the activity stream as well as events stream.

If your a private beta tester, check it out right away. http://sqmash.com/signin

A recent performance testing revealed that GA scripts were slowing down page load times and seriously causing performance issues with certain scripts I employ in the front end of sqMash.

I did not have to search for too long before I settled on an alternate service for analytics. GoSquared was a perfect fit (as always). Their GSTC script did not interfere with any of the scripts sqMash was already using for other purposes. The result, was rather surprising. Not only do I have access to analytics in a beautiful interface, I also noticed some incredibal performance boosts in page loading. All pages started loading 1.2x faster.

Oh, and did I mention how easy it was to use to set this up? It took me literally 20 seconds. No more do I have to deal with going through 4 lengthy steps just to acquire the tracking code for the intended website. Here are a few screenshots of the 4 step, beautiful process:

And there it is. We're setup, up and proudly running faster, and better.

• o.8 introduces a whole new UI.
• the main app is now completely based on the sqMash API.
• the sqMash API is completely RESTful now. New API endpoints and auth methods will be introduced in a separate documentation.
• fixed function that showed wrong months in all event blocks.
• when logged in, your user profile will show private events associated with your profile under both, the attending and created tabs.
• the profile page now uses restful URIs, to enhancing sharing capabilities.
• smaller javascipt and stylesheet files as well as images, further optimizing load times.
• lighter html syntax generated by a newer template module, allowing faster rendering of pages.

Hello sqMashers (term coined by a beta user), I hope you have been having fun using sqMash and using it to socialize out in the real world.

I have been working on several things lately for version 0.8 . On the way, smaller patches to 0.7 will come into play, but mostly will be related to the sqMash API. No cosmetic/UI changes will come into play.

Version 0.8 will sport a complete new UI, tailored to fit desktop, laptop and mobile device screens, by leveraging the power of CSS media queries. This version will also be powered by a much better and completely RESTful API. Some major patches to the API will be applied to improve performance, load balancing, caching and session handling.

Version 0.9 will firstly introduce the iOS app to all beta testers with access to an iOS device. Along with that, comes uploading photos to events you attended, and several powerful tools for organizers/hosts for pre and post event interactions with the attendees.

With all that to work on, along with scaling the architecture as required, this is surely going to be fun. See you at an event soon.

• Added notifications via email. You can currently setup notifications for friend requests and comments on your events. These can be set via the settings page. These notifications are global. Per event notifications to come soon. More notification options to come soon.
• Some styling broke upon invoking the modal window on the create new event page. This issue was known to occur in certain older versions of firefox. The issue has been resolved.
• Some URI route fixes implemented to reduce and eliminate unnecessary reroutes upon login, logout and non-AJAX POST calls.
• Fixed issue causing wrong timestamps to be generated for certain timezones.

• Small patch. Now all user avatars as well as the default avatar will be served via AWS S3. New avatars (uploaded/updated) will be served via S3.
• All static media content as well as stylesheets and scripts are now served via Amazon S3.

An overall performance boost.