It’s a bit behind the times, but back in March, we here at KickCode soft launched except.io, a brand new error tracking app. After a fair bit of interest, a lot of user signups, and almost 60,000 exceptions tracked thus far, we decided it’s time to give it a bit more exposure, and get some more people onboard using it, testing it, and providing feedback and suggestions. This is a tool for developers after all, and we want your feedback to help us shape it what is most useful for you.

Right now the app is geared towards tracking exceptions with Ruby apps, using the exceptio-ruby client gem that we’ve written. It has automatic hooks for unhandled exceptions in Rails 2.3 and Rails 3, and you can call the client directly in other web frameworks, or indeed if you want to handle errors in rake tasks or long running scripts, for example. It uses GitHub for authorization, which makes it easy to get your GitHub hosted applications up and running, and handles access control for you so that anyone with access to the code, can sign up and get access to the errors too.

You can set how long it is before duplicate exceptions are re-sent as notifications, so you are not bombarded with the same error emails over and over (but so you don’t forget about them, too!). You can also have it log unique exceptions straight to your GitHub repository as an issue, and we recently added the ability to log unique exceptions to Pivotal Tracker as bugs too, making it easier than ever to turn errors into actionable, fixable items. An iOS app that provides push notifications for errors isn’t very far away either!

Right now, while we’re in public beta, the service is completely free. We do have plans to charge for usage at a later date, with pricing still to be decided. However, if you start using the service during the public beta, we’ll be sure to make sure you get a discount of some sort when we do roll out paid plans, and it’s quite likely that the more active you’ve been with feedback and suggestions during the beta period, then the greater the discount. We certainly want to reward anyone that helps us shape the vision and future of the tool.

We’ve also decided that for open source projects, except.io will be entirely free. After a bit of thought, it was an easy decision really - integrating with GitHub means we can easily tell if your project is public and open or not, and so open source projects will not count towards any payment plan or pricing structure when they are launched. except.io runs on open source software, and is designed to integrate and work with one of the biggest open source networks in the world, in GitHub, so we certainly want to make sure we follow in those great footsteps and encourage open source work.

We’ve got lots more planned though, so stay tuned to the roadmap to see what’s coming, and don’t forget to follow @except_io on Twitter so you can keep up to date with the latest changes and updates. As always, any problems, feedback, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Last year, myself and Kat Neville of Capra launched a festive mini app called Mr Snowflakes, that allowed you to send Christmas ecards to friends and family. Kat has a great write-up of how we’ve improved things this year, which is well worth a read. The biggest change I think in terms of getting people to use the site though, is lowering the barrier to entry and not requiring signup of any kind. In fact, we chose not to allow it - you can create a card, and send it, the recipient receives it, and the creator also gets an email so they can retain the link. There is no sign in, no “my created cards list”, it’s massively simplified, and I think it makes a lot more sense this way - the response has been brilliant!

The core functionality is the same, with a lovely new spruce up in terms of design. The drag and drop functionality, for those interested, is made very easy using the jQuery UI Draggable module. We simply save ornament positions when you stop dragging, and we define an area for the bookshelf so we can trap when you place an ornament back on the shelf.

For the technical types, Mr Snowflakes is a Rails 3 application backed by MongoDB, hosted on the always brilliant Heroku, using SendGrid for emails, and we’ve switched to using the astonishingly gorgeous Gauges for analytics - the “AirTraffic Live” view to see people coming on to the site from all over the world is incredible.

It’s also given me a great chance to play with marketing and promotional tools. I’ve been using AdWords for a while, so there weren’t too many surprises there (except for the CPC dropping through the floor the last few days, and giving me 10x as many clicks as I was seeing before for the same budget). However Facebook Ads was where the real interest for me was, mainly because their advert creation process gives you access to some brilliant data as you filter out certain segments and demographics. It’s very interesting to be able to target certain ads at only certain people (for example, people that have liked Christmas on Facebook), or indeed to run multiple ads slightly tweaked for their target audience. It’s a very powerful tool - albeit one I’m still clearly getting used to, as the click-through-rate for my ads combined on Facebook for Mr Snowflakes is a meagre 0.051%, whereas on Google AdWords it’s a much better 2.8%.

How about more stats? Well last year we launched on December 7th, and had 57 uniques (136 page views) on that day. After that the traffic trailed off dramatically, with only half the days between then and Christmas achieving unique visitors in double numbers - pretty disappointing. In total, there were 242 uniques in December 2010, with 411 page views. This year we re-launched on December 9th, and had 95 uniques (284 page views) on the first day. Since then we’ve had really solid numbers, predictably increasing as we get closer to Christmas. As of right now, we already have 696 unique visitors this month, with a total of 1387 page views. While still modest numbers, with limited ad budgets and marketing exposure, I’m very pleased with the gains we have made this year in terms of visitors.

I hope that everyone has enjoyed sending cards using MrSnowflakes so far this year, and it’s not too late to keep sending them of course, even when it’s too late to post a card, you can always send a beautifully customised ecard!

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, so that we can let you know when we relaunch for MrSnowflakes 2012!

Also follow KickCode on Twitter or like us on Facebook (or both!) to stay up to date with more exciting apps and developments from KickCode in 2012!

On the 31st August, it was the first birthday of KickCode, and specifically exactly a year to the day that the company was incorporated. On the 1st September, it was the first birthday of the unveiling and announcement of KickCode itself. It’s been a fantastic year, as I transitioned existing clients from my sole trader business to KickCode, and took on some new projects throughout the year too.

The next year we hope to improve even further, and to keep expanding the business, and also to launch some more of our own web apps that we’ve been working on and tinkering with. Here is to the next year!

Oh, and for the next week or so, you’ll see we have a nice celebratory logo change here on kickcode.com, a la Google, thanks to Kat Neville of Capra.

Since setting up the KickCode site almost six months ago, one thing that has been missing is a blog. So here it finally is, a place for musings and thoughts from us here at KickCode - it won’t be high frequency, but will hopefully be high quality. Do get in touch with questions or comments!