

Scaling Asana.com - krausejj
http://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/

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randomdrake
This is a fantastic approach to the "But how am I going to be able to edit
it?" question that inevitably gets asked by clients or bosses.

I've tackled the problem so many times and had so many different solutions
depending on the client.

Instead of providing a stupid and bloated CMS to do things I don't want it to
do and let the user break things that they shouldn't be breaking, there's
this.

I could possibly just provide them with access to edit some markdown with a
link or two and instructions on how to make the edits. It puts a bit more
burden on the user, but it also means they don't have to pay to run or setup a
dynamic and crazy CMS platform too.

If someone could productize this as a service, provide a pretty interface for
it, and let it be an easy CMSaaS that gives me, the developer, lots of options
and access, but provides a dead simple and easy editor that I could give to my
clients, I think that'd be great.

~~~
krausejj
Statamic actually does include an Admin interface where you can do (basically)
this. We really like having the Git version control and we really like the
Github editor, which is why we don't use the Admin pages, but they definitely
exist in Statamic already.

~~~
randomdrake
That is certainly helpful. The website makes it confusing as to whether I need
to host this somewhere, with every client site, or if I need to run a single
server and point things to it, or if they do the hosting and run a service for
me? What exactly am I paying for when I buy this?

Presentation issues aside: I think it would also be neat if I didn't have to
host/maintain/setup anything at all. Simply point a service at a (my) github
repo where I can commit my client's sites, and let the service take care of
the rest, providing a nice admin for me and something I can do for my client.
That way, I don't need to have a server setup and running PHP if they don't
need it. Makes it less expensive for me to setup and less expensive for the
client to run.

It could store my templates, so I could easily fire up a new service and send
a link to the client. Hell, maybe even use a template each time and say:
"Here, provide your copy while I go build some stuff. We'll marry them
together as we complete our respective sides of the agreement."

If that's where Statmatic, Stamatica, err... Statamic, is going, then I think
that's pretty neat. But, it's not terribly clear at the moment.

~~~
fredleblanc
Hello, I'm one of the Statamic developers.

Statamic is both a content management system (in that it has a nice,
responsive, client-friendly admin area for managing content) and a website-
building platform (in that the admin area is completely optional if you're
someone that's comfortable with writing content files, and you can fully
create and maintain a site easily without it). A license gets you the software
itself and allows you to run it on one domain.

At the moment, there's a folder where you place all of your content files.
I've seen people play with syncing that up with systems like Dropbox and even
maintaining that folder as its own git submodule. There's no ability to do
that automatically at this time, but I bet someone could figure out how to
make that happen.

It seems out marketing message could be a bit more direct in that instance,
certainly noted!

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jamesmoss
I'd be wary of using Statamic, at least the admin panel portion. I did a code
review of it recently and it's pretty insecure, if you can disable/delete
admin.php I'd recommend it.

After a quick look I found a few basic CSRF and session hijacking exploits
going back several versions (including the latest). The PHP code is pretty
amateur - I imagine somebody with more skill could find many many more holes.

~~~
krausejj
they've been super-responsive fixing any issues we've found (although we don't
use the admin interface)... you should shoot them a message if you have
specific concerns.

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leobelle
A hundred people to work on Asana? Asana is a great task manager, but that's a
lot of people. Basecamp for example has 43 people, which still strikes me as a
lot of people. I guess having mobile apps requires at least a few people
working on each there. A backend team, and the webapp team. 100 seems like a
lot though.

~~~
marcog1
Asana employee here. We have 58 people, about 20 of which are engineers. Even
just focusing on engineers, there's so much we'd like to do and growing the
team enables us to work on more of those things. It took 3 engineers to build
the recently launched calendar feature, for example. And then there are other
product features, growth, mobile, platform, data, and a bunch of us working on
infrastructure (from keeping the site running to making it fast).

~~~
rsl7
nice. now: task dependencies. get on it. please.. :-)

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sync
I'd be interested in knowing more details. It doesn't seem like some of their
pages (e.g. [https://asana.com/product](https://asana.com/product) ) would be
very easy to represent in markdown, especially considering the image
carousels.

~~~
krausejj
Statamic includes a short YAML snippet at the top of the markdown files where
you can specify the layout/theme you want to use (or you can just use
defaults). The YAML can also include variables that can be used in the theme,
such as "Headline," "Subhead," etc... and lists. It's pretty awesome.

Most of the carousels are partials where we feed in some basic variables
around copy/image - but since they're at the top of the Markdown file, anyone
can change them easily.

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codva
I got sent an Asana invite from the boss earlier today. Apparently we are
going all-in on using it.

~~~
kbd
You're lucky. I use Asana for my personal tasks at work and I wish we all used
it, but the PHBs want burn-down charts and such so we officially use Jira.

~~~
onedev
The Asana mobile apps are garbage, I don't know if you're ever used them, but
it's like they didn't even try.

~~~
krausejj
we're actively developing better ones. stay tuned for updates!

~~~
state
I absolutely can. Not. Wait for this to happen.

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pastylegs
I do something similar with my own personal site. It's using Jekyll and the
repo is in bitbucket. When I commit to the repo, my server is pinged (to a
lightweight Flask app) and the server pulls the changes and recompiles the
static pages:

[http://timmyomahony.com/blog/autodeploy-jekyll-using-
bitbuck...](http://timmyomahony.com/blog/autodeploy-jekyll-using-bitbucket-
post-commit-service-hooks-and-flask/)

It's surprisingly satisfying

~~~
kaishiro
Nicely done. I'm literally (seriously, right at this moment) attempting
something similar right now. I have a Middleman site building up on Heroku and
being served with nginx. That part is perfect. The content is being fed into
Middleman via Siteleaf on build, but Siteleaf doesn't yet have any sort of
webhook on publish/edit of an article :( I think I'm going to just have to
rebuild on cron every 10 minutes or something...

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gmjosack
Often when I try to open Asana it will take minutes to load. I also find it
very hard to organize things inside of the product to the point where I prefer
vim. There's not way to specify blocking/dependencies and linking inside the
product always carries your search context with you.

For small todo style lists it seems fine, if not overkill and if it eventually
loads, but for more complex task tracking I just really haven't gotten it at
all.

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alexchantastic
I think this is great. If only more people agreed on writing and maintaining
markdown. Often it's the non-technical folks who are driving how a marketing
site is run.

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egbert
Last weekend I actually built a self deploying website with Github Pages,
Travis CI and Middleman.

The owner has access to the github repo and can edit everything whenever she
feels like it.

No need for a non functional cms, a wysiwyg editor or me for simple text
updates!

[https://github.com/Egbert/vonb-tv](https://github.com/Egbert/vonb-tv)

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geku
Does something like Statamic exist as open source?

~~~
ericcholis
[http://getkirby.com/](http://getkirby.com/) is close, although doesn't seem
as polished as Statamic

~~~
josh-wrale
This seem to be commercial software as well.
[https://github.com/bastianallgeier/kirbycms/blob/master/lice...](https://github.com/bastianallgeier/kirbycms/blob/master/license.mdown)

Semantics aside about the source being available to read but not effectively
use, that is...

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jpeg_hero
didnt know Asana needed scaling :/

