Many of our customers try to user Google Apps for your domain with Olark. Unfortunately Google does not tell system administrators to configure Google Talk to work with external XMPP(Jabber) networks by default. This leads to a lot of problems when a customer has Google Apps for their domain, but does not have the required SRV records to work with Olark.

We’ve always pointed out customers to: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34143

But, this doesn’t always solve the problem, because sometimes it takes a while for ISPs to update their DNS cache, and it’s hard for our customers to double check their ISP, or their own attempts at setting SRV records. That is until now!

Introducing the Olark Google Apps for your domain SRV Checker. Using the below tool, you can now finally see if your SRV records are set correctly.

Olark Google Apps for your Domain SRV Checker

So first, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on the Hab.la (soon to be Olark.com) blog. A lot of exciting things are in the works as always. This week we launched a bunch of new plans. You probably noticed the new signup process, we tried to help new users experience Hab.la before they had completed signing up.

We monitored the changes that we made in the signup process using a tool from our friends at MixPanel. Which lets us compare the funnels on our old signup and our new signup. If you are confused by Google Analytics, or want to track events with a little more granularity I recommend checking their product out. In any case the new signup appears to be performing about 5% better getting people setup on their sites. (But is not yet available to Internet Explorer Users).

We’ve implemented RabbitMq to help speed up transcript processing, you’ll see some nice improvements to transcript processing in the next week or so.

We decided to become Olark.com to help our visitors find us better. When you see search referrals coming in for people searching for “hab.la.com” you start wondering how much traffic you are losing from people who can’t remember your name or try to spell “habla” like “ahblah” or “ahbla” or “obla” or “habla.la” or “habla.com”.

Roland has been working on some great new graphics for Olark. Think Lark – the bird, but far more valuable to your business than twitter :-) [at least in terms of direct value that we will be able to measure and present to you! ]

We welcome feedback on the name, but let’s just say we wasted far too much time figuring out the new name to be easily swayed to something new

I spent some time this week hacking on Puppet, it was a bit of a learning curve, but seems promising for managing configuration across all of our servers. To be honest we still have a manageable number of servers, but something like puppet lets me easily build classes of nodes with specific configuration. I.e. I can define a web node with nginx, haproxy, lighttpd, and apache, or a DB node with mysql. When I deploy a new server I just tell puppet what type of server it is, and it syncs up the right firewall options and configuration options. [I’ll post some of our specific config another time]

The great thing about using puppet for deployment, and storing the configuration in GIT, is that I can build a post-receive hook that take the latest commit to git, pushes it to puppet, let’s puppet update all of our servers. Just add a post-receive hook to your remote git repository. And make sure you have a password-less way for your git repository to update puppet.

#!/bin/bash
#.git/hooks/post-receive
ssh puppet@puppet "cd /etc/puppet && git pull"

So now I can edit config for all of our machines in textmate, commit with git, and sit back, and manage our entire cluster without logging into a single machine using SSH :-).

-Ben

A few of our users have requested that we provide another port to access hab.la on. We actually implemented the code mid last week, but didn’t push it to production until today.

Corporate friends you can now access the hab.la Jabber server on port 21. So, your server configuration should look like:

username: user@hab.la

password: _ you should know this _

server: hab.la

port: 21

Let me know if you need further instructions.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes from our users:

“I’m impressed - I didn’t think after using 37Signals apps anything would impress me. But you guys did a good job on this.” - Anonymous

“This is just exactly What I needed . Plugoo was flash based and too heavy. Great Job!” - Michel, France , Marseille

“It’s a great way to interact with other people on web pages.” - Anonymous

“Thanks very much for putting the time into this. its very easy to use and its much better for people that don’t need all those complicated chat systems. As soon as I put it up, I had users asking questions all day it really helped me improve the site, because I got to talk to customers on the website directly. our customers are people who don’t use computers too often so its very simple for them to use.” - Dentfix.com

“its a real cool function.. better than a java chat on the website… so i can use my pidgin to chat directly if a user visits my website… thx for this great tool” - Moff, http://houserocker.tk

I think I’ll make a tradition of occasionally posting some of the feedback from our feedback form. (if you include a link, and your comment doesn’t look like obvious spam, I’ll try to include it) Thanks for your support guys, your feedback is what keeps Hab.la moving :-)

Let us know what you think