Tech Support Transition Update

Just an update to let you know how our transition to this new tech
support system is going. This morning I moved all outstanding tech
support issues from the old system to the shiny new system. That may
mean that you got an email telling you that your support issue has
been received and that you can login and check the status of your
issue. If you don't want to signup/login you can always send us an
email at support@rnsoft.zendesk.com or support@rnsoft.com. We'll be
working diligently to clear this backlog of support issues and will
get solutions out to you as quickly as we can.

Thanks for your patience as we make this change to serve you better.

New Tech Support System

OK, I admit it -- I've been very bad at staying on top of tech support. Sure, I've been out on paternity leave, but really things have gotten far more out of hand than I had hoped they would. But as of today I'm gettin this ship turned around with the help of Zendesk.

There are a lot of new features and tools that I hope will help folks find solutions to problems they're having with our products. The Forums add an entirely new level to the support system that should help highlight important and useful information. There's also a completely open user-driven forum called Tips & Tricks that will be whatever people want to make of it. I'm hoping this will give them the opportunity to exchange their own great ideas. Also, commenting is available on almost all Forum entries so they can add their perspective to any issue we're working on.

On the back end, there are a lot of useful new admin tools that should bring things to light quicker and allow us to be much more responsive than we have been in the past. It also has a great toolkit for mobile use so even while I'm on the road I'll be able to stay on top of things (yay iPhone).

I've got the basic system up and running at http://rnsoft.zendesk.com and I think it should work much better than the old system. I'm going to transfer the support archive to it today and then I'll monitor it closely over the next few weeks. Let me know what you think.

The Transition is On

OK, so after some pretty extensive discussions and testing I have made a decision not to host my own blog. The blog accounted for some of the largest amounts of traffic while I was regularly updating it. I plan to move the old blog entries -- at least the ones that are relevant to our ongoing discussion -- into the new blog. This will probably take some time and will have to wait until I complete my active development work.

I'm using Blogger now. I decided on that mostly because it integrates with Gmail, which I use for my personal email, and I can post via email from my iPhone on the road. This should make it easy for me to keep content flowing while keeping the tools required to a very minimal and highly portable set. 

And honestly, I like posting from my email -- even from my desktop. I guess I just grew up with email. It is just part of the way that I work and think. I feel pretty comfortable composing my thoughts and sending them off to the world. Emailing is already part of my workflow -- and takes much less effort that launching Dreamweaver and tossing off a page (yes, even with templates). 

I liked my old blogging method because it was a showcase for what you could do with RSS DreamFeeder. Both RSS and Atom feeds were generated from the pages I built in Dreamweaver. I am also a very firm believer in eating your own dog food -- that is, using the tools you build and sell to others for your own work as well. I often find some of the worst bugs myself while I'm using it. And I curse about it just as much as any customer might and perhaps even more so.

So making this switch was a tough choice, but the advantages of posting more will more than offset the drawback of using tools that are not of my own making (and selling). Though it will interest some of you to know that I am using RSS Replay (actually an early beta of version 2) to display this blog on the blog page at RNSoft.

On a programming note: I am going to be posting more of a mix of personal and business stuff here from now on. I tried two blogs and it just doesn't work for me. Many of the folks who read my blog are interested in both topics. And if you're not, well feel free to skip the personal stuff at any point. There are categories listed on this blog's main page (at the bottom-right) and if you click the category you'll see only content related to that topic. You can also subscribe to the category from that page.