Just wanted to say hi and thank everyone for using FeedHammer. We're coming up to our first year anniversary next month and I'd like to thank everyone for supporting us. It's really been a labour of love getting it this far - and I thought I'd start taking a more active role in letting everyone know what's going on behind the scenes.
The last year has really been about just getting something up and running to test the concept of a central news feed for Warhammer news - somewhere you can just drop in and check what's going on in the Warhammer world - that pulls in RSS data, but also data from proprietary APIs - like Twitter, stores and indexes it for you.
We haven't really pushed or advertised it this year (in case it fell apart around us!) - but even so we have seen a very healthy steady growth of users. We have had nearly 5000 downloads of the android app so far, with nearly 2000 current users.
The big plans for year two are to release the iPhone app (almost got v1 ready), update the web site (it's a bit messy at the moment), revamp the back end, and start to add new functionality (like personalised news and giving feedback).
Before I start adding new functions - I'm doing a major overhaul of the back end. For anyone who's interested its currently running as a JEE6 app on a Glassfish server, with a MySQL database and Squid proxy cache. It works really well, but it's a bit complex to manage (and expensive to run). I'm currently going through a process of rewriting it to run on the Google App Engine. Once I have the basic engine running ok - I'm going to start adding some new features and functions. The system is storing all the news as we go - so we're building quite a database of Warhammer related goodness - which we should be able to anaylse in various ways (for example - codex specific news, personalised news, hot topics...)
Anyway - hope to have more info next month. If anyone has any comments or feedback - please do get in touch via the website, or email info@feedhammer.co.uk.
Any if anyone is happy with the Android app - please do leave us a positive feedback in the Android Market - it makes all the difference!
Right - better go and finish painting those 40 Guardsmen...
