Well, the first week of Hubify's pre-alpha check seems to be problem free (barring the ones that I already knew about), although for most of the week I found myself curled up and passed out on account of the flu. So things are fairly stagnant.

Well, except for the fact that we now have a full fledged designer on board helping us along. Hubify will get its first facelift this week once the pre-alpha closes. New logo (finally, now we have something not shameful) and eventually a whole new look!

Some users have noticed a slight discrepancy with how posts are categorized as "updated" meaning, they really rarely are. That's not our fault we swear, Facebook apparently doesn't feel like updating the time that a post was last updated so now it's up to us to come up with a logical solution. One idea is to simply ram Facebook with a bunch of queries, amalgamate the results and then return them to you. While it isn't very "friendly" it should help teach facebook that it needs to actually USE all the fields it provides in its API.

Well, hopefully things work out well and we have a few screens to show you of what Hubify will look like soon!

Well, yesterday was the first official pre-alpha day and things are going (more or less) excellent. The post liking feature was enabled sometime in the middle of the day and apart from a few stream related bugs, there doesn't really seem to be any issues.

One thing that I did notice was that when there were new comments, the stream didn't always bubble the latest entry to the top. There is some sorting present in the Facebook API, but either my entries aren't being sorted correctly (probably my fault) or my bubbling is all wrong... either way, I'm hoping to get to the bottom of this.

Another thing GitHub users may have noticed is a new project show up. Once we enter the alpha stage (and can version as 0.0.1 officially) our GitHub project page will update with the source to let you run your own Hubify. As a web-based application trying to make ANY kind of income (enough to support the servers at least), this seems like suicide, but hear me out. 

Hubify does not want to store your personal information. Infact, we took great care when crafting our application so that it tries to store ZERO information about our users by default. This is to assure you that your data is safe. Your social media accounts make up the most important data about your online presence and we care about that. So when you take Hubify for a spin you don't GIVE us any data at all, we just provide you with a great way to access all of your data.

The reason we provide the GitHub project is two-fold. For one thing, more technical users who may be comfortable running their own-setups can take advantage of Hubify without providing us any information. The walkthrough will eventually be provided so that even non-technical users can setup their own local environments. The second reason is because we have nothing to hide. Feel free to browse our source and ensure that we do only what we say we do. 

Note: For security reasons any registration/login system that may be implemented into Hubify will be stripped out for the GitHub release. The reason for this is primarily security, but also because we want to keep requirements for local-running users as minimal as possible. 

That being said, here are a few things that I would like to have implemented during alpha: 

• The ability to notify users of Hubify that there has been an update WITHOUT needing their email addresses, or posting to Facebook or Twitter. Some problems with this is... how do I notify users? 
• A more modular sand-boxed approach to the javascript. While building the first few modules, it made sense to have things fairly.. intertwined. This was so that we could get Hubify out there as soon as possible, and also because the best way to design a system is based on how it works for that system as opposed to a very abstract generalized model. By refactoring AFTER we have a working test-case we can ensure that things work in a way that makes the MOST sense for Hubify.
• A much nicer UI. I'm not a REAL graphic designer, I'm a programmer. And that shows. I've tried to fix things up as best as I could but there is still a lot of things that I don't like about the UI. Anyone out there interested in working on a project? If you have any spare UI's lying around ;) send me an email with a preview/link so I can check it out and don't forget to include a price. I'm not looking for a freebie (although, freebies are welcome =D)

As always, don't forget to tell your friends about Hubify!

Over the span of a week Hubify has gone from an idea to an actual product. Granted, the only users at the moment are those I have to coerce into using it.. but it's getting there slowly I think. 

This Monday will mark the first day of a two week pre-alpha testing phase. Essentially, if everything goes smoothly, by the end of March we will be able to move into alpha stages! Oddly enough, things will be pretty stable for the Facebook module in Hubify, but the reason we're not going to beta is because I want to add Twitter and Buzz support before I consider it stable. 

So this weekend is a mass of fixes and optimizations and adding one more necessity (namely, the ability to comment/like posts) and then it will be up to all of you to hunt down any bugs that I may have missed. 

Thanks for taking the time to check out Hubify and tell your friends!

Hubify is a simple web application that aggregates all of your social media information into a single location. No more fumbling about between 5 or 6 different websites to get all your information. With Hubify all your content comes to you. 

Stay tuned as we make our push towards an open beta release!