Shellsink Nearing Free Quota

Shellsink has been a pet project of my for the last few months, and it has been fun to put something new out there just to see how people react. My main goal of course was to build something useful. What I didn't anticipate was that I would have to begin paying for hosting so soon. Unfortunately Google has rolled out the non free portion of app engine, and they have announced resulting changes to the service. I had hoped that ad revenue on the shellsink site would pay for whatever app engine hosting costs were incurred, but since 99% of use is at the command line, actually very very few ad impressions are viewed on the site.

The short of this is that very soon shellsink will hit the data storage quota. 1GB of commands, tags, and annotations will have been logged and indexed on the shellsink site. I an trying to get Google to lift the quota for my application. But I have little hope unless one of the Googlers using the service decides to intervene. I expect that late next week shellsink.com will hit the quota and stop accepting commands. BUMMER!

The good news is that all data you have logged there will remain accessable, but if you are like me, that isn't much consolation. So the other good news is that all the source code for the server is going to be in the shellsink Launchpad bazaar repo, so you can keep using shellsink by deploying to your own app engine account. So, it looks like without a deux ex-machina that shellsink.com will have to morph into a non-centralized system.

UPDATE: There is a thread in the google group about this.

ShellSink Server Upgrade

On the same day that our government gets an upgrade, ShellSink gets an upgrade. Specifically, a new version of the server is live! The changes are all performance related and it enables me to bring the client behavior into line with the way google has designed app engine to scale. That is, to make lots of very simple requests instead of fewer complex requests.

Unfortunately, this version is not backwards compatible with older versions of the client. You must upgrade your client! Why would I make such a drastic change? Simple, nobody is using shell_sink but me! That means I'm sure 100% of my users will upgrade. It doesn't explain why I need a blog entry to tell myself about it.

Why search terms are restricted.

Currently you can only search for two keywords at a time. Shellsink uses Google App Engine (GAE) as the underlying technology. The keyword search implementation provided by GAE is currently quite limited. There is: no substring matching, limited number of keywords and only fields of 500 characters or less are indexable. I know. It is a bummer. Unfortunately, search is a complex problem and I don't have the brains to solve it. I'm going to wait for google to solve it. I predict later versions of the App Engine APIs will improve the search functionality and I look forward to removing these limitations just as soon as Google does.