Melkjug 0.5 faster, smarter and on the couch

We’re proud to announce our latest version of melkjug is now live on http://melkjug.org.  This release focuses on speed and supporting more users — so please give it a try and then tell your friends. We’re hoping to establish a solid core of users who would be interested and involved enough to make collaborative filtering a possibility in the near future.

We’re also proud to announce that with this release, we are now using CouchDB as our recommended and production backend.  After some exciting initial results, a lot of listening to how others are using it and watching the course it has been taking, I feel confident that it is a very solid and natural match for melkjug going forward.  Additionally, it just rocks and it’s a pleasure to work with

During this cycle we significantly refactored the underlying model of melkjug. Firstly, to make it faster and more usable in general.  Secondarily, to tease it apart a bit more to open it up to other useful things we might want to do with its underlying tech.  I’ve had some interesting offline conversations with Ian, Nick G and Rob Marianski lately about the possibility of integrating geo-coding and filtering into melkjug to do a separate geo-ish application that I think could be a very exciting project and test of how transportable melkjug’s underpinnings are.  I invite those of you who are interested to check out the development site for info on what melkjug looks like on the inside and to join our discussion with your ideas of what else could be done with what we’re up to so far and where we should head next.