Progress on NarraFirma

Hey folks. I wonder if people might have wondered what happened to NarraFirma. Here's an update.

After the software's initial release last October, we found ourselves pretty busy for a while. My husband got busy looking for a job, and now he's hard at work keeping the job he found. I experienced an uptick both in small paying projects and in general interest in PNI. These were good problems to have, but they meant that NarraFirma got less attention for a while.

However, in the past month I've finally been able to put some serious time into the software. As you may know, Paul wrote most of the code, so I've been learning to work with it, starting at the edges and working my way in. I've been fixing bugs, adding little features, and working on clarity and usability. I've also learned the long and convoluted process for putting out new releases for the Node.js and WordPress versions of the software (well, it's only the WordPress part that's convoluted).

Now that I'm getting up to speed, I hope to keep putting out new releases as often as I can. If you have installed the NarraFirma WordPress plugin, you will get upgrade notices from time to time. If you're using the Node.js version, I recommend that you check either the releases page on GitHub or the NarraFirma web site blog.

What NarraFirma needs now is more users and more feedback. If you've been thinking about using the software, please try it and tell me what you think. (By the way, we recently discovered Bitnami "application stacks," which you can use to install WordPress locally with just a few clicks. A few more and you've got a working copy of NarraFirma. Good stuff. More instructions here.)

If you are using NarraFirma, I would be very grateful if you would send me a note and tell me what your experience has been like so far (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com). I'm eager to hear what people like and don't like in what we have built, and I want to know what people would like to see in the future.

I would also like to use this opportunity to thank several people who have been helping out with testing and feedback so far. M, P, S, J, G, M, and B, thank you so much. You have helped us to make NarraFirma better!