Summersault Blog

by Sarah Warfield
Contributing Editor
The Earlham Word, Friday, Oct 23, 1998

If you look up the word “summersault” in the dictionary, you will find that the way that Chris Hardie and Mark Stosberg use it is an accepted alternate spelling, although their combined idea of what summersault is, proves to be of higher standards than what is normal.

“Summersault connotes youth, energy, and happiness,” said Hardie of the duo’s choice of words when naming the company they started together in the summer of 1997.

“The definition of a summersault is a complete revolution,” explained Stosberg.

A complete revolution driven by youth and energy seems the perfect explanation of what Stosberg, a 1998 Earlham graduate and Chris Hardie, of the class of 1999, are accomplishing in cyber-space.

They have created and are running a small business that designs and hosts web pages for private companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlham grads turn passion for Web into profit
by Beth Musgrave
Staff Writer
The Palladium-Item, Sunday, Aug 22, 1999

They say things like “data-base driven, dynamic interfaces,” “e-commerce” and “static HTML pages.”

And it ain’t all talk.

While the rest of Wayne County might be satisfied simply surfing the Web, Chris Hardie and Mark Stosberg, of Summersault Web site design and hosting, are building and maintaining it. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally written for publication in a trade magazine about the BSD family of operating systems; it’s been updated slightly since then.

When a friend and I started our technology business 11 years ago in 1997, we didn’t choose FreeBSD, it chose us.  But we’re sure glad it did, and we came to build our company on FreeBSD.

We started out with a focus on graphic design and website development.  We were small, starting out in a college dorm room, but with high aspirations about what we could do for the world.  It was only after a few projects that we realized we needed a place to send our clients for hosting the websites we had just built for them.  When we asked a friend who was involved in running a small local dial-up Internet Service Provider where to host, he offered us some space on one of their servers, where they were already hosting a number of websites.

We got our FTP username and password, and we were off and running.  We eventually co-located with that local ISP, and partnered with them enough that they gave us shell access on that shared web hosting server, and eventually even root access.  It was a FreeBSD box running version 2.1 of the operating system.

Read the rest of this entry »

At Summersault we build websites with a modified version of the Titanium framework. While Titanium continues to work very well for us, I always like to keep up with other possibilities. There are always new places to find inspiration and there’s always room for improvement. In that spirit I’ve recently explored HTTP::Engine and Mojo. Looking at how these options fit into the bigger picture of Perl frameworks, I wrote an article called Evolution of Perl Frameworks for Perlbuzz.com. Here’s the full article.

At Summersault we have been using darcs for source control management, and have found it to be a great tool for us.

To review darcs 2, I reviewed hundreds of bugs entries in the darcs bug tracker, checking to see whether the bugs were fixed are still present. Through this process I became as intimate as the developers with what had been improved in darcs and what remained to address.

What I found was that darcs 2 closed over half the bugs in the bug tracker, literally hundreds of bugs. This was possible because it addressed not just specific bugs, but whole categories of bugs were closed by major architecture and design improvements.

You can read more about the update on my personal weblog.

Richmond, IN – The story of Summersault’s evolution from an idea in the minds of its founders to a successful technology company will be told here tomorrow as a part of a conference about and for entrepreneurs. “What’s the Big Idea?” is a day-long event offering the opportunity to capitalize on the successful experiences of entrepreneurs and professionals in the areas of starting, funding, growing and managing a business. The event is presented by Main Street Richmond Wayne County.

Read the rest of this entry »

Richmond, IN – The first in a series of technology education workshops begins tonight with a talk on “The Internet as a Political Tool.” The series, sponsored by Summersault and produced by Morrisson-Reeves Library in Richmond, will run between now and February 2009. All events are free and open to the public. Read the rest of this entry »

Richmond, IN – Summersault co-founder Mark Stosberg announced today that the new maps of bicycle routes in Richmond are available. The maps were created by Stosberg and others as a guide to bike commuting and safety in the Richmond area, and sponsored in part by Summersault.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, I made some notable contributions to various open-source projects, including:

• Tim Bunce, the author of Perl’s DBI asked me to be a committer on the DBIx::HA project, a high-availability/load-balancing Perl module.
• I uploaded a new release of CGI::Session, version 4.30. As the official maintainer of the module, I worked closely with Ron Savage who did most of the release work. Summersault will likely take advantage of these improvements in the future.
• Multiple people gave me praise for my help with the Darcs 2 release. One person wrote, “Mark Stosberg was an unsung hero of the darcs-2 project for diligently triaging and following-up on hundreds of bug tracker tickets. His quality-assurance work (including setting up automated buildbot tests) is an important reason that darcs-2 is much less buggy.” By patch count, I’ve committed the third most patches to the project due to numerous documentation and test suite improvements.

These are just some of the ways that Summersault staff participate in the online community and in the open-source software movement.

INDIANAPOLIS, IN — Summersault was proud to be a sponsor and participant in Blog Indiana 2008, the first state-wide conference about blogging and new media, which concluded here today.

The event was attended by more than 160 people from the region who were interested in all aspects of blogs, blogging, social networking, and related topics. Presentations and panels covered were available on “beginner,” “business,” and “general” tracks, while panels and networking events allowed for more informal discussion and interaction about these tools and technologies.

Read the rest of this entry »