Summersault Blog

RICHMOND, IN – Martha Stewart is no stranger to the cause of adopting homeless pets, and in a live segment on her March 18th show, Stewart featured Adopt-a-Pet.com, a pet adoption website built and maintained by Summersault, LLC in Richmond.

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Richmond, IN - Summersault announced today that it will contribute $1,000 as a sponsor of the upcoming Lemonade Day event being held in Richmond, Indiana on May 3, 2009.  Lemonade day nurtures entrepeneurial skills in young people by teaching them how to start, own, and operate their very own lemonade business. Read the rest of this entry »

Richmond, IN - Summersault, LLC has teamed up with Girls, Inc. and Wayne County foundation as one of the sponsors for the oral history project “What Is Your Story?”.

The project is in cooperation with StoryCorps, whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. Read the rest of this entry »

If you read my previous post about 10 Reasons to Work at Summersault, you may have noted Reason #5: In-depth performance reviews provide you with concrete professional goals and feedback on your successes. As we wrap up our Fall review cycle for staff here, I thought I’d say a little more about just what that process involves.

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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.

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RICHMOND, IN – Summersault, LLC is pleased announce a community challenge donation of up to $4,300 through their sponsorship of the 2008 Alternative Gift Fair.

The 4th Annual Alternative Gift Fair, held this year on December 6, provides the community with the opportunity to shop for donations in lieu of physical gifts during the holidays.  Shoppers can browse tables of local organizations in search of the perfect “gift” for their loved one.  Gifts might include art supplies for an after school program, preservation of one acre of land, or conflict resolution training for a middle school classroom.  The recipient receives a box with a beautiful bow and certificate explaining the donation.

In order to foster additional participation in this fun event that provides important financial support to multiple local organizations, Summersault will be contributing $20 each for the first 90 individual donors and $25 each for the next 100 individual donors, for a total possible contribution from Summersault of $4,300. 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.

6,500 animal shelters come together for national signature campaign to support Obama adopting a dog at a shelter and “Pardoning a Pooch”- www.Presidential-Pooch-Pardon.com

RICHMOND, IN – Summersault LLC, a website development firm based here, and Adopt-a-Pet.com, the nation’s largest non-profit pet adoption website, are spearheading a national campaign and website called “Presidential-Pooch-Pardon.com”, using a Barack Obama-themed campaign website and messages such as “Yes We Can ADOPT” to gather signatures in support of the new President-Elect adopting a shelter puppy.  The website, created and hosted in Richmond by Summersault, already has gathered thousands of signatures from around the country in just its first few hours. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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