Ride Sidecar

Dearest Gimleteers,

Downtime – Our Apologies

Today, we had two long hours of unexpected downtime when the cabinet our server is located in lost power. We sincerely apologize for the service outage and thank all of you for your patience. As the data center and our hosting partner work to repair this issue, they expect additional downtime to occur.

Additional maintenance downtime: 8/09/2011 23:59hrs – 8/10/2011 06:00hrs (CST)

They are reserving up to six hours to fix the issue, but expect the actual repair to take far less time. We apologize in advance for this additional interruption.

Support – Status Updates

We will always try our best to keep everyone informed about service interruptions — be it expected or unexpected downtime. Here are the best places online to check Gimlet’s technical status:

* Gimlet on Twitter – http://twitter.com/#!/gimletapp
* Gimlet on Ride Sidecar – http://www.ridesidecar.com

Our Twitter account will be the first place any news of an interruption is posted, and we will keep you informed there with real-time analysis and updates. Please strongly consider following our account.

You can always feel free to contact us directly for support issues, too.

* Gimlet support via email – support@gimlet.us

Future

This was certainly *not* the way we wanted to start the week, but it was a good reminder that we can always work to provide better service. We will be examining ways to better inform our clients about the status of Gimlet.

One option that is common online is to maintain a product status page (ex. Google Apps). If you would find this kind of solution an attractive option for monitoring Gimlet’s status, please leave a comment and let us know.

Again, we’re quite sorry for the trouble and we deeply appreciated everyone’s patience this morning.

Thanks everyone,
- The Gimlet Team

5 hundred thousand, that is.

It seems like just yesterday that I was writing, amazed, that our clients had added 58,000 questions to Gimlet. Really, it was a little more than a year ago.

Since then, things have exploded. Dozens of libraries and businesses from around the world have signed up; in combination, they’ve added more than half a million questions (523,029 as of this writing) to their knowledge bases. It’s amazing.

So! Thank you to everyone who has signed up, told a friend, or even just taken a look at us. We wouldn’t be here without you.

Are you headed to ALA in New Orleans this week? So are we — we’ll be in the Small Press & Startups area, at Table #3815.

Stop by, say hello, tell us how you’re using Gimlet or ask us questions. We’ll have some free Gimlet schwag for you.

We think Gimlet is fantastic. But of course we would — we made it! So, it’d be great to hear what some other people have to say about it. Well, we can help you out.

First up: Alexander Justice from Loyola Marymount University gave a fantastic presentation on Gimlet at ACRL this spring: Gimlet: Mixing the Perfect Public Services Assessment Cocktail. Check it out; it’s great.

And then, in The Charleston Advisor’s April 2011 issue, there’s a fabulous review of Gimlet. You’ll need a subscription to view the full article, but to quote the reviewer’s conclusion: “Gimlet is a great product for a great price.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Still not totally convinced? Sign up and see for yourself — it’s free!

During the work week, Gimlet is the best library desk stats tool around. But on the weekend, a Gimlet is a great drink.

* Gimlet (Monday – Friday)
- Track your questions
- Search all the answers
- Build rich reports

* Gimlet (Saturday – Sunday)
- 2 oz. Gin
- 1/2 oz. fresh lime juice
- Garnish with lime wedge

However you take your Gimlet, cheers to you!
- The Gimlet Team

PS: We know MANY of you work on the weekend — truth is, we do too.

Hi! We’re Sidecar, the company behind Gimlet — the best library desk stats tool around.

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Since launching in June 2009, we meant to post a Thank-You to our clients after you had answered 1,000 total questions in Gimlet. However, that milestone came a little earlier than we expected, and we missed it.

Next, we planned to do it after 10,000 questions. Again, other issues called to us, and the 10,000 question mark faded into the past. As did 20,000, and 30,000.

And then 50,000.

Finally, we realized: we can’t wait for an artificial milestone to thank our clients. So: at the time of this writing, librarians have used Gimlet to answer 58,512 questions. That’s amazing. (Actually, since starting this post, it’s now 58,526.) In fact, we’re seeing nearly a thousand questions recorded every single day.

So, thank you to everyone who has helped us make this possible. Keep it up!

- The Gimlet Team

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Try Gimlet for free today.

Hi! We’re Sidecar, the company behind Gimlet — the best library desk stats tool around.

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Want an even faster way to add Q&As to Gimlet? Try our latest feature: the Gimlet bookmarklet.

Gimlet – Bookmarklet from Ride Sidecar on Vimeo.

What’s a bookmarklet?

You probably have many sites bookmarked in your browser — these bookmarks take you to all your favorite websites. A bookmarklet is just a browser bookmark, but instead of taking you to a URL, it runs a little piece of JavaScript to do something helpful. Our Gimlet bookmarklet pops open your library’s “Add question” form from anywhere you happen to be online.

Installing the Gimlet bookmarklet

Login to Gimlet and you’ll find your bookmarklet link at the bottom of the page. If you’re using Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome installing is as easy as dragging the “Save to Gimlet” link up to your browser bookmarks toolbar. If you use Internet Explorer, you can install it by right-clicking on the “Save to Gimlet” link and adding the bookmarklet to your Favorites.

Using the bookmarklet

Anytime you find yourself answering a question where a web page contains the answer, use the bookmarklet. You can highlight text on the web page with the answer and our bookmarklet will add the copied text, along with the title and URL of the web page to your “answer” field in the “Add question” form.

It’s really simple to use and we think it’s gonna save you loads of time. Give it a try and let us know what you think. We’re always open to new ideas or suggestions from our customers.

Cheers!
- The Gimlet Team

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Try Gimlet for free today.

Hi! We’re Sidecar, the company behind Gimlet — the best library desk stats tool around.

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Under the hood

We thought everyone might like to know how we roll the Gimlet. Here’s our current technology stack of choice:

Ruby on Rails

Gimlet is a Rails app. We’ve been writing RoR applications since the framework first appeared on the scene. In fact, we attended the very first RailsConf way back in 2006. We love Rails because convention over configuration just works.

MySQL

We use MySQL for the backend database. You haven’t lived until you’ve used the SELECT … INTO OUTFILE syntax. When you’re exporting Q&As out of Gimlet, you’re taking advantage of that little gem.

Sphinx

Sphinx is our full-text indexing engine and a very intimate friend of MySQL. We’ve been impressed with the speed of this new indexer. As I write this post, we’re extending the ThinkingSphinx and Riddle gems to better support the type of faceting our next generation of reports will leverage.

Nginx + Unicorn

We’re using Nginx+Unicorn to serve our Gimlet pages. Just like the article linked describes, God keeps a trustful eye on our Unicorn workers.

Ubuntu

Underneath the rest of the stack, we ride Ubuntu Server Edition. Performance and simplicity makes Ubuntu great.

If you’re keeping track, all of the tools are open-source. Have any questions about the technology we use? Just ask. We’d love to tell you how we’re building the best library desk stats tool around.

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Try Gimlet for free today.

Hi!  We’re Sidecar, the company behind Gimlet — the best library desk stats tool around.

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Turn your questions into statistics

You answer questions all day at work. People ask questions at the reference desk, in the computer lab, via email or IM. Some of these questions are easy: “Where’s the bathroom?” But many of these questions are also extremely hard: “I need to calculate the tensile strength of a rope… can you help me with that?”

So how do you keep track of all those questions? More importantly, how do you record all those great answers?

Record your questions

Gimlet helps you leverage your questions and answers (Q&As), recording the full-text of the reference interaction, along with fields to categorize the question via five fundamental facets:

Question Facet	Example Value
Duration	15 minutes
Type	Reference or Directional
Questioner	Student or Professor
Format	Email, Phone or IM
Location	Reference Desk or Computer Lab

You can customize Gimlet to record any value for these basic elements you need to capture. Instead of student or professor, maybe you need to track class: freshman, sophomore, junior or senior. You decide how to shape your account.

In addition to these five facets, we can optionally collect question difficulty or tags to more richly describe the Q&As.

Search your answers

Gimlet creates a knowledge-base of your libraries Q&As. Quickly your Gimlet account becomes indispensable, full of valuable answers to questions anyone on your staff can search.

Need to find that question you answered last month on EPA guidelines? It’s easy. Want everyone on staff to answer a common question identically? In Gimlet you can “star” the question and that Q&A will always rise to the top of your search results.

Build rich reports

Gimlet helps you better understand the service you provide your customers. Want to know when your desk will be its busiest on Tuesdays? Maybe you want to follow up on the most recent, most difficult questions with a staff training workshop? Simply put: Gimlet allows you to know when and how to staff your desk.

Your data is yours

Worried about vendor lock in? Don’t be. With Gimlet, you can export your entire account’s data anytime you wish. This feature is free, forever. We double-promise.

It’s free – reports cost a tiny bit extra

You can try Gimlet for free. In fact, you can continue to use Gimlet for free as long as you wish. However, Gimlet does have very powerful reporting tools that you’ll love. You can generate charts, graphs, data tables and export Q&As to Excel. All for just $10/month per library.

We’ll be posting regularly about ways your library can benefit from making Gimlet your favorite new reference tool. Along the way, please feel free to drop a comment or email us at support@gimlet.us if you have any questions.

Cheers!
-The Gimlet Team