For those you interested in more of the the origins, personalities and thoughts behind the creation Wufoo, there’s a great interview just published over at Juxtaviews.com with me about some behind-the-scenes details. It’s been hectic around here lately and so it was nice to take a break and reflect on our work for awhile. The following is a quick excerpt from the interview:

Q: Can you tell us about some highlights and/or hardships that happened during your three months in the Y-combinator incubator?

A: Well, right before we went out there Ryan got Cat Scratch Fever. I won’t go too much into it, but it has something to do with swelling of the lymph nodes and apparently feels like somone kicking you in your precious place all over your body. This is a disease most common to the demographic consisting of 12 year-old girls. What it comes down to is only Ryan could get a disease like this. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really affect anything because he was over it by the time we got out there, but I like telling the story because Ryan is ridiculous and that’s the flavor that always follows us around.

Secure RSS feeds have been a pain since the launch of Wufoo, but it appears that the issue may be solved. Many Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi’s and failed patches later, we were able to narrow down the problem to two areas: password encryption and API credentials. We pushed up a fix today and have tested it with previously broken accounts in previously broken feed readers, and everything appears to be working. If you use a feed reader that supports authentication (most major ones), go give your feed a try! So far the following have been tested:

• NewsFire
• Netvibes
• Bloglines
• Newsgator

The short version is that we weren’t accommodating for all password types, and we weren’t communicating the password information properly to the new API. For those of you who are technically inclined, the longer version is below. But for everyone, if you cannot see or subscribe to your feed, please let us know in the comments or by contacting support. We would like to get this ironed out for good.

Password Encryption

The original problem with feeds was that some people could see them in the browser while others couldn’t. And then, if you could see it in the browser, you could subscribe to it in a feed reader. So half of the people had everything working 100%, and half had 0%. Well, it turns out that I was doing the password check completely wrong because of encryption. All of your passwords are stored in a safe, encrypted format that Chris programmed. When I was learning his code to do the authentication for feeds, I wasn’t escaping the encrypted password properly. With this fix up, everyone should be able to see a feed in their browser.

API Credentials

The next problem was that even though people could see feeds in the browser, they could not subscribe to them with a feed reader. About a month ago, we switched RSS feeds so that they are powered by the API. In order to access data with the API, you need to either be logged in to your account, or provide a proper API key. Well, in testing, I always happened to be logged in. Either because my localhost only has one user, or because I logged in to access the feeds rather then typing the URL. Obviously (or not so obvious to me at the time), a feed reader can’t log in, and it doesn’t send an API key. So, the code needed to allow for people with proper credentials to access the API.

Additional Access

We have also opened up access to the feeds for those of you without feed readers with built in authentication. You can now access your feeds directly by URL in the following format:

https://email+gmail.com:password@username.wufoo.com/feeds/form/form-name/

Note that the example above replaces the @ in the first email with a +. So, if your email address is ryan@wufoo.com, you would type ryan+wufoo.com in that first section of the URL.

With those two problems fixed, things seem to be running smoother. We’re sorry it took so long to get this far, but we’re happy that progress is being made with them.

Custom Buttons and CSS

Last night we very happily pushed to the server the final versions of two new features to make the Theme Builder a whole lot more awesome for web designers and power users: custom submit buttons and add your own CSS.

Custom Buttons

We added some of this functionality last week so you can use your own text inside the submit buttons so your form doesn’t have to ask its users to just “Submit.” This is really great for our International users. Now your submit button can ask your users to add entries in the appropriate language. Last night, however, we added the ability to also use your own image instead of text. Just upload it to your own server, tell us where to find it and we’ll show it on your form.

Add Your Own CSS

This feature was implemented for our power users and so is appropriately accessed via the “Advanced” property in the Theme Builder. The premise is that while our Theme Builder is pretty great for most cases, we know that there are some fancy pants web designers out there that will want to explore and push their own CSS to customize their Wufoo forms even further than what we can offer via our interface. Just upload your CSS file to your own server, tell us where it’s located and we’ll load your CSS rules along with your form.

To help you figure how your CSS will work with our default CSS and markup, we’ve created The Wufoo Theme Kit to aid you on your quest to prettier and better integrated forms. The Theme Kit is sort of in beta to help us lock down the markup of our Wufoo forms, so as you play with adding your own CSS rules, send us feedback on what hooks work and what could make your life easier. Over the next few weeks, we’ll refine the code and hopefully, get something relatively stable.

Anyway, we’re really excited about these new features and we think it’ll open the doors to some pretty exciting designs. Again, send us your feedback and any awesome designs or tips you discover along the way.

Hey everyone. We were just informed by BitPusher that our servers have to come down for a bit tonight. It appears that our location has to do work on the power supplies. All of our equipment is on redundant power feeds to two separate Power Distribution Units, but unfortunately they will be bringing down both PDUs that we are connected to. The details are below — if anything changes, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Estimated START Time: 11/03/2006 21:00 PST

Estimated END Time: 11/04/2006 01:00:00 PST

UPDATE : And we’re back up. Thanks everyone for your patience.