This first demo was a simple affair, we manually copied the page HTML, output by textburst, into a few new files and then ran them through a shell script which called sed a dozen or so times to replace anything that didn’t work without the full application behind it.

Since putting the new design live we felt we needed to show off all the features to prospective customers. What really surprised us was just how much work is involved to create a fully featured demo.

Our requirements seem simple at a glance:

• Look and feel like textburst
• Include all major textburst features (except payments)
• Be easy to update
• Don’t really send text messages

For various internal reasons the demo needed to run on the same server as this website, this left us needing to run a C#, ASP.NET web application on a server running PHP and Linux. To make this work we came up with the following steps:

1. Log in to textburst on our development platform
2. Grab a copy of all the relevant pages
3. Run some standard find and replaces to remove ASP.NET specific content
4. Add PHP include files at the top of each page
5. Add in page specific PHP includes
6. Remove any development data
7. Copy this altered page and any includes in to a directory ready for release
8. Create some demo contacts and sends using PHP Sessions for display to users

Just over 800 lines of perl later we have a wonderful jumble of regular expressions and a dozen or so php files that make textburst into the simple demo you can see today.

By automating this step we can just re-run the perl script each time we do a release keeping the demo perfectly up to date and preventing any surprises once you’ve signed up.

We do still have to create page specific include files for some of the pages to show how the product actually works. For example, we add an include to the send message page which displays either a sent successfully or failure message depending upon whether all the form fields were completed. It also adds the sent message to your session so it shows on the sent messages page.

We’ve got an exciting year ahead and we’re getting straight into it. The new website will be live later in January and at the same time textburst will take on a whole new appearance.

There’s a demo available so feel free to click around and let us know what you think?

Don’t be fooled though, it’s a demo, it doesn’t actually send messages.

View the textburst demo

At the same time I thought it worth showing off the work that the illustrator Stanley Chow has put in. He’s created us a range of images we can use to identify products and services.

We’ve deliberately steered away from any stereotypical representations of a text message, usually a mobile phones and/or envelope. It’s been done many times and we wanted something that helps us stand out, while at the same time providing cohesion between our products.

So here they are:

mediaburst birds

Textburst

Outlook SMS

Email to SMS

Let us know what you think, are they too bold, are they simple enough, do you like the consistency?