We were fortunate to be able to sponsor Ignite Portland 3, which was held at the Baghdad theatre in Portland, Oregon.

What is Ignite? Let’s let them answer that (from Ignite Portland site)

“If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.”[1]

Several of us from Planet Argon came down to enjoy the evening. Here are a few videos that I (Robby) took on my Flip.

• The Evolution of our Social Brains, by Jenny Andrews

• Boiling Water in Five Easy Steps, by Vanessa Holfeltz

• Fracking robots, dude! by Sharon Greenfield

• How To Run a Startup and Not Lose Your Mind, Eva Schweber

• Talking Trash, by Meredith Sorensen

A Short Course On How to Ride Freight Trains – Gerry Van Zand

Don’t get mad, make a video! – Phillip Kerman

(coming soon)

As sponsors, we had an opportunity to go up in front of the audience for 15 seconds. Allison got up to introduce everybody to Planet Argon.

Additionally, it was fun to watch just how active Twitter was during this event.

• http://summize.com/search?q=ip3

Thanks to everyone who came up to introduce themselves and to all the speakers for making it an fun and educational evening!

¹ http://www.igniteportland.com/about/

² As sponsors, we had an opportunity to go up in front of the audience for 15 seconds to pitch our company.

By popular demand.. we’re happy to announce that we’ve just rolled out monthly subscription plans for Boxcar, our professional VPS hosting solution for Ruby on Rails applications. That’s right! You can now order a new Boxcar on a month-to-month basis for just $99/month.

Our team has been building a completely new account management and billing system for the past few months and just launched the initial version. Our aim was to get the essentials out to our customers and work with them to learn more about their goals for managing their Boxcars. Over the next few months, we’ll be building automation tools to simplify the process for deploying Ruby on Rails applications to your Boxcar. Be sure to stay tuned and follow Boxcar on twitter as we’ll be posting information there as we launch these changes.

Ready to hop on our train? Go ahead and place an order now!

For more information, visit railsboxcar.com or contact us.

We moved to downtown Portland, Oregon in February of 2006 and while the space has had it’s perks, it also lacked a lot of natural light. So, we had decided that our next location would have much more natural light.

The new office space lacks private offices, but over time we have all migrated to a shared workspace anyway.

It’s just our luck that within the same building, a new studio space opened up. We have people working this month on improvements to the space, such as a finished (wood) floor, installing a sink/kitchen area, amongst other fun stuff. We’re hoping to be in our new space, which is just down the hall around November 1st.

The team is excited that we’ll be in a space that has way more natural light than our current space. :-)

Small perk… Ground Kontrol is across the street!

Stay tuned for more photos as the construction team makes progress…

It’s October and we’re excited to announce that we’re an official sponsor for the Working with Rails monthly hackfest this month. We’ve allocated one Boxcar for the first prize winner of this months hackfest. As of today, you have 29 days to climb your way to the top of the pack.

Good luck to all those who participate this month!

A week ago, we quietly opened up the process for accepting new orders for our brand new hosting solution for Ruby on Rails. Here is what we sent out to all those who signed up on the Rails Boxcar mailing list.

Rails Boxcar is here!

We’ve been busy getting everything setup and tested for our newest hosting solution for Ruby on Rails. Boxcar, a pre-configured virtual server for hosting your business-level Rails applications, was developed out of our observations of how our Rails hosting customers are deploying their applications. Boxcar was designed to support the best-practices for Rails deployment.

How, you ask?

Unlike a typical VPS, we’ve pre-configured Boxcar to allow you to follow just a few steps to get your Rails application up and running as quickly as possible. We’ve also given you more control over your environment to install additional packages, gems, and programs.

We don’t want your Boxcar to box you in… except when you want it to.

Boxcar will provide you with more privacy. Your application will be completely separate from other customers’ applications. You will also get excellent performance as you will not be competing for memory usage or disk space with other customers, which leads to more stability for your application.

Don’t feel lonely!

All Boxcar customers will have access to a community-driven documentation project, aimed at helping everyone share tips and tricks for configuring and maintaining your Boxcar.

Ready to hop on our train?

For the initial launch, we’re offering 6 and 12 month plans, both of which have a 30 day money back guarantee. Prices start at $85/month for the twelve month plan and $90/month for the six month plan.

Go ahead and place an order

Questions?

If you have any questions about our new Boxcar service, don’t hesitate to send an email to contact@planetargon.com or give us a call at +1 877 55 ARGON.

We’re excited about the launch of Boxcar and would like to thank all of our existing customers who have helped us design it.

Cheers,

The PLANET ARGON Team

If you’re in the Portland area (or would consider relocating) and are interested in a contract or potential full-time job working with Ruby on Rails, continue reading!

PLANET ARGON is currently seeking Interaction Designers and Ruby on Rails Developers.

We’re looking for passionate people that are enthusiastic about working in a diverse and collaborative environment. Developers on-site in Portland are preferred, but we will consider top-notch people that can demonstrate their ability to collaborate as quickly as our team does in our company offices.

If you’d like to apply, please introduce yourself with a thoughtful cover letter and resume. We’re looking forward to meeting you!

We decided to create an account on twitter for PLANET ARGON.

More details to come, in the meantime, add planetargon as a friend!

It’s been year since I announced our Rails Business Hosting, and it has been a popular hosting choice for many of our customers. We’ve been hard at work designing a new hosting service, which aims to provide you with even more privacy, more guaranteed resources, and better options for scaling your Rails application as your business grows.

In the coming weeks, the PLANET ARGON team will introduce Boxcar, an exciting new hosting service that has been designed, developed, and fine-tuned over the past several months.

In the meantime, check out the new Boxcar site, launched this morning by our designer in residence, Chris Griffin. Sign up on our mailing list to be one of the first to find out when this new service is available for public consumption. You can also stay tuned to our blog, as we’ll be posting more updates over the coming days and weeks as we prepare for our launch!

Once upon a time, a PLANET ARGON company blog was neglected and under-used. One brave and diligent hero did work tirelessly to better the blog galaxy with his wit and information, but sadly the blog was taken hostage by spam space-pirates and trackback tyrants. The people of the PLANET blog were weary of the toils… and eventually the PLANET blog was ignored so much that a year and half passed without the sun shining brightly on its surface.

But there is hope for the blog galaxy. Today… a new blog has been born.

Our brave team has decided to give hope back to the blog galaxy and launch a new blog. The team has selected Mephisto as the blogging engine that will run on our much beloved web development framework, Ruby on Rails. Many of us have our own personal and technical blogs, but we wanted to enrich this PLANET by fostering and engaging in an open dialogue with our customers, friends and communities. We hope that this new blog makes PLANET ARGON an even better place to be a part of.

All the employees at PLANET ARGON are suited up in preparation for our quest deep into the blog galaxy… and we hope that you enjoy the ride.

3… 2… 1… blast off.