Yesterday I started rolling out a new version of our tools to everyone's devboxes. contractor 1.0.8 understands what to do with software you've installed from source in /usr/local. As our intelligent config file management is limited to /etc, so our source installation tracking is limited to /usr/local, which is the right place to install such things and is conveniently the default location for software built with GNU autotools.

blueprint-create(1) automatically creates and uploads tarballs containing everything you've installed in /usr/local. To welcome this new feature in style, I've created a blueprint of my Go environment for everyone to share. If you've got a DevStructure server already, simply blueprint apply rcrowley/go to get started with Go. We're continuing to expand our beta rapidly so if you don't have an invite code yet, sign up!

Feedback is rolling in from our alpha users and we are squashing bugs with a vengeance. Tonight, we're pleased to announce that in addition to Rackspace Cloudservers, DevStructure now supports Amazon EC2 instances. Remember, if you have a server from another provider, you can use the Bring Your Own IP option. Waitlisters, more invites are coming! Enjoy.

Yesterday I joined Dan Benjamin from 5by5 on The Conversation #22: The Secret Sauce. At the beginning of the show, we talked about DevStructure, our beta plan and the service. The nitty gritty is within the first 5 minutes, the rest of the show is business and startup chit-chat. Full show notes and an audio/video link are below.

Dan Benjamin talks with Matt Tanase of Slicehost and DevStructure. They discuss creating demand for a product and your business, marketing on a budget, building an audience, getting your users to help market for you, the importance of a co-founder, acquisitions, and more.

http://5by5.tv/conversation/22