In this weblog we write about our products and our experiences while designing, implementing, supporting, promoting and using them.
Update your Status
05 10 2009, Michiel van Vlaardingen in TeamSpinnerA nice thing about social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is to keep up to date on the life of your friends. Because TeamSpinner is all about keeping up to date on your project, we believe that the new status feature will further improve tracking your projects. It works just like on all other social sites, but with a twist: you can attach messages to a specific project. Your messages are than only shared with other members of that particular project.
Go check it out and tell us what you think.
Have More Fun In A Group
01 10 2009, Michiel van Vlaardingen in TeamSpinnerThis feature isn't particularly exciting, but we have postponed it for a long time. TeamSpinner now has Groups. You can create a group of users and then assign that whole group to a project. This makes it much quicker for teams to use TeamSpinner. We are working on more exciting features to keep your project members up to date, which we hope to present soon.
Projects on the road again
16 09 2009, Michiel van Vlaardingen in TeamSpinnerToday we've released a minor update on TeamSpinner. Just a few small things that are hopefully better now, for now, it's mostly layout. However, we are looking for a major improvement soon. We aim to provide much more project management tools and ways to integrate external data and applications into TeamSpinner. Think of issue tracking tools, source control, etc. We hope TeamSpinner will become the center of project information.
To keep moving, we need your feedback! What whould you need to give your projects a spin?
Moving to S3
08 09 2009, Michiel van Vlaardingen in PicturePushFor some time we have used Amazon S3 as back up for our pro users on PicturePush. However, with the growing amount of users we decided that it was time to switch to S3 for all storage. The reason being that we got tired of managing our own storage: disks got full at unexpected times, etc.
The approach we followed was to first get all files into S3 using the backup scripts we already had for the pro-accounts. Then we wrapped al our code that touched the image files. So we ended up with a filesystem based storage api with methods like:
- getLocator($image, $format)
- putFromFile($locator, $file)
- getToFile($locator,$file)
- getToTemporaryFile($locator)
- exists($locator)
- exists_local($locator)
- readfile($locator)
- filesize($locator)
- etc.
Furthermore, we needed to account for metadata storage such as filesize, resolution, etc. because we could no longer get these from the files directly.
Implementing all these abstraction was the most elaborate part of the transition. (If you ever do anything with files: wrap it! ) After this, the actual switch to using S3 was trivial. After a few days of bug fixing everything seems to be stable and quick again.
As we needed to preserve our existing URL structure, lazy image generation and session based authentication ( for private images ) we could not serve from S3 directly. To keep things quick, we decided on using a large local cache for the most common files. This enables us to serve files fast and using our existing infrastructure without relying on it for permanent storage.
For example: To further speed up the serving of images, we are now experimenting with custom CDN nodes. Hopefully we will start some nodes in the US soon, so our US customers will get a much better experience.
More Filtering Options
31 03 2009, Michiel van Vlaardingen in FlexListsToday we worked on extending our filtering options to other parts of FlexLists. Starting today you can now also select which items to show on the widget by configuring it on the 'Publish' tab. You could for example show a list on your website with priority 1 items only by entering 'priority:1' as a custom filter and putting the code in your site. Furthermore the printing option will now print the current selection as you see it, instead of the whole list. So you can quickly compile a list using a search query and print just those items.
An other thing we added is the option to hide the time on the date/time fields. You can hide it by checking the 'Date Only' checkbox in the field properties dialog. (available through the 'Fields' tab)
Finally we fixed a few issues with the date picker and optimized the loading of the list data a bit to be on your screen even faster.
Safety First: Daily backup
23 02 2009, Michiel van Vlaardingen in PicturePushAlthough we store all your photos twice at PicturePush, this might not be enough to handle small or larger disasters. Therefore we decided that we want to keep your photos even safer. Starting today, all photos uploaded by pro-members will be backed up daily to Amazon S3. It's a very reliable service to store data. It uses multiple datacenters to spread the data, so we feel that we will be able to recover your photos in almost any event. So if you want your photos to be really really safe, upgrade to a pro-account.
07 02 2009: 20.000 PicturePush signups!
30 01 2008: New Upload Page
28 01 2009: Protect your images
24 01 2009: Updates for PicturePush
28 10 2008: Customize FlexLists web export layout
20 08 2008: PicturePush Milestone
04 08 2008: Timezone detection
21 07 2008: Change of plans
07 07 2008: Photo Printing
27 06 2008: Changing the locks
20 06 2008: Account Limits
04 06 2008: Archives
02 06 2008: Top request: password protected albums
01 06 2008: Pretend to be a new user time after time
01 06 2008: Downtime expected for FlexLists
09 05 2008: FlexLists Update
07 05 2008: Towards BloxDB
04 03 2008: Really beta software
01 03 2008: Spin Faster
01 03 2008: Clone Your Lists
14 02 2008: Delete Comments
30 01 2008: Progress
28 01 2008: VoteLists cleaned
04 01 2008: Growing pains
11 12 2007: Guest Passes
05-12-2007: Advertising
22 11 2007: What's Next?
16 11 2007: Unexpected downtime :(
27 10 2007: New Skins
23 10 2007: Windows Hosting
18 10 2007: More Support
12 10 2007: More Cleaning
11 10 2007: Time to clean up
09 09 2007: Start Your Own PicturePush?
27 09 2007: Track your Changes
26 09 2007: Attention to Teamspinner
18 09 2007: Fresh Design
20 07 2007: Xinu tool
16 07 2007: Screen Space
13 07 2007: Did it make you angry?
06 07 2007: Tag everything
05 07 2007: Win a Canon Digital Photo Camera
13 06 2007: PicturePush Uploader Beta
22 05 2007: Photo and Video Categories
05 05 2007: Do YOU get FlexLists?
30 04 2007: Better FlexLists Lists
26 04 2007: Redesign : part 1
19 04 2007: PicturePush Milestone: 41148
18 04 2007: Comming Soon: PicturePush Upload Tool
30 03 2007: Structuring CSS Files
23 03 2007: Unexpected Downtime
16 03 2007: User Interface Tuning
13 03 2007: Book Suggestions
12 03 2007: Improved PicturePush Search
12 03 2007: Sharing VoteLists
09 03 2007: VoteLists again
09 03 2007: How does a nerd promote a cool, feature rich, non marketed website?
08 03 2007: PicturePush Milestone
01 03 2007: Something Extra
24 02 2007: Doubles
22 02 2007: Expected downtime
17 02 2007: Remove the Ads
16 02 2007: Comments
16 02 2007: Broken Special Characters
31 01 2007: Oh no... forgotten...
30 01 2007: My case for using plain PHP
25 01 2007: Pictures first
21 01 2007: WebDAV support
29 12 2006: Speeding up PicturePush
25 12 2006: List the lists
24 12 2006: FlexLists updates
20 12 2006: Effective website monitoring
09 12 2006: Consyn Form validation
22 08 2006: Small Annoyances
18 08 2006: Simple Project Management with FlexLists
17 08 2006: Moving pictures
07 08 2006: More on PicturePush
31 07 2006: Adding AJAX with the Consyn Framework
24 07 2006: Improving PicturePush
13 07 2006: What has been keeping us busy?
02 06 2006: We are still moving
05 04 2006: Tight schedules
30 03 2006: No specs?
27 03 2006: Moving Labs starring E-lab and 2Vi