Hey peeps! We’re having some difficult-to-troubleshoot problems with our server cluster right now. The primary problem seems to be with file uploads: I’ve taken the site down into maintenance mode while we scramble to fix this. Will keep y’all updated via this blog, blog.slideshare.net, getsatisfaction.com, email, and carrier pigeon as we work to fix this.
Author: jonathanboutelle
Chris Heilman’s awesome multiple slideshow widget
Chris Heilman published an article where he described how to make a slideshow widget that has ALL your slideshows from slideshare in it. The article was recently profiled in the Ajaxian.
The result looks totally bad-ass. In fact, we’ve been working on a similar widget, but this one totally blows ours out of the water. The only downside is that his current solution required server-side scripting (with php). We’ll definitely take inspiration from this design and try to put something out in the near future that does something like this from a simple embed.
It’s interesting that Chris chose NOT to use our APIs for doing this, relying instead on our RSS feeds and embed codes to get the information he needed. Chris writes:
I had a look at the API of slideshare but I am always a bit bored with having to go through a developer ID and then do everything on the server. That’s why I put on my “ethical hacker” hat and took a look at the RSS feed of my slides and found everything I need there!
Sounds like making our read-only API calls usable without a login would have helped here. What else would make our API more accessible or useful to developers?
UX of advertising at BayChi tomorrow
The upcoming BayCHI panel on UX of Advertisinglooks really cool! A great line-up of folks:
Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed,
Ted Rheingold, Dogster,
Joe Hurd, VideoEgg,
Heath Row, DoubleClick
are going to be talking about the user experience of advertising. It’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m interesting especially in whether Flash can be used to make advertising LESS annoying.
Plus the Dogster guy will be there. Dogster cracks me up, the fact that a social networking site for dogs is a massively succesful site is probably a sign of the apocalypse.
Happy Birthday SlideShare!
SlideShare is one year old today. We’re celebrating in typical web fashion: messing with our logo.
I’m really proud of everything our team has been able to accomplish over the last year, and incredibly grateful to all our users for their enthusiastic support. We never expected it to get this big, this fast, and we’re now solving all kinds of cool scaling issues thanks to the traffic we’re getting, even as we work on adding super-duper new features.
Thanks to everybody who helped us get here (you know who you are ;->).
Using S3 to Avoid VC
Last week I spoke at the Startup Project at the Stanford Faculty Club. About 300 people (a mix of startupists, VCs, and curious techies) gathered together to talk about Amazon Web Services. Check out the talk here:
Other speakers talked about using EC2. My favorite speaker was Joyce Park (of 106miles fame) from boozemail, a silly little facebook app that is growing like a weed (it lets you send virtual drinks to your friends on facebook). Sean Knapp (from a hot video startup called Ooyala) also presented, and Don MacAskill from SmugMug gave his crowd-pleasing “Set Amazon’s Servers on Fire, not Yours” presentation.
Randy Komisar from Kleiner Perkins also gave a great interview where he talked about “dashboard businesses”, where you measure user behavior on a cheaply-built live site rather than focusing on up-front analysis and business planning.
Good stuff, all of it! There was a similar event in San Francisco the next day, but I had to get back to work, so I didn’t go.
Speaking at the StartUp project
I’ll be speaking at the startup project at Standford next Wednesday. I’ll be speaking about the economics of amazon s3, and how buying bandwidth for your website is like picking a cell phone plan. Should be fun!
AJAX && Flash at SXSW08
I’ve submitted a panel idea for South by Southwest 2008. If enough people vote for it, I’ll by talking about “AJAX and Flash mistakes”. My theory is that people talk way too much about successes, and not enough about their failures. We’ve had plenty of each, but if accepted, I’ll be talking exclusively about our failures.
So please: vote for me! The panel picker interface this year is very gmail-esque and cool.
My talk from last year was an inspirational little thing about how Flash and AJAX have a lot of synergies. Check it out below.
While you’re at it, vote for Rashmi’s MUCH funnier panel on “True Stories from Social Media Sites”. It will be a guaranteed laff riot. And it has audience participation, so it will wake you from your deepest SXSW hangover. Here’s the description:
Social websites are funny places. What stories do you tell over drinks with friends? Tell us about when someone accidently revealed their company’s business plans, or uploaded the *wrong* folder of pictures to your site. Share stories of funny bugs, features gone haywire, or crazy customer emails. Stories solicited from audience (maximum 5 minutes / story).
LinkedIn Answers: a killer social app?
A few days ago, I simultaneously posted a question about source control structure to my blog and to LinkedIn Answers. My blog got one response. LinkedIn answers got, as of now, 14 extremely well-thought out answers (more are coming in every day). The quality of the answers is pretty remarkable, as is the fact that none of the people responding are people I know. They may be distantly connected to me on linked-in, but they aren’t on my contact list.
I’m super-impressed. While the app doesn’t have a friendly face (URLs are non-intuitive, information architecture is confusing, etc), this is an extremely valuable and practical result to get from a social app. I’ll definitely be posting more questions to LinkedIn! Answers are below the fold if you want to read them …
Releases or features: how should branching be done in source control?
So at SlideShare we currently organize our source control branches by release. This works our pretty well (we can work on something that’s a month or two away from being ready, without messing up our ability to deploy other stuff next week).
But one thing I don’t like about this model is that it’s a little inflexible. If one feature on a release is taking more time than was planned, it’s hard (impossible?) to “unbundle” it from the other features and deploy a fraction of a release. In other words, removing a feature from a release is not straightforward.
I’ve heard some shops organized their source control by feature. This seems interesting (it removes the problem I’ve described above) but a little tricky (what’s a “feature”? Does every bug fix have it’s own branch? Seems to bring a lot of subjectivity into the system). Since their are probably several features in a release, this also greatly increases the amount of merging that has to happen to do a release.
Thoughts? Reactions? How are the branches organized in YOUR source control system?
UPDATE: The LinkedIn “Answers” feature rocks! Check out all the thoughtful replies to this question here.
Pecha Kucha SF is gonna rock!
Pecha Kucha is a really cool design-geek event that originated in Japan. The format is somewhat similar to PowerPoint Karaoke, with some important differences. Participants design a 20-slide slideshow, and have 20 seconds PER SLIDE to talk over it. The timing is done by computer, so you don’t have any leeway, and have to time your presentation perfectly for it to work.
It’s creative, it’s competitive, it’s funny, it’s awesome. And it’s happening in SF on August 29th! The SF Pecha Kucha group has been at it a while (this is their 16th event) and was recently listed in the SF Bay Guarian’s “Best of The Bay” issue as “best hyper-intellectual show and tell“. Here’s the full description:
Pecha Kucha – Japanese for chitchat – began in 2003 in Tokyo as a way for emerging designers to share ideas. The wildly popular concept has now caught on here, with San Franciscan chitchatters meeting every last Wednesday evening of the month, usually at 330 Ritch. The format is simple: presenters curate a 20-image slide show about their creative work; each slide is shown for exactly 20 seconds; and each night has an overarching (and often disregarded) theme. Anyone can sign up, though it’s mostly designers and artists talking about their work – which can range from Burning Man sculptures to mass-market furniture. But you never really know what you’re going to get: recent nights have seen a writer, a couple of software developers, a social engineer presenting an interesting theoretical exercise, and a creative vacationer with some gorgeous images of plate tectonics in the Colorado basin, graffiti in Australia, and the state of socialist architecture in Eastern Europe.
jonathanboutelle.com 