As some of you have noticed lately, since our last migration the DuplicateHunter™ stopped working. He was somehow losing his manners and was doing some nasty stuff during the hunt, so we decided to send him on vacation till we could have a couple of serious human-machine talks with him ;)
For those of you who couldn’t remember him, on VisualizeUs he’s the one in charge of finding and hunting any duplicate image that got bookmarked, so we can have a pleasant image browsing without finding one time and another the same pics (here’s a more tech explanation about his work).
So I’m glad to announce that finally he’s back! He has a lot of catch-up to do (you know, post vacation syndrome) but he’s working full time with the same mission as we do: to give you the best experience when browsing and collecting your favorite pictures on the net.
So Antonio and me (and of course the DuplicateHunter™) want to wish you a very special Merry Christmas. We hope you enjoy these special dates with your beloved ones and have tons of fun ;)
And just to end, here’s the proof that the DuplicateHunter™ is back!
Recently I was looking for some website to play chess online (don’t ask…) without having to sign up, but signing up was mandatory in all the sites I found. The thing is, I just remembered how I hated to have to sign up on a site just to use it. And not to talk, the worst case of all, the sites rules by invitation only. I can’t remembered how many times I’ve left some new-awesome-hype service without test it just because of this.
So, thinking about that I realized how in my mind, subconsciously, I haven’t take that into account for the service I was running. I’ve just presumed that you have to sign up in order to use it. Just like “in all other places”.
Till now.
From a couple of days back, you can use your Facebook and Twitter account to sign in on VisualizeUs, painless way! Also you can connect your VisualizeUs account with Facebook or Twitter to share your favorite findings with your social friends. There’re some screenshots at the end of this post ;)
So we can say, chess makes you reflect. Enjoy!
(more…)
Hey there! Summer is gone and I’m so happy to announced you that VisualizeUs has its first full time employee! And yes, that’s me! :D
As you probably know I’ve been this whole time working on VisualizeUs on my spare time. I had a great full-time job in a R&D (research & development) facility on the Astrophysics field, that was both challenging and amazing.
But as you also now the site has been growing a lot lately (we’re now a community of more than 69K people! Never thought of that when I started this all because a personal need!) So all of a sudden “spare time” was not enough anymore for the site, and I had in front of me a tough decision to make. To be honest, actually it wasn’t that tough. Inside of me the choice was very clear, but leaving the comfort zone I had always lead to some serious doubts, y’know ;)
So I quit my job, and believe me, I’m so excited to be working full-time on VisualizeUs. I’ve never experienced before that feeling of a hobby evolved into a work, and it’s kind of exciting! I feel a new adventure is starting in my life right now ;)
Also, the good news include a new person on the team… say hello to Antonio! He’ll be in charge for all the system architecture, in fact he was the wizard behind our whole “on-the-cloud” migration. He’s currently working as a web operations engineer in a successful spanish startup, and will be working part-time on VisualizeUs. Welcome aboard Antonio!
Summer time, but here we go again! More little tiny bits you’d like to known about. These ones are mostly from users’ feedback:
- Related pictures: Some time ago (it seems like yesterday!) I was forced to disabled the related pictures recommendations you see in each picture page because it was a killing-performance feature for the current server in that moment. Now after some hard work optimizing it, I’m so glad to announce the return of the related pictures! It’s amazing how well it works, so give it a try!
- Improved Search: Now you can sort your search results by popularity, relevance or date. Also you can choose whether to include NSFW pictures in the results or not. Thanks to Kemie for the suggestion and continuous feedback on this one ;)
- Hotkeys scrolling: Thanks to a suggestion and some code contribution from Metello, now you can scroll down to the next unseen row of pictures with the “Space” key, or just to the next row of pictures with the “j” key. Also a Twitter conversation with @MaxwellUhamzing makes me remind you that you also have the A/S/D/F hotkeys available ;)
- Integrating with Google Buzz: Now you can use the
rel="me" attribute in your profile, in order to link your VisualizeUs account with Google Buzz. You can find out more in this how-to. Thanks to John for this one ;)
- Comments notification: Probably some of you have already noticed this one. When someone comments on one of your bookmarks, you will receive a mail notification. Of course, you can choose to switch off these notifications in your Account Settings ;) Also you can now see the last comments that someone made in his/her profile (for example).
Hope you like these improvements!
Hey!
After the successful VisualizeUs user survey (big thanks to all of you for your contribution!), one of the most demanded things on the survey results was more ways to view all the fantastic pictures the community is gathering each day.
So two months ago I started to work in a new visualization way, that I’ve creatively called… the Waterflow!
Now you’ll find in each pictures listing a toolbar on the header, in which you can switch between the normal grid mode and the new waterflow mode. Here’s a screenshot:
Hope you like this new way of enjoying your favorite images! I’ve discovered myself browsing through incredible images for hours! And remember, I appreciate any kind of feedback ;)
This month the guys from Art House Co-op have joined our kindly sponsors. They want to spread the word about The Sketchbook Project, which is as they said “like a concert tour but with a sketchbook“! Sounds cool, right?
The idea is that you receive a Moleskine sketchbook and a theme, which may be something as inspiring as “Things found on restaurant napkins” or “Make mine a double“, and after complete it with whatever is on your creative mind, you send back to them and your sketchbook go on a tour to be exhibited at galleries and museums in the US. They also will be part of the permanent collection at The Brooklyn Art Library once the tour ends.
Anyone from any part of the world can participate! It’s a great opportunity to unleash your creativity and give some exposure to your work ;) For more details on ‘The Sketchbook Project’, check out its website over here.
Hey all!
After an intense weekend of migration, and the rest of the following week tweaking zillions of things, we can proudly say that Visualize Us is running on the cloud! That doesn’t mean we have our head in the clouds, but our servers! (yeah, bad joke :D)
We’re using the awesome Amazon EC2 infrastructure to run VisualizeUs, and probably in the following days we’d give a more techie approach about our setup for those of you interested. We’re sure EC2 is going to provide us with all the scalability we are needing in a easy and painless way!
As a bit of an anecdote, we spent the Friday night awaken just chasing a darn bug, obviosly with the site completely down (sorry for that!). It was kind of a hackathon but bug oriented ;) That’d proved our point about migrations: No matter how well you test everything beforehand, just expect everything possible to strangely fails at the last moment!
So, enough for the words, let’s just get inspired!!
Hi everyone!
As most of you probably know, the new Safari 5 now supports extensions, which is great news for all the Safari users out there. And then, the logical following question for a lot of people in the VisualizeUs community was: “How about a Safari 5 extension for VisualizeUs?”
Wait no more! Thanks to the effort of Valerii Hiora (@vhbit in Twitter) there’s now available a Safari 5 extension for VisualizeUs!
You can download it here: VisualizeUs Safari Extension
Kudos goes to him!
ps: Anyone dares with Google Chrome? ;)
Hey there!
The other day I received this mail from Joan:
Hi Victor, I’m on a small team of 4 graduate students at the University of
Washington. We’re interested in learning more
about your site as we’re researching social bookmarking sites. We have a
proposed survey for your users, it would be really nice if you could blog
about it and we’d be interested in doing more to help out.
Joan is part of a team together with Amanda, Nicole and Charles at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Their class is titled, “User-Centered Design” in the department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering.
So after reading his email, I liked a lot the idea. I took a look to the survey and it was very clear to me: At the same time the VisualizeUs community would be helping Joan and her friends to get A+ in their class, it would be helpful for the site and the future improvements as well to know better the community interests. A classic win-win scenario ;)
So please, spend 5 minutes of your day filling the survey! Is painless and easy, and it will make a lot of people happy, you among them as a VisualizeUs user!
Here’s the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LZLK567
From Joan and her friends, and also from me, a big thanks in advance!
Sorry pals, during the weekend the database has been suffering some desynchronization issues. That’s why some of you didn’t see your latest bookmarks, or saw weird unfresh things, or have problems with the sign up… and so on and so forth.
Should be fixed now, but if you find more glitches, please tell me!