Keebler/Blog

Can anybody tell me if it’s safe for my dog to go into Lake Ontario? I’m afraid he’ll grow a second head or something.

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Since we launched ScribbleLive a few weeks ago, we’ve been excited to see a lot of people from around the world starting to use it. I built the code from the ground-up to support other languages, but we weren’t planning on rolling anything out so soon. But because of all the great interest, we decided to launch our first international feature.

Now when you are blogging in any language, people from around the world can watch along through our new on-the-fly translation feature. We can translate to English, French, Spanish, Italian and German for now. More to come later.

Say you are blogging in Italian, visitors from around the world can choose a language from the “Translate” box, and all your posts will be translated to that language for them. Not only will it translate all the posts that are already there, but it will translate whatever you type when it appears on their screen.

The translation may still have a few bugs to shake out, but I’d love to get your thoughts. I’ve been catching up on the Italian WWDC blog myself

Have fun!

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This can’t be for real, can it?

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Yesterday was the first big test of ScribbleLive under load during the WWDC keynote where the iPhone 3G was announced. We burned a lot of hours over the last week getting ready, and I start off with a big thanks to our key service partners.

Akamai did their usual stellar job of handling the traffic the event generated, and deflected the vast majority of the traffic off our origin servers. We were able to feed continuous updates to almost 8,000 visitors with very little load on our systems. Now that we know our caching algorithm is stable, we can go bigger next time and get some real load on the servers

I’d also like to thank our host GoGrid for helping us get our servers ready for the event. Their dedicated cloud servers handled the bandwidth and the load without a hiccup. And it only cost $15 for the entire day! These guys have been a great option for a bootstrap startup like us.

Now to get down to the numbers

3.33 Pages/Visit
04:58 Avg. Time on Site
81.47% % New Visits
Akamai Page Views: 2.3 Million
Total Page Volume: 13.4 GB
S3 cost: $0.63
Peak bandwidth: 171 views/sec at 2:45pm 7.4 Mbits/sec at 1:10

Thanks to everyone who chose us to watch the keynote! There are lots of great events going on every day on ScribbleLive thanks to our great community. Check out the recent coverage of nextMEDIA: Future of Digital Content, Graphing Social Patterns East 2008, and STC 2008.

Happy Liveblogging!

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The Apple Worldwide Developer Conference kicks off today. It’s our first Apple keynote for ScribbleLive, our new liveblogging site, and we’re excited to already see lots of people on there getting their liveblogs ready for the conference. T-3 hours to the Apple Keynote, and our traffic is already climbing. It’s great to see bloggers from North America, Italy and Spain starting to login. I hope you guys have a great time at WWDC and using ScribbleLive! Remember, the keynote gets started at 1pm EDT/10am PDT.

In preparation for the traffic, we’ve armored our servers with the Akamai Content Distribution Network, on top of our GoGrid cloud computing servers. For a bootstrap startup, that’s about as much muscle we can throw at it If there are any problems, we can throw another few servers online. “Morrrre power!”

If you’re visiting ScribbleLive for the first time this week, the WWDC08 aggregator page will be pulling in all the WWDC content from the site into one place, so if you’re looking for a jumping off point, check that out. From there, there are links to all the individual WWDC08 live events if you want to check them out in their entirety.

Hope everyone has fun at WWDC08 and happy liveblogging!

Photo Credit

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This weekend, ScribbleLive is on the road attending the nextMEDIA: The Future of Digital Content (NM08) conference in Banff.

To mark, the occasion, we rolled out some new features on the event pages. If you check-out the event page for NM08, you’ll see a aggregated feed of all the live events and the posts from the conference. It doesn’t live-update via Ajax yet but give me a few more hours to play with the code and it should be going UPDATE: The aggregate pages now live-update too! You can watch all the posts going into multiple events via those pages..

If you see us around the conference, come say hi

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Tonight we did a rollout of a few new features on ScribbleLive. We’ve got some other big ones coming this week, but hopefully these tied you over until then

Event URLs should now look a little cleaner. We dumped the /Thread.aspx?Id=#### format and moved to sexier URLs like http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/Video_is_Everywhere__mesh08. All the old URLs should redirect you automatically. If they don’t, please let me know in the comments.

When you login, you will now have a “Profile” link at the top-right corner. It will take you to a page where you can change your name, select your sort order, and give you an overview of all your latest posts. FYI, an API to retrieve all that information programmatically is coming out soon.

Behind the scenes, we’ve tried to fix a few bugs and make the site perform even faster. Please have a poke around — or just keep using it if you are already — and drop me a line in the comments with any bugs, suggestions, etc. Thanks!

Happy scribbling!

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Since we launched last week, the number one most requested feature has been an embed: the ability to put your liveblog directly on your site. Who am I to argue?

Here’s the alpha of what the embed, powered by an iframe. Obviously we’ll be rolling out many more features to customize it to the style of your site, but what do you think? Will this work for you? Please drop me a line in the comments with your feedback.

Oh, and don’t think I’ve given up on a really cool Wordpress integration feature. It just needs a little more testing before it’s released

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This week ScribbleLive was mentioned on net@net (about 25 minutes in) by The Amber Mac and Leo Laporte. Not to gush here, and Amber knows this embarrassing truth, but I’m a massive TWiT fan! I try to catch as many episodes of all the series as I can (when I’m not working on Scribble*). I’m very flattered to be mentioned

I guarantee there’s definitely a little bit of TWiT in ScribbleLive. I was always thinking how great it would be to have a liveblog of all the links and videos mentioned in a TWiT-cast, and I built ScribbleLive around a lot of those ideas. We also tried to make the right decisions when it came to building a site that the web-community would embrace, by bringing together a lot of popular tools to do one thing and one thing well. We’re committed to a product roadmap that will make us an open product via an API, and are looking to work with other startups whenever possible. That cross-pollination of the web is a value I think we share with a lot of the TWiT community, and I hope that we’re able to bring something to the party

So thanks again to Amber for the callout and you’ll be seeing much more of us in the weeks to come!

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Michael and I decided today that we’re going to try to do everything we can to get ScribbleLive ready for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC08) in a couple weeks. I know, we’re insane

Last year, the keynote on MacRumors drove over 200,000 simultaneous visitors to their site. We’re by no means that well known, but assuming everything goes great and we get Dugg or something, we could be looking at uniques in the six-digits. For our Ajax updates, that means tens of thousands of hits per second!

As we get closer to the keynote on June 9th, we’re going to scale up our grid servers, and supplement that with a CDN. Still waiting to see who we’re going to go with but we’ve got 8 business days to figure that out

I’ll be blogging our progress with our scaling over the next couple of weeks. If you have any suggestions or want to help out, drop me a line in the comments. Also, check out our new WWDC08 area on ScribbleLive. It’ll be pulling together all the liveblogs of people attending the conference. If you’re at the conference, we’d love you to try out ScribbleLive If you do, I’ll totally buy you a drink if you’re ever in Toronto!

Thank again to everyone who has tried out ScribbleLive since the TechCrunch story broke last week. It’s been great hearing all your comments.

Happy Liveblogging!

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