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To begin with, if you paste a URL to an image into the writer post box, it will automatically grab that image and post it into your live blog. This works with many standard file formats.

Next, if you are using our Twitter integration to follow users or to scan for keywords, once you post or approve a tweet that contains an image URL like twitpic.com, yfrog.com, or flic.kr, we post the image (not just a link to it). This is a useful way to show the complete story around an exciting event. Imagine, at the end of the day you will have an archive of all the content, comments, tweets and images all in one place.

If you were an enterprise client, all this would be wrapped inside a fully branded site where all the content could be found by search engines and you could monetize the page views. Trying doing that on Twitter or with other live blogging competitive tools!

If that’s still not enough, why not link a Flickr account to your live event? It’s simple to do! Under the “Post to this Event” you will find the Flickr setup. Just choose the account you want to monitor (make sure you have permission though cuz it’s not cool to steal someone’s photo stream) and presto, your Flickr photos will start streaming into your live blog. Happy Live Blogging!

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If you’re a writer and you want to reach out to all those watchers on mobile devices, send out this short email address and watch the comments pour in. It’s available to all under the Options tab in the right column of the live blog. Live blogging just keeps getting better and better using ScribbleLive, a live publishing platform. Happy live blogging!

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Access the new Advanced Moderator Screen by clicking “Moderator View” in the “Advanced View” section in the side bar.

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As well as uploading multiple images from your harddrive at the same time, you can now post URLs of images (ending in .JPG, .GIF, or .PNG) and we’ll suck them right in for you. You can also put in Flickr, Twitpic or YFrog page URLs, and we’ll pull in the images too.

Let us know what you think! Happy liveblogging!

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Now when you are a writer, you will find Flickr Setup under “Post to this Event” in the sidebar. Just tell us your account name (or someone elses’ if you have the rights to pull in their images) and click “Connect”. If everything looks good, click the button to confirm we are allowed to pull in those images, and you’re done! All new images that are posted to that Flickr account will be pulled into your liveblog while it’s live.

There are a tonne of great tools for Smartphones to upload direct to Flickr. I personally love AirMe for the iPhone. Just set it to send your photos into the Flickr account you told us about, and we’ll take care of the rest. Within 30 seconds your photos will be pulled into your liveblog automagically. It’s that easy!

While we had the Flickr API open, we had to throw in a new Flickr login option as well on ScribbleLive. That brings our list of logins to Facebook, MSN, Twitter, OpenID and Flickr. I hope that covers about 98% of the planet by now

We’ll be using Flickr a lot this week to cover the mesh conference on our official mesh liveblogging site. Give it a shot yourself and please send us any suggestions!

Happy liveblogging!

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Here’s the response time for www.scribblelive.com over the past couple of months. I love how you can totally see our point-releases by a major drop in response time (and in one place, an increase — oops!). My personal goal is to get the response times below 50ms across the entire site in the next couple months (I have some more crazy ideas that keep me up at night)

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This will be my third year going to the mesh conference, and I’m not a super fan of most conferences. I’ve been liveblogging mesh since mesh07 when I started a minor flamewar with a music exec In a lot of ways, the old-school way I did the liveblogging was one of the catalysts for ScribbleLive. The ScribbleLive Beta was literally launched the night before mesh08 and about 36 hours before the TechCrunch article. I’ll always look back fondly at past mesh conferences and I’m really excited to be an official part of this one.

I’m going to checkout meshU for the first time too, because who am I kidding, I’m a super nerd.

If you’re going (there’s still time to buy tickets), come say hi if you see me around! I’ll be the guy liveblogging the hell out of every session I can with Michael

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Hope to meet you all at mesh in a couple weeks where we can thank you in person (and get a beer)

Friday, March 13, 2009

• SXSW2009 – Unnatural Experiments in Web Design
• SXSW2009 – Everything You Learned About Web Design Is Wrong

Saturday, March 14, 2009

• SXSW2009 – Queerosphere: Same Sex (Link) Love Interactive
• SXSW2009 – from my eyes & ears
• SXSW2009 – Collaborative Filters Recommendation Engines
• Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On
• SXSW2009 – Designing for Gestural UI
• Designing for Irrational Behavior
• SXSW2009 – Curating the Crowd-Sourced World
• SXSW2009 – Change (v2) – Lawrence Lessig
• SXSW2009 – Not The Same Old Story
• SXSW2009 – Emerging Mobile Trends
• SXSW2009 – Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet
• SXSW2009 – That Doesn’t Suck! Inspiring Creativity with Spore

Sunday, March 15, 2009

• SXSW2009 – New Think for Old Publishers
• Are PR Agencies A Dying Breed
• SXSW2009 – From Flickr and Beyond – Lessons in Community Management
• SXSW2009 – Sunday Keynote Stephen Baker – Nate Silver Interview
• SXSW2009 – The Wisdom of Crowds
• SXSW2009 – Version Control: No more save as…

Monday, March 16, 2009

• SXSW2009 – Wireframes For The Wicked
• SXSW2009 – Quitter: How to Leave Your Perfectly Good Job
• SXSW2009 – Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

• Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money
• SXSW2009 – Location Location Location: The Future of Mobile Advertising
• SXSW2009 – Tuesday Keynote: Chris Anderson / Guy Kawasaki Conversation
• SXSW2009 – Beyond Apple TV: Next-Generation Systems for Acquiring Content
• SXSW2009 – Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable

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There is lots more we can do to further cache our sites, but for now, I’m happy to report that we are looking very stable under those spiky loads

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I’ve known about high performance servers like lighttpd that have been around for a while, and the new up-and-comer Nginx. I tried them out and they are amazing at serving-up content (PHP, Perl, mono, Rails) but their proxy abilities are still in their infancy. For example, Nginx when acting as a proxy has a Memcached Module which can check Memcached for an object, before going back to the origin/upstream server. However, you have to load your cached items into Memcached yourself, so it’s very useful yet. (Sidenote: the Nginx project is very impressive and I’m definitely going to watch them over the next year). Squid is the obvious choice when it comes to “proxy” and “caching”, but the other projects seem to perform much better under stress; not to mention, Squid configuration for a reverse-proxy is horrible.

After a lot of messing around in /etc config files, I stumbled on Varnish. Varnish isn’t a proxy product or a server like the others. It was built from-the-ground-up to be an HTTP accelerator, and it shows. Configuration is very straight-forward if you’ve used a CDN before, and it can do a lot of URL rewriting, managing cookies, edge-server includes (ESI), backend health polling, and support for inline C. The docs leave a lot to be desired, but you can’t have everything

I got Varnish running on a Fedora virtual machine in Amazon EC2 with ./configure && make && make install. Then you just have to set-up a configuration via /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl and launch the daemon.

On ScribbleLive, we use an ASP.NET session (stored in Memcached, with SQL 2005 failover) to keep track of your login. But until you login, we don’t use the session for anything. So my caching strategy is this: cache everything (images, stylesheets, etc) including ASPX files without any Set-Cookie headers until you login, then don’t cache ASPX files. Logging in is done via an HTTP POST, so I just told Varnish to not cache POSTs, and strip all cookies from cached responses unless an “ASP.NET_SessionId” cookie was sent in the request.

Here’s the configuration file I’m using which seems to work great. It remains to be seen if I actually roll this out into Production sometime soon, but using it myself in our Staging environment, it gives a massive improvement in page loads and origin offload, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someday soon when you visit ScribbleLive, you’ll be going through Varnish

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If your site supports many different languages, you can now easily embed the same liveblog and have it translated to any major language. For example, you could be writing in English, but your Spanish visitors could see the liveblog in spanish, your French visitors in french, etc.

It’s as easy as adding ?lang=fr (where “fr” is the shortcode for any language) to the src of our standard iframe embed which looks like this:

For example, the same liveblog in french would be:

Below is an example of the same embed translated into 4 other languages.

We hope you like our new feature and please keep the suggestions coming. Happy liveblogging!

Original:

English (?lang=en):

French (?lang=fr):

Spanish (?lang=es):

Russian (?lang=ru):

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The first thing you’ll notice is the look-and-feel. Since liveblogs are all about reading, we’ve made everything on our site as easy to read as possible; big, clean fonts everywhere on soft backgrounds. There’s nothing like 80px fonts to enhance readability There’s also much more sliding using the script.aculo.us library.

We’ve been trying to get a Twitter integration that makes sense for months, and I think we have it now. Not only do we make it really easy to “follow” a Twitter account and pull all their tweets into your liveblog, but we have a new Twitter live-search that will constantly check Twitter for anyone talking about your topic. The tweets will appear right in the sidebar where you can easily pull them in as comments. This provides a never-ending stream of comments for your events. Here’s a video walkthrough of using Twitter in your liveblogs. And of course, you can login to ScribbleLive with your Twitter account.

Another great feature we now have are “sticky” posts. During your liveblog you can click the “stick” button next to any post to pin it at the top of your liveblog. It’s a great way to keep a score or video stream where everyone can see it, or just use it as promotion for your site. We can’t wait to see how people use it and look forward to your feedback. This video walkthrough also shows you how to use sticky posts.

We now support any Flash embed. Just copy-paste the HTML for your embed directly into the input box and we’ll take care of posting it. We always supported YouTube but now you can embed videos from Ustream, Qik, or any other Flash widget. You can even write your own and embed them!

As well as the features you can see, there’s several big changes under-the-hood. We completely changed how live-updates work to use the power of the Amazon cloud products to handle more watchers than ever before. On Tuesday we successfully served up over 11M hits without any performance impact. We don’t just want to be the flashiest live publishing platform out there, we also want to have the most horsepower.

There are many more changes with this launch and the best way to see them all is to try us out! Thanks to everyone who sent us suggestions and please keep them coming. We love to hear what you think.

Happy liveblogging!

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I was happy to find that in .NET, a web application can access the processes running on the host server. I whipped up this little bit of C# (which will be on an ASPX page) to check for the processes, and report if they are “UP” or “DOWN”. Pingdom will then check for the word “DOWN” on a request to the page and let me know if it finds one.

Here are the using statements that you have to have for this code to run:

using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;

Then here’s the bulk of it:

Collection<string> RunningProcesses = new Collection<string>();
RunningProcesses.Add( "Program1" );
RunningProcesses.Add( "Program2" );

Response.ContentType = "text/plain";

foreach ( Process proc in Process.GetProcesses() )
{
    if ( RunningProcesses.Contains( proc.ProcessName ) )
    {
        Response.Write( proc.ProcessName + ": UP" + System.Environment.NewLine );
        RunningProcesses.Remove( proc.ProcessName );
    }
}

foreach ( string s in RunningProcesses )
{
    Response.Write( s + ": DOWN" + System.Environment.NewLine );
}

When I have a bit more time, I’m going to add a call to Process.Start(…) to restart and processes that have gone down. You know, at some point this code will probably make me unnecessary

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I have a copy of the theme files which I may post if they don’t come back soon, but for all those people already running the Brightness Theme, there are some issues if you upgrade your site to Wordpress 2.7. I’ve written this patch to fix the problems and get you up and running. There were just some minor problems with the setting screens and the “news sections” on the home page. Just drag these files into your /wp-content/themes/Brightness Theme/ directory and it should fix everything.

I hope those theme-ers at DailyWP.com come back some day; they did good work

UPDATE 12/26: I’ve gotten a few requests for the full theme, so I’ve included it below with the patch applied.

DOWNLOAD PATCH
DOWNLOAD FULL THEME

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Nice job guys! It’s great to see ScribbleLive taking on more of a roll as a platform for liveblogging, a focus we will continue to develop this month with the launch of our whitelabel product and a major redesign. Happy liveblogging!

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Today from 1pm EST Scott from Raptorblog.com will be liveblogging the Raptor’s game on the web or on ScoreMobile. Come join in!

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Everyone is curious how many people are watching their liveblog, and now it’s easy to find out. Whether you have your liveblog embedded, crossposted, or are linking right to scribblelive.com, we’ll keep track of the number of unique visitors watching your event in real-time. You’ll find the count right in the header and it’s accurate to about 20 seconds. The entire system is built on memcached so it can keep pace with all the traffic you hit us with.

There’s even more to come in the way of metrics including traffic graphs and other statistics. If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see, drop me a comment.

Hope everyone has fun liveblogging tomorrow night! Happy liveblogging!

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