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Archive for the ‘ScribbleLive’ Category

SXSW09 Live Blogs (all 28 of them)!

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

With SXSW interactive coming to a close today, we would like to thank everyone who liveblogged the hell out of the sessions for the education/enjoyment of the rest of us suckers who weren’t down there. We’ve been following along all week and you guys did an awesome job!

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

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Tags: liveblogging, sxsw, thanks
Posted in Featured, ScribbleLive | No Comments »

Our database CPU during the iPhone OS 3.0 event today

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

We’ve spent a lot of time since we launched last Spring improving our software load-handling. To give you an example of how our infrastructure has improved, here are the CPU levels on our primary database server during the iPhone OS 3.0 event today. This liveblog alone was sustaining over a thousand people at a time (remember, those are real-time numbers of visitors, not totals). As you can see, our database rarely got over 2% CPU for all the events running simultaneously this afternoon.

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

Tags: cpu, development, scribblelive
Posted in ScribbleLive | No Comments »

New liveblog translation tools from ScribbleLive

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

We want to bring together as many people as possible with the liveblogs on ScribbleLive and as such, supporting writers around the world has been our goal since day 1. Now we have taken our on-the-fly translation and extended it to our embeds.

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):

Tags: scribblelive, translation, widget
Posted in ScribbleLive | No Comments »

ScribbleLive Launches New Look, New Features

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

There’s nothing like a MacWorld in the world of liveblogging. I often tell people that it’s the quintessential example of liveblogging. This January, we wanted to have something special for the users of ScribbleLive. We’ve been working on a major redesign for weeks, and this week we officially go live. This launch brings, not only a new look, but a new set of features and service enhancements.

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!

Tags: live blogging, liveblog, scribblelive, twitter
Posted in Featured, ScribbleLive | 1 Comment »

berlineblase.de builds liveblogging console for Le Web ‘08

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Wow, I’m really impressed by what the berlineblase.de guys have built to cover Le Web ‘08 today. They put the ScribbleLive embed alongside the video stream of the event. It looks great and they have some great running commentary of the event.

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!

Tags: leweb08, liveblog, scribblelive
Posted in ScribbleLive | 1 Comment »

The Score launches new liveblogs powered by ScribbleLive

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

Today is the inauguration of The Score’s new liveblogging site liveblogs.thescore.com powered by ScribbleLive. We’re very happy to be working with The Score on the first white-label version of ScribbleLive’s liveblogging platform. Even if you’re not at a computer, you can follow along on your iPhone with ScoreMobile. There’s lots more to come from The Score in the coming weeks, so keep checking back!

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

Tags: liveblog, scribblelive, the score, whitelabel
Posted in Featured, ScribbleLive | 3 Comments »

See how many people are watching your liveblog!

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

With the US election tomorrow night, we couldn’t resist rolling out a new much-requested feature on ScribbleLive: a real-time visitor counter!

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!

Tags: hit counter, liveblog, scribblelive
Posted in Featured, ScribbleLive | No Comments »

Avatars for crossposted liveblogs

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Now that we have avatars on ScribbleLive, your may decide that you want your avatars to show up on your crossposted liveblogs. Not a problem! We are now attaching CSS classes to the HTML that we crosspost. The posts from each writer have a CSS class like Writer1234 (1234 is their unique ID on ScribbleLive.com).

We’ve whipped up a stylesheet you can use to style your crossposted events. Here’s an example of the CSS it will produce for a liveblog with four writers in it. Here’s an example of a crossposted liveblog with avatars.

To get started, please follow these steps:

Follow the steps to create a liveblog on ScribbleLive and crosspost it to your blog
Open your Wordpress admin area and edit the post that was created in step #1
At the very end of the HTML of the post, you will see something like this:
<script type="text/javascript">var LastPostLiveBlog = "10/2/2008 9:40:43 PM"; var ThreadLiveBlog1234 = new LiveBlog1234( 1234, true, LastPostLiveBlog, "", false, null, document.getElementById("LiveBlog1234Posts"), 400 );ThreadLiveBlog1234.PollForNew();</script>
Make note of the numerical number — your liveblog id — that appears throughout. In the example above, the number is 1234.
Append this stylesheet HTML to the very top of the post, replacing #### with your liveblog id from #4:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.scribblelive.com/crossposting/css/v2.aspx?Id=####" type="text/css" media="all" />
That’s it, you’re done!

Tags: avatar, liveblog, scribblelive
Posted in ScribbleLive | 1 Comment »

By popular demand, crossposts and embeds now change sort order

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

We’ve had a lot of interest at ScribbleLive in our new crossposting feature, and a lot of people are also using the more-traditional iframe-embed. It’s been great getting your feedback. One thing that has consistently been asked for is, “can the liveblogs appear newest-to-oldest while an event is live, then switch to oldest-to-newest afterwards?” Generally, everyone seems to agree that that would make it easier for their visitors. Well, who are we to disagree?

As of today, the iframe-embed will be sorted newest->oldest during live events, until 30 minutes after your last post. Since some of these events are getting really long, I also introduced pagination in those embeds so they load faster for your users. Your avatars will now show-up too. There’s an example of what they look like below. If you have an embed already installed on your site, it’s been automatically switched over to the new version so you don’t have to do anything.

For crossposted liveblogs, once you connect a liveblog to your site, your entries will appear newest-to-oldest. When your event is over (or almost over) you’ll find a new button in the right bar on scribblelive.com: “Close blog entry.” Clicking that button will reorder your liveblog oldest-to-newest and remove all the ScribbleLive scripts from your page. Basically, clicking that button gets us completely out of your hair

I hope you like the new feature! Happy liveblogging

Tags: liveblog, scribblelive, sort order
Posted in ScribbleLive | No Comments »

Sorry, brief outage on October 7th UPDATE

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Tonight during unprecedented traffic during the 2nd Presidential Debate, we had a brief outage on ScribbleLive. We take our uptime very seriously and immediately engaged priority support when we went offline. Unfortunately, it took longer than ideal to get the site back online and I sincerely apologize.

ScribbleLive is a Beta product and as such, we take events like this as a major learning experience. Based on the event tonight, we immediately made a change that will further enhance our hosting capabilities, and that change is now holding the traffic at levels higher than before the outage.

As we grow, we will continue to work on producing a stable platform, and I hope that you will continue to work with us. Please leave a comment or email us at info@scribblelive.com if you have any comments or questions.

Thank you for your patience tonight and happy liveblogging!
–Jonathan, founder of ScribbleLive

UPDATE: We have identified the cause of the problems last night to be a failing processor in one of our primary servers. We will replace the processor during a brief downtime this Saturday between 4am-8am CST. I will post more details as they emerge.

UPDATE #2: The failing processor has been replaced and, to be extra safe, we also replaced the entire chassis. We’ve been closely monitoring all our systems for the last couple of days and we are confident that the errors are gone. To further show our commitment to being a stable platform you can rely on, we will have a DBA, Network Technician and myself actively monitoring our systems during the Apple event this Tuesday (Oct 14) and the next Presidential debate on Wednesday (Oct 15). Happy liveblogging!

Posted in ScribbleLive | No Comments »

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