Keebler/Blog » scribblelive

Improving Response Times

Jonathan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:17:24 +0000

Just so you guys know, we really are complete geeks who care about those milliseconds it takes to send a page to you! We have Pingdom monitoring constantly and are doing everything we can to shave off load-time wherever we can.

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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ScribbleLive + mesh09 = liveblogging BFFs

Jonathan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:37:37 +0000

I’ve been working on an Enterprise liveblogging site for mesh this week and tonight we’re officially opening it up to the public. I’m really digging the green headers Check out the new site at mesh.scribblelive.com and the announcement on our new company blog!

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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Our database CPU during the iPhone OS 3.0 event today

Jonathan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:40:43 +0000

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

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New liveblog translation tools from ScribbleLive

ShiftEdit — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:12:54 +0000

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):

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ScribbleLive Launches New Look, New Features

ShiftEdit — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:10:40 +0000

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!

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berlineblase.de builds liveblogging console for Le Web ‘08

ShiftEdit — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:30:27 +0000

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!

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The Score launches new liveblogs powered by ScribbleLive

ShiftEdit — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:34:26 +0000

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!

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See how many people are watching your liveblog!

ShiftEdit — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:04:17 +0000

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!

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Google results now showing post counts and content insight

Jonathan — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:20:29 +0000

I’m not the first to notice this, but it looks like Google is playing with attaching some content insight into it’s search results. Search results for ScribbleLive liveblogs now have a little gray line of text under the title that says something like, “48 posts – Last post: 12 Aug.” They must be looking for repeating dates in the content, checking for a repeating HTML structure, and extracting the information. Very neat, indeed, Google I’m sure Matt would point-out that this is another benefit of using XHTML standards (or close to them).

It kinda reminds me of a website I built in university called @Pad. It pulled the latest course news off websites by looking for dates in the format “##/##/#### ##:##”. It then grabbed whatever was the to the right of it. I might do the same for ScribbleLive one day to scrape in liveblogs from regular websites. Ya know, if I have a day to kill

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Avatars for crossposted liveblogs

ShiftEdit — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:32:55 +0000

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:
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:
That’s it, you’re done!

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By popular demand, crossposts and embeds now change sort order

ShiftEdit — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:57:19 +0000

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

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HOWTO: Liveblogging with MSN Messenger or GTalk

ShiftEdit — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:12:11 +0000

In this screencast, we unveil a new feature on ScribbleLive: Instant Messenger integration. You can now liveblog right from your IM client to ScribbleLive (or to your Wordpress site). For now we’re launching with MSN Messenger and Google Talk (or any Jabber client), but more clients are coming soon.

To get started, watch the screencast to see how it works, then add bot@scribblelive.com as a friend.

Please give it a try and drop any questions or comments in the blog comments. Happy liveblogging!

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HOWTO: Liveblogging in Wordpress using ScribbleLive

ShiftEdit — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:00:08 +0000

With lots of websites starting to use the crossposting feature on ScribbleLive that we unveiled back in August, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a quick demo video. In this screencast, I go over all the steps to get your liveblog crossposting to your Wordpress site without using an iframe or other embed code.

Please feel free to drop in other questions in the comments, and I’d be happy to write you back. Happy liveblogging!

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