I’m happy to announce that photostre.am has been sucessfully relaunched. Only technical things in the software have changed, the design, themes and photomanager are next on my list. Here are a few details about the changes:
- Now runs on Rails 3 which is currently in a beta phase but very nice and stable
- The database has been moved from MySQL (with ActiveRecord) to MongoDB (with mongoid)
- The whole application has been moved from a single not so stable VPS to Rackspacecloud where it soon will dwell on an application and a database server
Towards the end of the migration I’ve also fixed up flickr_fu to a) collect your private photos too and b) speed up the import process for your images. The import method is now, in numbers of API calls, a flashy O(n/200) instead of O(n+n/200)
With its tremendous pile of photos and data flickr is a goldmine for statistic digging and Flickr Flow is one of the most amazing I’ve seen in a long time. They plotted the main colors of flickr photos on a 12 month wheel and it’s quite easy to spot spring, autumn and the long winter without any green.
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“http://hint.fm/projects/flickr
The green arrow with “drag -> dop” on it is new. It’s there just to make everything clear. If anyone notices any other potential to enhance the UI, please drop me a line
My employer and I decided (they did last week, I did last month…) that it’s better if I don’t work on their code anymore, meaning I won’t have a job from January 1st on. A new one is already on the horizon and will be a proper startup this time. Besides being happier at programming I’ll also have a whole month for photostre.am only. A month where I’ll work as much and as hard to get the products live and polished up. A month to communicate and work with the current 47 users of photostre.am to make their user experience better and help them creating the portfolios they want.
I live in exciting times and want you all to join this ride. Programming will be fun again for me. Yay!
I hope everyone likes it. Big font for the questions, something like a tagline and two instead of one column in the bottom. Oh, and Helvetica Neue for the typography.
Hurry, the first translation went online today. Ellinor, a friend of mine from Schmiede translated the interface to Swedish. Try out photostre.am svenska.
We also started to work on the theme manager last week, a first result is already online though not so much important. I’ve removed the former controllers for serving the themes files by a Rack middleware. I guess no one understands that anyways. Still it’s important and will serve us a long time.
Future changes are the completion of the theme manger so you can finally select from a small variety of themes, and the other thing will be migrating the whole database from MySQL to MongoDB which is a document based database and allow faster adaption of other photosources, e.g. facebook. And I’m also confident that the import (especially the tags are driving me crazy) will speed up a lot.
The app is making steady progress, in small steps. Right now there are 27 users on photostre.am including myself and four personal friends. It looks like just putting it into the Flickr app garden pays off. Same for the two click login. The workling/starling combination is finally working as expected and looking for new photos on flickr more often. The photo manager needs some more information and help texts. Of the last 10 new users only 3 actually created a website, something to be improved very much. Some other statistic is that an amazing 50% of my users are already paying pro users at flickr. Bling bling I say ;-)
The theme manager is still work in progress as I didn’t get any designs yet from my graphic designer :( What’s also coming up next month is some support forum and more help texts.
It’s been a long time since I had such a productive weekend, and I had to clean up my apartment as I’m in the process of moving (closer to my favourite photo dealer :). In all that I had time to implement a much easier way of logging in. No more OpenID necessary, just click the blue/white “Login via Flickr” button and you’re there. The Photo Manager is getting better and better. You can select multiple photos, or sort them by website and album.
My tasks for the next days are In the background, getting the combination of starling, workling and memcache to work, finish theme manager and do some marketing.
It’s been a week now that I went through the pain of bringing photostre.am online. After about a year of non-continous development the migrations and a few other things got buggy when I’ve set them up on a completely different system. Interesting though that this always happens.
As the title says, only a few steps are left, I’m writing the specifications for the theme editor and then the only thing left is integrating Spreedly and a referral system. Oh and the background processes for fetching new photos need a little kick or two.
A few steps ahead of me is pullfolio which is targeting pretty much the same audience, even using the same tools like Ruby on Rails for developing their site. But after having had a closer look into their app we are both having very different goals. I seem them as inspiring competition and I’m very sure we can live next to each other happily.
So, I’ve started the software for photostre.am in November 2008 and after a few months of rest I’m picking it up again. I prefer working on things full time to pursue a bigger picture and with freelance gigs or now a full time job for the last five months I just didn’t get anything about photostre.am done.
In the last weeks I was hanging out at metalab hackerspace a lot. Quite a few people there are working on their internet business, like soup.io. And of course there’s lots of possiblities to have fun and make new friends. I’ve integrated into this cosmosphere quite well, helping to get the photolab running again after years as a storage room. I give other programmers advise on ruby on rails and much more. I enjoy being at metalab.
Last weekend was the Railsrumble where a friend and I created antga.me which is not playable but I’m very happy about how much of the basic system and ideas we realised. antga.me will for sure be continued but I’ll also change my workstyle for photostre.am to such such compressed weekends. It might look like a complete time waster in aspect of photostre.am still waiting for love, but I enjoyed it very much and somehow Railsrumble marks the end of summer, the beginning of a new, very productive season.
The third benefitting factor to help me finish photostre.am is my application for seedcamp. Until two weeks ago I thought I could go into business with photostre.am without external but those months without any development clearly show that I can’t. I need some outside pressure to get things done and yes, applying for seedcamp is good pressure. Being invited for that one week would be a even bigger pressure to get a prototype online.
So, here’s a short list of what photostre.am can and does right now:
- Sign in via flickr
- Add several flickr photostreams
- Import photos and set from flickr (basic, could be improved)
- Have your own domain
- Payment integration via Spreedly
As you see, the whole part about custom designs (think shopify.com) and organising your photostream(s) into actual portfolios and websites is missing. I hope to run my own portfolio at photolog.at by end of August with the photostre.am software and then allow photographer friends to run special interest photoblogs.