Storytlr Blog

Hello storytellers,

As promised a while ago, we are open sourcing our platform. A first version is now available at http://storytlr.googlecode.com with a detailed set of instructions on how to install.

With this code, you can host your own storytlr on your own server (or on a shared hosting environment). By default, it is setup as a single user mode, but you can easily change it to a multi user host and therefore reproduce the exact service we are hosting on the current storytlr.com.

We release the code under an Apache 2 license, which is non restrictive. This means that you can do anything with this, even create a successful business :-) 

If you have questions, issues or ideas, please post them on the mailing list. We will do our best to monitor and answer them. We also count on your help to provide support to other users having trouble installing.

We are looking forward to your feedback and plan to keep on working on this in the next weeks to bring it to a stable 1.0 release.

Thanks a lot for your ongoing support and tweets,

Cheers,

-Laurent and Alard

The title says it all, we have decided to stop operating Storytlr in 10 weeks, on December 31st 2009. The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don't have time anymore to operate this service properly.

We have spent the last months looking for alternatives, potential partners, and even thought about creating a startup around this project. Yet, in the end, nothing did really make sense for us and we have decided to pull the plug. It was a tough decision to make, it is a sad day, and we feel sorry for our passionate users who have put so much effort into their page and who have helped us improve the service through their many comments.

This is why we have also decided to open source the platform. Not today. It will involve first a major refactoring, since at the moment it looks more like a giant spaghetti than an easy to install package. We don't know when it will ready, but we will do our best to do it as soon as possible. Please get in touch if you want to help with this effort.

In the meanwhile, lets focus on what this means for you:

• Registration of new accounts is now closed.
• On January 1st 2010, the servers will be gone, and so will all the data, accounts, etc... that we aggregated over the last year.
• All your data can be retrieved through our Backup tool into some simple CSV files that can then easily be processed in order to be imported in other tools.
• You'll also soon be able to download a zip archive of your binary files (pictures & mp3s that you have uploaded).
• We have created a group for the community to meet, discuss and exchanges ideas on other potential services to use. We'll also monitor it and answer support questions.
• If you have specific needs and/or concerns, feel free to mail us at support@storytlr.com

Finally, we wanted to say thank you, to all of you who have contributed to the success of storytlr. It was a fascinating experience, we have learned a lot and, more important, we have met so many great people in the storytlr community.

Thanks to all, Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Hi everyone,

We've just learned that Storytlr was nominated in the 'best boostrapped startup' category for the Techcrunch Europas award. The selection of the five finalists is based on public votes. So... if you like what we do, and want to support us... just vote !

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/the-europas-best-bootstrapped-startup-less-than-3-years-old/

Thanks a lot for your support !

Laurent & Alard

Dear all,

As some of you have noticed and expressed on twitter, our service has encountered some issues over the last two days. Here is a quick update on the status and the actions we are taking to solve this.

Service unavailable: This was caused to a DNS issue at our provider, which has now been fixed. Slightly more details on this issue here.

Missing/slow twitter updates: This is a more serious issue for us. Gnip, our provider for all the realtime updates, had to stop distributing the twitter firehose on June 19th, as explained here. This means that we don't receive realtime updates anymore and that we had to revert to polling. However, due to throttling constraints imposed by Twitter, the updates are slow (can be up to 6 hours for your tweets to appear). We are actively working with Twitter to find a solution and get early access to their new stream API.

Besides that, everything is running smooth. We have slowed down on new developments in the last weeks, mainly due to an increase in sunshine and BBQs :-) Yet, don't worry, we are still around and strongly commited to keep on evolving the platform. It is just too much fun too stop :-)

As always, thanks a lot for your support, and don't hesitate to send us your feedback !

Cheers,

-Laurent

Today and tomorrow we're presenting Storytlr at Google I/O in San Francisco. We thought it would be a good opportunity to announce an exciting new location feature.

Lifestreaming services typically offers a reverse chronological view of all your online activities. Although such a view can be insightful, we at Storytlr believe there are other meaningful ways to showcase your content, besides the story format you are used to by now. 

Mainly due to maturing location technology available on today’s high end mobile devices, location is becoming available as an extra piece of information about your content. We want to leverage this location in two different ways. 

First, by offering a map view of stories where all items of a story that have location are plotted on a map (See sample - Please note that this sample only works in Firefox/Safari).

Second, you can display and browse the latest items that contain location information in reverse chronological order on a special map page (See sample - Please note that this sample only works in Firefox/Safari).

Since location is not yet ubiquitous across all sources, you can easily add location to any item on your site. We think this an exciting and new way to consume content.

In addition to location, Storytlr goes social and announces integration with Google Friend Connect. With Google Friend Connect it is easy to create a community around your Storytlr page.

Both the location and the Friend Connect features will be made public in the coming weeks. If you are around, feel free to drop by our booth at the Google I/O Developer Sandbox.

We trust you will let us know what you think!

Cheers - Alard & Laurent

A quick post to let you know that as part of the weekly maintenance we ran today, we also rolled out a new architecture with a reverse proxy. Nothing to be afraid of, this is just a really cool trick to reduce the load on a server by letting a lightweight server (nginx) deal with static content, and only using Apache for the PHP heavy-lifting.

The performance improvement on a per page load is noticeable, but the major impact in on our average server load. However, this may break stuff if we serve the wrong files with the wrong server. So, we count on you to tell us if you spot anything weird while using the service in the coming days.

This new step is part of our 'scaling' plan that we started in January when we had our first performances issues. We will continue executing on this plan on a 'as needed' basis.

Cheers,

-Laurent

Hi storytellers !

As you may have read a while ago, we have been invited by Google to present Storytlr, in San Francisco, at the Developer Sandbox of Google I/O.  This will be on May 27th & 28th.

In addition to that, we'll participate to a very special SFNewTech event, on May 26th, together with five other belgian startups. You can get your ticket here.

We still have some time available for additional meetings in the Bay area. So, if you would like to meet us and cannot make it to Google I/O or to SFNewTech, just send us an email and we'll try to setup something.

Looking forward meeting you there,

Cheers,

-Laurent

When Mark Krynsky blogged about it, we totaly felled for it. So much that it also inspired our new dashboard page and that Alard immediately started to port it. The Irresistible theme is a free, GPLed, theme by WooThemes, so they were happy for us to go ahead and make it available to you. You can have a look at what it looks like on this demo page. Enjoy !

Update: To have this nice view with activities grouped by categories, you must add a 'Dashboard' page to your site. Simply go to Configure -> Pages to do so. Move the page to the top of the list to make it the default one.

Hello Storytellers !

Right on time for Easter, we bring you the 9th release of storytlr, and we hope you'll like it as much as we do. New features include post by email, a much improved bookmarklet, a new 'dashboard' view, plus the usual tweaking and debugging. Details below and, as always, we count on you to help us test this out. Please ping us by mail or on twitter if you come accross any issue !

Post by email: In the Tools section, you'll find a new tab where you can configure your private inbox. Anything you send there will be posted on your stream. Attachements are supported, so it is now really easy to post a picture or some audio from your mobile phone !

Bookmarklet: It is finally possible to directly post video embeds, and these will be recognized as videos and correctly displayed in your video gallery ! You can now link to picture or mp3 a file hosted elsewhere.

Per page RSS feeds: The RSS feed associated with a page now correctly reflects the content of that page. So, the RSS of a picture gallery will contain only pictures. You can even build your own RSS feeds, for example filtering out status updates. We've also added proper support of audio enclosure, so your RSS can also serve as a Podcast !

Dashboard page: As the name implies, this page presents all your latest activities in a dashboard view. This is becoming the default 'Home' page for new users. Check the dashboard of eschnou to see what it looks like.

SEO improvements: Entries permalink are now prettier, we've removed duplicates as much as possible and added 'nofollow' where necessary. We've also added more meta information and more microformats. Finally, we now ping blogsearch at google whenever you post an item on your stream (not for imports). We are not SEO experts, so if you have ideas on what we must still improve, send us an email !

We wish you a great Easter weekend ! If you travel and make some great stories please let us know !

Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Following our new release, we've received the same request from various users: "how did eschnou add a 'blog' tab showing only his blog entries ?". It is really easy to do, but not necessarily obvious (something to make easier in the next release). Here is how to do it:

• Add another page of the type 'lifestream'
• Click the 'customize' link
• Select the sources (storytlr is one of them) that you want to display
• Select the type of data to show (here, blog only)
• Pick a nice title
• Click save and you are done !

You can also reorganize the order of the tabs. The one on top will always be the first one displayed when a user visits your page. So yes, you can also get rid of the default lifestream page if you don't like it.

Figure 1: You can add and customize additional 'lifestream' pages

Hello Storytellers !

Just in time for the spring, we bring you a fresh new release with two really exciting new features and various little tweaks and bug fixes. We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do ! If you want to directly see the new features in action, have a look at eschnou's page.

We introduce the notion of Pages, available in the Configure->Pages section. A page is a different view at your data than the standard lifestream. For example a picture page will display all your pictures, accross all sources, in a nice gallery format. You can also add as many 'lifestream' page as you like, and select which content to display on each. This is only the begining, now that the foundation is in place we have many ideas of new kind of pages leveraging your data in innovative ways !

Tagging is finally there, and unified accross all data sources. A tag cloud widget is also provided to help you navigate your data. Note that tags will be imported from now on, so if you want them for past data, you'll have to reimport your sources (but this can destroy stories and comments associated with old items).

A new theme is added, and this time it is a contribution from one of our users ! Thanks a lot to stumblepeach for this ! We really appreciate !

Amongst the other tweaks, it is worth pointing out that you can now edit the title of any widget (yes, you can get rid of the 'my web 2.0 life' title if you want :-). We've also added a remember me box, especially useful for all of you using the bookmarklet.

That's it for now. Please send us your feedback, tell us what you think and if you spot any issue, contact us and we'll try to fix asap !

Thank you all for the fantastic support,

Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Hello everyone,

If you have been following lifestreaming related news, you must have seen that this week was tough week for lifestreaming services. As Mark Krynsky points out in his post, Swurl has closed, Profilactic is looking for a new home, and Dandelife is refocusing. Mark also raises the question of data availability after such a service closes and advocates for Data Portability.

We fully agree. You having the control of your data is of major importance to us. We will have a developper API, and we will implement Data Portability when deemed mature enough. In the meanwhile, you already have access to our backup function, that lets you download all of your data as csv files.

We also wanted to stress that we have a reliable and tested backup system (based on LVM snapshoting, and mysqldumps, with remote storage). We actually had to use our recovery procedure following our failed update and it worked like a charm ! Yet, as the Ma.gnolia incident showed, even these can fail. We therefore encourage you to backup your data using our backup tool on a regular basis. If you would like us to facilitate this process even more, let us know on the feedback forum.

Reliability is also much better since our move to our new server. We have not experienced any downtime or slowdowns lately and don't see any reasons for this to happen in the future either. Slicehost.com is a fantastic solution !

Finally, as you know, storytlr is not a company but just a project we are running for fun. This means that we are not under financial pressure due to the crisis. We are actually working hard on our next release, bringing exciting new features such as unified tagging !

We are young, not funded, and we understand that this may scare some of you. We hope that this message answers concerns you may have. If you have any questions or ideas, do not hesitate to email us and we'll reply as soon as humanly possible !

Thanks all for your ongoing support,

Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Hi storytellers !

As you may have noticed, we've suffered from performance and reliability issues in the last weeks. This is normal, we are young and growing fast. When we wrote our first line of code, it was to support our personal pages; today we also do it for a few thousands friends :-)

So, we've been working hard over the last weeks to refactor our code base, improve our pollers for stability, and add two level of caching. One at the database level, one at the page component level. We may add a third one at the page level with a reverse proxy when required. We've also spent some time optimizing our sql requests. You may not feel a difference on an individual page load (generated in less than a second anyway), but we hope to feel the difference under heavy load !

In addition to this major upgrade of our backend, we've also moved to a new server host. We've picked up http://slicehost.com,  a Rackspace company. They provide us with a highly flexible solution, being able to upgrade a slice in a few minutes ! A perfect solution to manage resources and costs. In addition to that, I must say that I was really impressed by their documentation, tutorials and the management console.

No new features in this release, but still a few bug fix and slight UI improvements. We'll resume our work on features and improvements in the coming days.

As always, we need your help ! If you experience a strange behavior, please notify us at support@storytlr.com ! Even if seems to be an obvious bug, that may not be so straightforward and we may not be aware of it !

Thank you all for your help !

Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Today we tried to push a new release live, our goal was to introduce a new caching layer and set of SQL optimizations on which we have worked for the past weeks. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned.

A few minutes after being live again, we started to see strange effects on the database, missing records, disapearing stories, and other weird artifacts. It soon became obvious that we had missed something in the cache layer and it was not possible to fix this quickly on the live server. We therefore decided to roll back to the pre-release status.

So, the bad news is that we have to go back to our garage and fix the caching bit, it will take us some time, which means we won't work on new features for a while. We also need to spend time investigating a new hosting solution to avoid the downtimes such as last week.

As you know, we are just two guys in a garage doing this for fun, so we appreciate your patience while we learn, and improve our service. We are commited to sustain our growth, and will solve both the speed and the availability issues in the coming weeks !

Thanks all for your support,

-Laurent & Alard

We never anticipated this type of use for storytlr but journalist Kevin Sablan included many different web 2.0 sources that covered the hudson crash and created a compelling story (see below) as part of his blog post. This 'citizen journalism' story assembled by a professional includes tweets, news footage, twitpic images and youtube movies.

Previously Arne Hulstein created a story on a bank robbery he witnessed. The little details (police using macbooks) give an unexpected perspective to such a serious story that would be covered differently in traditional media.

Is this is a new way to consume big news events? If this type of story makes sense, we may need to rethink storytlr for news events. I'm thinking mentioning sources in the story, maybe even event related accounts to avoid all this noise on your stream. What do you think?

Alard & Laurent

Hello Storytellers !

You've been asking for it, we've just pushed it live: the bookmarklet ! This is a first iteration, we'll tweak in next release, so please send your feedback. To install, just go in the Tools section and drag the link to your bookmarks.

We also introduce a tighter integration with Twitter. We can now send tweets on your behalf when you post a new item, or when something appears on your stream. Combined with our realtime updates, it means for example that we'll send a tweet as soon as you bookmark an item on Delicious ! Of course, this is all configurable to avoid spamming your followers.

Twitter is the most used data source on Storytlr, so we improve the service by supporting Twitpic and Phodroid. The pictures are displayed in your stream and can be used in stories. We'll add support for more third party services built on top of Twitter in the coming releases.

If you want a robust comments management, you can now use Disqus to manage comments on your page. Thanks to Disqus, you get comments spam protection, moderation, central management, and even video comments using Seesmic !

Finally, we also continue to expand our support of external data sources, this time with Identi.ca and Laconi.ca support. We even have realtime notifications for Identi.ca thanks to Gnip !

We've also taken the time to tweak a few things across the various themes, and to fix various bugs. This won't have been possible without your help, so a big thank you to all of you ! Please keep sending bug reports, frustrations, and ideas to help us make storytlr a better service !

We hope you like it ! Please share your thoughts in the comments below, by email, on twitter, or on our feedback forum. Thanks again for your support. Stay tuned for release 7 mid-February !

-Laurent & Alard