I’ve got some new stuff for you today:
1. Taglists
I’ve added a list of the 20 most favorite tags to each profile page. You guys use tags like crazy and now everyone can see your most favorite public tags and filter your public items by those tags.
2. Commentlists
Profile pages now show the number of comments a user has posted. If you click on that number you will get to a list of items the user has commented on.
Here’s my comment list
Did you already recognize the tiny new button in the upper right corner of the “Everyone” and “Following” pages?
It’s a new filter button, which makes it possible to show only the latest images, videos, documents or pages instead of the whole soup. Just give it a try and let me know what you think!
I decided to start a little series about Zootool’s hidden or not so visible features.
Today: Keyboard Shortcuts
In your Zoo
In your Zoo (http://zootool.com/zoo) it is way faster to navigate with your keyboard instead of your mouse. I’ve always tried to make the whole thing behave as much as a desktop application as possible. So here’s a list of available shortcuts in your Zoo:
Arrow-Keys
navigate through items
Space
open the detail view for the selected item
close it again once it’s open.
Enter
open the URL of the selected item in a new window
Shift+Enter
open the source of the selected item in a new window
Backspace
delete the selected item(s)
Backspace (with a Pack selected)
remove the selected item(s) from the current pack
On public pages (everyone, following, user profiles)
Arrow keys wouldn’t be cool on pages where you also want to have control over scrolling with your arrow keys. So on all public pages you can move through items with “j” and “k”.
“j” jumps to the next entry and “k” jumps to the previous entry.
In the Aquarium
The Aquarium has also some basic shortcuts. Once you’ve entered your search and items appear in the list, you can move through them with your arrow-keys and open the selected item with “Enter”
In Zootool every public item gets its own dedicated page with a fixed url (permalink), which is visible to everybody – even visitors, who don’t have a Zootool account. It’s pretty much like the video pages on Youtube or the photo pages on Flickr. I call them the “watch pages”
Here are some examples of very popular items on Zootool:
http://zootool.com/watch/w8i/
http://zootool.com/watch/il4ik2/
http://zootool.com/watch/aw6aj1/
The problem always was, that those pages only showed an overview with some general information. So if more people added the same item to their Zoo, only the title of the first user and the most popular tags of all users was shown.
This made it impossible to share a link to such a page with only the data (tags, title, description) you have added for that item.
I just pushed a new update online, which makes it finally possible to share a personalized “watch page” for each item with your friends, family or mates at work.
By adding “user:yourusername” to the watch urls like this: http://zootool.com/watch/6iqn1py/user:bastian you will get your personalized page for that item, which will show your title, your description and your tags. (As long as you got it in your Zoo of course)
All your items on your profile pages, will automatically link to those personalized watch pages from now on, so you can always be sure that your followers will see the right stuff.
I’ve also updated the “all likes” pages, which now show the descriptions, each user has added to the item and the personalized link for each user: http://zootool.com/watch/aw6aj1/view:likes
I think this will make it far easier for you to share stuff.
Just give it a try and let me know what you think about it!
Sometime saving stuff with the Lasso just takes too long. It’s great to keep yourself organized by adding tags, a title or a description, but when you don’t have much time, it gets in your way. That’s why I’m introducing the Heart Button today. It will save the current website without any further ado within seconds – super easy. To show you how it works and how fast it is, I’ve created a little screencast.
I’m – again – very excited to hear what you think about it, so just leave a comment here, write me on Facebook or get in contact on Twitter.
I’ve been very quiet with updates and news in the last weeks since the Delicious rumors. The reason for this is that I’ve been working on moving Zootool from Rackspace to a German hosting company called Hetzner. We’ve been with Hetzner in the early days of Zootool and switched to Rackspace to make use of the advantages of cloud hosting about a year and a half ago. Cloud hosting is pretty cheap as long as you don’t need big, powerful servers or a lot of traffic and after thousands of Delicious users switched to Zootool and imported their bookmarks it wasn’t possible to continue hosting with Rackspace as it got far too expensive.
With Hetzner we get two times more server power for half the price, which is quite amazing. It’s always tough to move a webapplication, especially when it continually grows. It took me about two weeks to setup everything and test and prepare as much as I can. Today I’ve migrated the MySQL database to Hetzner, that’s why Zootool has been down for about one and a half hour. This makes it possible to keep Zootool running on both ends – Rackspace and Hetzner – and to switch the webserver almost seamlessly. Unfortunately it also means that Zootool is going to be very slow until everything is moved over to Hetzner. The reason is that the webserver is still at Rackspace (Texas, USA) and the MySQL server is in Germany now. The latency for queries is a lot higher as if the MySQL would be in the same datacenter – imagine that each and every request has to travel across the Atlantic! This slows down everything. I’m very sorry for this inconvenience and I’m trying my best to move the rest as fast as I can. I hope for you patience one more time :)
Cheers,
Bastian
Our servers are mostly running smooth again, but as you might have noticed screenshots don’t get generated properly or at all. Here’s why:
We don’t generate screenshots ourselves. We’ve been with a German company for the first years of Zootool and switched to Webthumb at the beginning of 2010. Though they are currently having troubles I must say that I’m very, very happy with their service. It’s incredibly fast. We are able to generate about 200 screenshots per minute with them, which is amazing and which gives us a lot of room to grow. Josh – the founder – is always very quick with responding on problems and the service has been super reliable the last months.
Unfortunately the Delicious-import-disaster hasn’t been enough so short before christmas. For the last two days Webthumb has been very slow in generating new screenshots or is failing at all. The good thing is, that we keep track of all that and missing screenshots will be regenerated eventually. We hope one more time for your patience here. All bookmarking will continue to work properly, it will just not look that nice as expected.
Hey guys,
the rumors that Yahoo is going to close Delicious down completely shocked me, when I first saw it on Twitter. Some of you wrote that this the big chance for Zootool, but for me Delicious always has been the unreachable godfather of bookmarking and I felt very bad for all the guys over at Yahoo, who spent all their passion and work on Delicious in the past years and got kicked in the ass with that rumors. Fortunately it really seems that those rumors were nothing but rumors and Delicious is continuing their service.
For Zootool that “Delicious-is-closing-down-thingy” had the most impressive effect I’ve ever experienced since the beginning. Habu and I decided to lift the import limit and let all of you import as many bookmarks as you like. After I tweeted that, an onslaught on our import system began. Within three hours you guys uploaded bookmark files with more than 850.000 bookmarks. To be honest with you, we had just reached 650.000 bookmarks the day before so our bookmark database doubled within three hours. There’s no reason to keep it secret that the importer sucked and took the whole site down.
Normally the importer tries to be as smart as our Lasso bookmarklet and categorizes the imported urls by type (image, video, document, link). Therefor it connects to sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr or loads of others and tries to find as many information about those urls as possible. (tags, thumbnail urls, embed codes for videos, etc.) It also tries to generate screenshots for all of them.
Imagine when the importer tried that for 850.000 bookmarks! It’s simply impossible in such a short time (unless you are Google maybe :)) and imports kept stacking up.
I decided to rebuild the importer and simply write all the bookmarks into our database to categorize them later and delay the screenshot generation as well. I also decided to take the site down completely to catch up with the huge pile of imports, migrate to bigger servers and improve the system as much as I can.
All bookmarks got imported over night and should now be safe and warm inside your “Zoos” :) You will find an “imported” pack in the sidebar of your Zoo where you always find them. Tags, titles, descriptions and your privacy settings should be imported correctly and as I said before, we are trying to find a good solution for the missing screenshots and they will be generated as soon as possible. If anything should have gone wrong, please let me know: zoopport@gmail.com
I know that downtimes suck. I hate when sites go down, that are important to me. But please stick with us through this growing pains and be sure that we do everything to keep the site fast and the downtimes short. Thank you so much for your patience!
If you got any questions, feedback or concerns, please don’t hesitate to write me: zoopport@gmail.com
Cheers, Bastian
Most of you might have noticed that Zootool has been down for about two hours yesterday. We had very little downtimes so far, but sometimes stuff just goes wrong and our backup system stuck while uploading a backup file to Rackspace CloudFiles and blocked everything. That wasn’t a big issue but it was a good chance to revise and improve the backup system again and I thought you might be interested how we do backups now and what server structure we got.
We are hosting Zootool on Rackspace Cloud Servers. Rackspace is known for their great technical support and high quality hosting. They are hosting huge sites like Posterous and Github and we have been very happy with our Cloud Servers so far.
We got two main server instances: a 2GB RAM instance for our webserver and a 2GB RAM instance for our database. We also got a small 256MB RAM instance as database backup server. Both, the entire webserver and database servers are backuped by Rackspace on a daily basis and we can roll back to every backup within minutes. Our database server replicates all data instantly to the database backup server, so all data you save on Zootool is always stored twice and when the database server should ever go down, we can switch to the backup server. We also backup the whole database once a day. We keep backups of the last 30 days on our server and push the latest backup to Amazon S3. So when both database servers should crash at the same time, which is extremely unlikely, we still got the backup on Amazon S3 and the snapshot from Rackspace, which are redundantly hosted on Rackspace CloudFiles.
A system can never be 100% fail-safe, but we want you to be sure that we do all we can to keep your bookmarks as safe as possible. If you got any questions or concerns, please drop me an email: zoopport@gmail.com
If you are still worried about losing your Zootool bookmarks, please go to “Settings” > “Sync” and download a backup file of your entire zoo as often as you like.
Zootool is now available on the Google Chrome Web Store.
