Movinglabs Weblog

Export Excel files

Sun, 05 Jul 15 00:00:00 +0000

We've improved FlexLists export abilities. First of all we've given you more options when exporting CSV files. Furthermore you are now also able to export Excel (xlsx) files. We are planning to improve our import options as well.

Brand New Observu Coming

Thu, 17 Mar 11 00:00:00 +0000

Since the start of 2011 we have been working on a new version of Observu. Contrary to the current version it will be a paid service. We made this decision because we were unable to provide the service level we desired and required without charging you. The new Observu will combine website monitoring from multiple servers with on-server monitoring using a collection agent that keeps track of your server health. Furthermore Observu will provide API access for you to input additional measurements and extract custom reports. All of this will be combined with the best reporting and notifications we can imagine. You can read up on our progress on the Observu Blog. I highly recommend getting on the mailinglist if you want to be in our beta program as soon as it launches.

Print Details

Tue, 14 Dec 10 00:00:00 +0000

We have added a small, but requested feature to FlexLists: you can now print individual entries as well: click an item in the list, at the bottom of the details listing a 'Print Item' button will appear.Furthermore we fixed a small access bug. In some cases, users with a READ_ADD key were also able to edit entries, by doubleclicking a row. We have now secured FlexLists against this.For those interested in more advanced search queries, we've added a section to our FAQ:Can I search specific fields? Yes you can by using "column name":"your keyword" as a query. Furthermore you can combine parts of queries using AND and/or OR. e.g.: status:Busy OR status:"Not started" you can also exclude certain parts e.g. -status:Done for columns with spaces in them you need to put quotes around the name e.g. "assigned to":Michiel AND -status:Done

Save Your Queries

Tue, 13 Jul 10 00:00:00 +0000

This new feature has been on our todo list for quite some time: storable search queries. If you do a search now, you can click 'Save Query As...' to store your currrent query as a View. You can either store it just for yourself or (if you have adequate permissions) for all list users.Some examples of queries to store (on a todo style list):-status:Done archived:0 (Todo items)status:Busy ( All active items)This new feature is combined with a small layout change, hopefully adressing two important issues:Users unable to find their archived itemsNew users unable to find out how to add items to an existing list

Organize Your Albums

Tue, 13 Jul 10 00:00:00 +0000

Some of our PicturePush users had problems organizing their albums properly. Therefore we introduce: Album Groups. To add albums to a group, you can click the 'edit' icon next to an album and then choose 'Add to Group'. This will open a dialog to choose the group name (or an existing group) Grouped albums will show under a seperate group header on your gallery index.

Brand New Server

Thu, 11 Mar 10 00:00:00 +0000

We moved PicturePush to a brand new server, which should be faster and physically closer to the servers that serve the images, Unfortunately this move did cause a disruption in our service yesterday evening/night. Everything is up and running now, so if you still notice anything strange please let us know. For those interested: it has both solid state drives for the database and normal disks for temporary image storage and 12 GB of ram. The CPU is a lot faster than the one on the old server, so resizing images and recoding videos should be quicker as well.

Update your Status

Mon, 05 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0000

A nice thing about social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is to keep up to date on the life of your friends. Because TeamSpinner is all about keeping up to date on your project, we believe that the new status feature will further improve tracking your projects. It works just like on all other social sites, but with a twist: you can attach messages to a specific project. Your messages are than only shared with other members of that particular project.Go check it out and tell us what you think.

Have More Fun In A Group

Thu, 01 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0000

This feature isn't particularly exciting, but we have postponed it for a long time. TeamSpinner now has Groups. You can create a group of users and then assign that whole group to a project. This makes it much quicker for teams to use TeamSpinner. We are working on more exciting features to keep your project members up to date, which we hope to present soon.

Projects on the road again

Wed, 16 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today we've released a minor update on TeamSpinner. Just a few small things that are hopefully better now, for now, it's mostly layout. However, we are looking for a major improvement soon. We aim to provide much more project management tools and ways to integrate external data and applications into TeamSpinner. Think of issue tracking tools, source control, etc. We hope TeamSpinner will become the center of project information.To keep moving, we need your feedback! What whould you need to give your projects a spin?

Moving to S3

Tue, 08 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0000

For some time we have used Amazon S3 as back up for our pro users on PicturePush. However, with the growing amount of users we decided that it was time to switch to S3 for all storage. The reason being that we got tired of managing our own storage: disks got full at unexpected times, etc.The approach we followed was to first get all files into S3 using the backup scripts we already had for the pro-accounts. Then we wrapped al our code that touched the image files. So we ended up with a filesystem based storage api with methods like: getLocator($image, $format)putFromFile($locator, $file)getToFile($locator,$file)getToTemporaryFile($locator)exists($locator)exists_local($locator)readfile($locator)filesize($locator)etc.Furthermore, we needed to account for metadata storage such as filesize, resolution, etc. because we could no longer get these from the files directly. Implementing all these abstraction was the most elaborate part of the transition. (If you ever do anything with files: wrap it! ) After this, the actual switch to using S3 was trivial. After a few days of bug fixing everything seems to be stable and quick again.As we needed to preserve our existing URL structure, lazy image generation and session based authentication ( for private images ) we could not serve from S3 directly. To keep things quick, we decided on using a large local cache for the most common files. This enables us to serve files fast and using our existing infrastructure without relying on it for permanent storage.Because of this switch to S3, we can now focus on stuff that really matters: features and speed. For example: To further speed up the serving of images, we are now experimenting with custom CDN nodes. Hopefully we will start some nodes in the US soon, so our US customers will get a much better experience.

More Filtering Options

Tue, 31 Mar 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today we worked on extending our filtering options to other parts of FlexLists. Starting today you can now also select which items to show on the widget by configuring it on the 'Publish' tab. You could for example show a list on your website with priority 1 items only by entering 'priority:1' as a custom filter and putting the code in your site. Furthermore the printing option will now print the current selection as you see it, instead of the whole list. So you can quickly compile a list using a search query and print just those items.An other thing we added is the option to hide the time on the date/time fields. You can hide it by checking the 'Date Only' checkbox in the field properties dialog. (available through the 'Fields' tab)Finally we fixed a few issues with the date picker and optimized the loading of the list data a bit to be on your screen even faster.

Safety First: Daily backup

Mon, 23 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0000

Although we store all your photos twice at PicturePush, this might not be enough to handle small or larger disasters. Therefore we decided that we want to keep your photos even safer. Starting today, all photos uploaded by pro-members will be backed up daily to Amazon S3. It's a very reliable service to store data. It uses multiple datacenters to spread the data, so we feel that we will be able to recover your photos in almost any event. So if you want your photos to be really really safe, upgrade to a pro-account.

20.000 PicturePush signups!

Sat, 07 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today photo sharing site PicturePush reached the 20,000th signup. The site doubled it's member base in just over 8 months. Member number 20,000 received a free two-year upgrade to pro-membership to celebrate. With this occasion I have taken the opportunity to write something about our current state of affairs and plans for the future: The site started in 2006 and has now grown to hosting over 1.3 million pictures taking up over 2 Terabytes of storage space. All of this using 2 storage/web servers and a database servers which together process the 54 million requests each month. Most of these requests come from Poland, The Netherlands and the USA. Currently the main focus is on increasing reliability and availability. The recent outages have emphasized the importance of this effort. An important step is the addition of very reliable backup for pro accounts which will become effective in the next few days. In 2009 PicturePush will further focus on it's pro-members by introducing more options for publishing and copyright protection. All members will profit from an ever increasing effort in improving usability and the integration with mobile and social platforms.

New Upload Page

Wed, 30 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of our beginning users were confused about the difference between the normal upload and the multi-file upload. Furthermore the installation of Java for the latter, posed a problem for some. Therefore we have tried to integrate the two into the new upload page. It is based on swfupload. We hope it is easier to use and more clear what exactly is going on. If you have any problems, or liked the old ones better, please tell us.

Protect your images

Wed, 28 Jan 09 00:00:00 +0000

For PicturePush pro members there is a new feature: add a copyright string to your images. You can set the text to show, and on what format of images to show it, in your profile. We also improved the effect of the 'Downloadable originals', from now on it does not only hide the download link, it actually completely disables downloading of the full size image for anyone but you.We hope this improves PicturePush for those users that care about the protection of their most beautiful images. Please let us know what you think.

Updates for PicturePush

Sat, 24 Jan 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today was a day for some updates on PicturePush:A short introduction text is shown on top of your galleryLarger thumbnails on the gallery index page for each albumChoose your own cover thumbnail for each albumMake comments on your photos private or just for friends (pro members only)

Customize FlexLists web export layout

Tue, 28 Oct 08 00:00:00 +0000

Some users ask to customize the layout of the FlexLists web export script. Therefore I created a small guide:It is currently partly possible to customize the layout of the web export ( available from the Publish tab). You can not do it directly in the FlexLists website, but if you are familiar with HTML/CSS there are some things you can change.Basically the output of the FlexLists web export script looks like: ............ .............. ................

field name 1
field 1 value

So if you insert the following code before the from flexlists:You will see a different appearance. Have a look at: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/propidx.html to see possible properties and values that are allowed in this small piece of CSS. To explain a bit: the first row are the table properties, the second row the properties of the header cells and the third row are the properties of the other table cells. So this particular example gives the table a standard width of 500 pixels, makes the header have a dark background with white text and left-aligned text. And finally adds dark borders around the data cells.

PicturePush Milestone

Wed, 20 Aug 08 00:00:00 +0000

A reason to celebrate: PicturePush has just received it's 1 millionth upload. It took us two year and one month to get to this point. PicturePush has very much improved since the start in 2006. We like to thank all of our members for using our service and especially those giving us feedback to further improve the site.

Timezone detection

Mon, 04 Aug 08 00:00:00 +0000

For a long time ForLater.net has been unchanged. It was the first MovingLabs application and by far the most simple one. However, the time zone dropdown has been incorrect for a while due to daylight saving and it allways defaulted to our server timezone. Because most users are from an other timezone, this might have resulted in some timing errors in the reminders. To prevent this, we have made a very minor change: Your timezone is now detected automatically using JavaScript, although you can still change it manually. We hope that you appreciate this small improvement.

Change of plans

Mon, 21 Jul 08 00:00:00 +0000

Due to the rapid growth of PicturePush and our involvement in an other soon to be released project, we have not been able to focus on the development of BloxDB. As we believe strongly in honest business I rather inform you now, then having everyone wait for something that will not come as soon as expected.We still believe in the project, but for the next few months our focus will remain on our existing projects. This will strengthen our common platform which will in the end benefit BloxDB as well. Basic features intended for BloxDB will be implemented as part of FlexLists, which is more and more becoming a light version of BloxDB.I hope this post clearifies the current state of BloxDB's development.

Photo Printing

Mon, 07 Jul 08 00:00:00 +0000

After a lot of considerations we decided to start a photo printing Beta using ColourMailer. You can now print your photos on PicturePush using the button on the right of the photo. By default you can only print your own photos. However, you can go to your Profile/Preferences and change who can print photos. It can be set to Public, Friends or just you. We hope this is a valuable addition for those of you posting event photos.

Changing the locks

Fri, 27 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

We made a change to the FlexLists secret URL approach. We no longer use the keys for normal list access, this means that the secret key will no longer be displayed in the URL bar. And will not be used at all, as soon as the list is in your user account. This means that if you do not share your lists the key is not handed out anymore. In the future we can now also make it possible to use secret keys for individuals and make them revokable. Which will make it more in line with the sharing options used in other sites. An other addition is the possibility to export CSV files for subsets of your data. So you can for example search for a keyword and then export only that part of your data to CSV.

Account Limits

Fri, 20 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush is growing faster and faster. As we are quickly running out of storage space, we will temporarily add some constraints to the site. The first is that starting now you are only allowed to upload 200 MB of pictures over a period of four weeks. This is always measured over the past 28 days. So if you uploaded 160 MB in the past days, you can still upload 40 MB today. The total amount of storage you can use remains unlimited.This is a temporary measure to give us some time to increase our storage capacity. To help yourself and us, you can upgrade to become a pro-member. It will give you back the unlimited upload and helps us improve the service.

Top request: password protected albums

Mon, 02 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

There is one thing that has been asked for a lot: Can I share an album with someone without having to share it with all my friends? Starting now, you can protect an album with a password (enter it in the Album Access dialog) that opens up private albums to only those who have the password.Please note that the password gives people extra rights, so if you have a 'for friends' album. And you protect it with a password. Now the album can still be viewed by all your friends, but also by those who are not your friend and do know the password.As our pro-account offering was somewhat limited, we have made this feature available to our pro-users only.

Pretend to be a new user time after time

Sun, 01 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

As PicturePush and our other services mature, we receive bug reports. This is a good thing, as it helps to improve the services. However, what we found out is that even with a lot of users, you cannot rely on your users to report bugs. Especially in the beginning, but even now, some bugs have been really serious and must have been seen by hundreds of people over the course of weeks, sometimes even months. Now you would say, how can this happen? You use your own services, right? Yes, we do. However most of the serious bugs were related to new users, bugs or unclearity in signing up, cases without data, etc. So they only occurred to people new to the service, exactly those without a good reason to report bugs. After we found this out, we introduced the practice to very regularly do the whole process of signing up, doing the first steps and canceling ourselves. And it really helped to improve things, sign ups have improved and people have responded more positively to the service. Even if it are not bugs, every time we find something unexpected that was not as smooth as it could be. Therefore my advice to you: don't just eat your own dog food, go out and buy it every week as well.

Downtime expected for FlexLists

Sun, 01 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow FlexLists will be down for maintenance. Normally this would take only a few minutes, but this time we will convert the data in all lists as well in anticipation of new features that will be introduced later this month. Because we want you data to be safe, we can't have anybody accessing their FlexLists during this conversion. If everything goes well, none of our changes will be visible to you. If you are wondering what those features are that we are preparing for:Be able to archive items (great for 'done' items in todo lists)Have sublists (e.g. have a list of comments for each task in your tasklist)Some extra field types and options Upgrading your FlexList to BloxDBEdit 02 06 2008: The update is completed, it took us a bit over two hours. If you encounter any errors, please contact us.

FlexLists Update

Fri, 09 May 08 00:00:00 +0000

As I announced two days ago, we are in the process of turning FlexLists into a BloxDB light. As we feel the new GUI is much better, I have moved it to the actual site for all of you to enjoy. The most important changes:Tabs on the right with 'Share', 'Configure', etc.Slightly different color schemeDelete multiple items at onceDetail view no longer duplicates the fields shown in the main listDrop down menu's to hide less used options such as 'delete list'Need to be signed up to create a list (This removes the need to explain how to return to your own list)Use email to share the URLs is now preferred over direct linking (People tend to loose those URLs if you don't mail them)If you notice any bugs, errors or want to suggest further improvement, please let me know.

Towards BloxDB

Wed, 07 May 08 00:00:00 +0000

This weblog has been quiet for a while. The main reason is that we are working on some new projects and libraries. A project that we announced a few months ago is BloxDB. Unfortunately we were not yet able to put a lot of effort in it, so you will have to wait a bit more for the release. BloxDB will target it as an upgrade to FlexLists. As we want to make the transition as easy as possible, we are now in the process of moving FlexLists a bit towards, what we could say is a BloxDB light. It will have the same interface for the data as BloxDB, but with less features.For those of you interested in the latest developments, it is available online at: new.flexlists.com it uses the same data as the FlexList site, so you can login using your existing account. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Really beta software

Tue, 04 Mar 08 00:00:00 +0000

It just became very clear that Teamspinner is still beta software: it was not working at all in Internet Explorer. We are very sorry for this and hope that those encountering these problems will give it another try.If you would like to know more about the actual JavaScript problem that caused this massive failure I have written an article about it on my personal blog.

Spin Faster

Sat, 01 Mar 08 00:00:00 +0000

You might like Teamspinner because it is so simple and wiki-like. However, it was still not as simple as many available wikis. So to make you work even faster we have added two things: Default Page setup: Instead of creating empty pages, by default a new page will get Text, Files and Comment blocks. And the second one, to make it into an actual wiki: If you type [[Pagename]] in the text area, it will transform into a link to the page with the same name. Not much special, but we hope it helps to make everything just a bit smoother.

Clone Your Lists

Sat, 01 Mar 08 00:00:00 +0000

So you created a nice FlexList for your niche application. And now you want the same thing again? Up till today you had to recreate all those fields from scratch. Based upon a request of one of our users we introduced a 'Copy this list' button what does exactly that: create a new list with the same fields. So once you've got a project management list that works, you can use it for all your projects, by cloning it.

Delete Comments

Thu, 14 Feb 08 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the time is exactly right to implement a certain feature. This week we got three requests to be able to remove comments from an image. Of course it should have been possible already, but it wasn't. Therefore we have now implemented this trivial feature. You can delete your own comments plus all comments on your images.Furthermore, I have restructured the menu a bit. It should now better present what is really important.

Progress

Wed, 30 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

We are working hard towards a first beta release of BloxDB our online database product. Last week we finalized the GUI design. The screens are currently being converted into HTML, CSS and JS to make the GUI look and feel nice, smooth and responsive. We expect to show the GUI to our subscribers within the next two weeks. So if you want to take a peek and have not subscribed yet, please do so at www.bloxdb.com .In the mean time we are also working on InfiniScale.net to support BloxDB in the area of data storage. This will keep all data safe and quickly accessible.

VoteLists cleaned

Mon, 28 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

VoteLists was in need of a huge cleanup. First of all, hundreds of spam lists have been removed (more will follow, but it is hard to screen those remaining by hand). Furthermore the design has (yet again) been adjusted.Finally, a few weeks ago we have added a feature which enables you to make the number of votes on items in a list unlimited. This will allow you to use the list to create sorted lists by moving items up and down as you like. Which can for example be nicely applied to priority lists. One of our users has reported use as a tool in a group process. Go check it out!Do you have additional ideas to improve Votelists? contact us or add it to the features votelist.

Growing pains

Fri, 04 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush is growing, with almost 5000 members and 300.000 photos. Some users experienced a noticable slowdown of the site. Therefore we have added an extra server, to provide more power to serve all users. This is a temporary solution until we will switch to our InfiniScale platform. We hope this improves the experience for all of you. (If it is still slow, please contact us)

Guest Passes

Tue, 11 Dec 07 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe the most requested feature for PicturePush was to give friends access without the need to sign up. Now you can! You still use the existing Invite page, but the user is not only shown the registration form, but also a 'guest pass' link. For the duration of one session they can see your 'for friends' images without signing up. Afterwards they can still sign up and become your friend.

Movinglabs Weblog

Export Excel files

Brand New Observu Coming

Print Details

Save Your Queries

Organize Your Albums

Brand New Server

Update your Status

Have More Fun In A Group

Projects on the road again

Moving to S3

More Filtering Options

Safety First: Daily backup

20.000 PicturePush signups!

New Upload Page

Protect your images

Updates for PicturePush

Customize FlexLists web export layout

PicturePush Milestone

Timezone detection

Change of plans

Photo Printing

Changing the locks

Account Limits

Archives

Top request: password protected albums

Pretend to be a new user time after time

Downtime expected for FlexLists

FlexLists Update

Towards BloxDB

Really beta software

Spin Faster

Clone Your Lists

Delete Comments

Progress

VoteLists cleaned

Growing pains

Guest Passes