Archive for the 'Online Photo Sharing' Category

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

Snapact Website and Photo Manager are Live!

We are overjoyed to announce that www.Snapact.com are now available for general public use!

The Snapact Photo Manager can be downloaded for free by visiting www.Snapact.com now - or if you’re anxious and can’t for another webpage to load, just click here.

I encourage you to explore the Snapact Photo Manager thoroughly; we’ve put extra effort into keeping it simple and even though we’ve only just released it to the public as of 10 minutes ago, we already have plans to make it even easier to use.  We even have some new features that we’d like to add in - but we believe that simplicity is important to users.

Most of all, we really want you to create your own photo albums within the Snapact Photo Manager so that you can easily share them online with the click of a button.  We’re excited to see your mad photography skills.

Over time, we will be adding great new community features to the Snapact Photo Sharing website.  We’re thinking of things such as contests and a rating system, but really, it’s all up in the air until we hear what you want.  If you have something you’d like to share with us - a neat idea to make Snapact better, a problem you’ve noticed or perhaps you’d like to just as a question - you can do so by going to our Snapact partner page on GetSatisfaction.com.

GetSatisfaction.com is a great way for users to share their thoughts, ideas and frustrations regarding ANY business.  I’d recommend them for companies and individuals alike.

Monday, September 8th, 2008

Server Upgrade Progress

It’s been a while since anything has been posted - this is a big no-no in the world of blogging.  I know this, but really when you’re hammering away at work during the day and then hacking PHP and SQL in the evenings, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the all-important communication that users need.  The Snapact team plans to improve our communication with you once we get the first public release out there - we promise.  Now, some news:

I am happy to report that we have made some major strides in the couple of weeks.  We’ve migrated our static content hosting to S3 to offset the bandwidth and server load from our main web server, which - in a somewhat humorous fashion - has been located in my closet at home up until yesterday.  www.Snapact.com has been in testing, and I had a great system for it sitting at home… a piddly little 1.6ghz, 396mb RAM, 120gb hard drive machine.  Perfect to see if all of the PHP and DB script would bog it down - and guess what?  It proved to be an excellent choice!

That junky little machine was handy in identifying the need for caching DB results in memory; it also helped to identify the need to offload static content to an external server.  All that having been said, it has reached the end of its public involvement with www.Snapact.com - but please, don’t worry about its future.  It will continue on merrily as a development and staging system!

Some details of how we’re currently operating:

• The PHP website is hosted via www.Slicehost.com (referral link - feel free to sign up via the link; it helps us with our hosting costs!).  These guys ROCK.  A great virtualized setup, easily upgradable, affordable and very flexible.  That, and their website is very pretty.
• The Upload from the Snapact browser is done via www.AmazonAWS.com’s EC2.  This is a great way to get items into S3 with only a single hit of uploading bandwidth.
• www.AmazonAWS.com’s S3 is where Snapact stores your photos for the website to reference.  Having the user photos as well as the Snapact CSS, Javascript and miscellaneous other static files for the website lets the PHP website hosted by Slicehost be fast and focused.

On the Snapact website server, we use a couple of caching mechanisms:

• MySQL has some built in caching that’s done - but I don’t count that…
• XCache is a PHP plugin that caches the compiled PHP script pages (preventing future interpretation)
• Memcached is a distributed, in-memory caching system cleverly devised to share any sort of cached information across multiple servers.  This is where many of the database query results will get stored in order to prevent redundant database hits.

All in all, while there are further optimizations possible (and planned), this is the foundation from which we will launch into the public.  Both Amazon EC2 and Slicehost offer multiple avenues for scalability, so we feel fairly well prepared for our growth.

We look forward to opening up Snapact for users to use; in the future, we really look forward to having developers build on our platform using a planned developer API.  Exciting times call for … sharing.  Photo sharing.

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Beta Update: Infrastructure

It’s been a flurry of activity recently, based on great user feedback.  A host of bugs have been addressed, along with some improvement of existing features in both the Snapact Photo Browser and the Snapact Community Website.

For the website, one of the more crucial changes has been to move to a small-business, entrepreneur-like infrastructure using services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 - this has been proceeding well, and is forecasted to be complete within the next week or so.  We plan to (re)launch the new-featured beta by mid-August.

Stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks - we’re more excited than ever!

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Beta Update: Profile, Album and Photo Privacy

We’ve been hard at work not only fixing bugs, but also trying to add what people have been asking for.

We knew Privacy was important, but hearing your feedback helped us to prioritize - so now, we’ve got a great start for profile, album and photo privacy in place on the beta website.  Numerous fixes and optimizations have been added in as well, including:

• Xcache: prevents unnecessary ‘compilation’ of PHP scripts
• Memcached: prevents redundant hits to our database
• mod_deflate: reduces page size by compressing web page content

Fun stuff!

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Beta Progressing Well

I just wanted to share some simple news: our beta is alive and going well.  It has been operational for a couple of weeks now and we are opening the beta program to more individuals as we address issues that float to the surface.

Feedback has been good so far; excellent new features (and defects!) have been brought to our attention.  We appreciate all the efforts that the keen, bleeding edge folk are putting in!

In the coming weeks, we will be putting the website in the public eye, however we will still be restricting access to our growing closed beta group. We’ll be sure to put a “Request an invite” feature up for those of you interested-photo-sharing-people.

Thank you and take care, all Snapact followers!

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Photo Sharing Progress; Beta time!

It’s been far too long since we’ve posted news in regards to our great new snapact product and service - for this, we do apologize.  We’ve been enormously busy with putting some final touches on the initial feature set of the snapact photo browser and the snapact photo sharing community.

We are fast approaching our initial beta testing, which is slated to start in the next 2 weeks, pending the review of current features and functionality.  So far, things are looking fantastic.  We have decided to each select 5 participants for the first early, closed beta of the website - making a total of 20 new people we’ll be introducing our ideas to… and the culmination of months of effort.

We’ve gotten more excited with each passing day, as the product and service prove themselves.  It’s a great feeling knowing that we are about to show what we’ve created to ‘outsiders’ - although we actually want them to become insiders.  We want everyone who tries the product and service to want to stay; to be a part of our community and help build it up over time.  We know there will improvement and feature requests - in fact, we’re hoping for them.  We want people to share with us what they believe will make an excellent photo sharing solution.

If you’ve read previous postings on how busy we’ve been working full time as well as creating snapact, you’ll know that the simple fact that we’re still working on this adventure - our adventure, including you - means that we are dedicated to seeing what we can accomplish together.

First, there were 4 people.  Soon, there will be 20 more.  To infinity, and beyond!

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Where To Find The Time?

It’s often been said the key to delivering anything with a good impact on your target audience is that Timing Is Everything.

While I would agree with this statement in general, I would still have to say that finding the time to get ’stuff’ done is the major problem!  I know, I’ve spoken of this in the past, but I just wanted to ensure that everyone knows that the snapACT team hasn’t fallen apart, asleep, or into a very deep hole.

We have had some good progress over the last few weeks; however, not as much as we’d hoped.  Work and life seems to keep getting in the way.  We are all seeing our schedules becoming more manageable now that the hectic days of last year are behind us, thankfully.  This translates into quicker progress!

On that note, we are getting ready to do a small group beta test of the photo management and sharing software and online photo sharing website.  Features are being kept limited in scope until we learn what the community really wants, but we have a few items lined up that won’t be released in the initial beta.  It’s always good to have an ace or two up your sleeve, right?

Once the small group beta has run its course, we’ll open the product up to more willing testers via an invitation system.  We’ll provide more information on our release plans as we solidify them in the coming days and weeks.

We can’t wait to share what we’ve cooked up!

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Re-energize: Take A Break

Let me first state that I have no desire to burn out.  I am tired from long hours at my place of employment, let alone effort put in on snapACT!  My passion for providing solutions for the digital photography community has not diminished; however, I do believe that I will serve the goals better by taking some time for myself.

Since I do not want to mislead anyone, I’ll specify that I will be back working on snapACT by the end of October.  Please do keep in mind that the other members of the snapACT team will continue to work on their parts of the solution in the meantime.

Now, for a bit of an update: the community photo sharing website is coming along well.  Social networking aspects are coming together.  User profile modification is well underway.  Basic album viewing is working well.  Commenting on photos works too.  There is, naturally, so much that can be done… but as I’ve previously mentioned, we want to deliver something solid first, and then continue to improve the solution by not only addressing issues that arise, but adding in the features that the community wants the most.

We are very excited!

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Release Early, Release Often - Then Listen

Apart from all of us being very busy with either parts of the software product or the online photo sharing service, we regularly get together to discuss the direction to make sure we all agree on “the right path”. It’s easy for us to come up with what we believe to be what people want, but we can’t be certain until the people have their say. With that in mind, we’ve all come to agree on the following course of action:

“Release early.”

You might ask yourself: What the heck is this guy going on about? I think it can best be explained as keeping things simple. We have many grand plans for what we could do, but to spend time designing and implementing all of them only to discover that our future users find them unimportant - or worse, useless - would be considered a bit of a setback. Hence, we Release Early with a basic feature set.

We plan on finishing up a subset of the total features that we’ve thought of and releasing both the digital photo management software and the online sharing community/service in a limited scope fashion. This does not mean that they won’t be functional and easy to use - it means that we’ll have focused on and addressed the problem areas that we spoke of in prior postings here on the snapACT blog.

So, Releasing Early simply means not waiting until we get all of our wishlist items implemented before showing the world our improved offerings. Releasing Early allows you to have your say on what we’ve accomplished so far and what direction you would like us to go. It allows us to ensure we focus on what the community wants, instead of wasting our time on unwanted features.

Releasing Early also tends to imply Releasing Often. For the online photo sharing community in particular, that is the path we will take. As we get feedback from you, we will implement desired features and release them relatively frequently. For the digital photo management software, we will be listening just attentively for suggestions, but due to the nature of software delivery mechanisms, the releases will be more regulated.

We do have a tentative release date set, but due to our availability, we’re unable to share that yet. We are also working on a launch strategy that will allow us to grow our user base at a manageable and comfortable pace. We will share information on both of these topics with you in the coming weeks - just as soon as we’ve ironed out the wrinkles and solidified our time lines.

We know you’ll like what snapACT has to offer, and we’re very excited to share it with you.

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

What are You Looking for in a Photo Sharing Solution?

Thanks Kramer for getting this blog started.

As Kramer has commented, photo sharing is not new by all means. There are numerous solutions out there, however, we would really like to know what you are looking for in a photo sharing solution? What do you like and dislike about how you are currently sharing photos with your friends and family?

Your comments are appreciated.