Browse entries tagged "uploads"

Search, bulk uploading and alternate image

Friday Oct 24, 2008

There have been many small tweaks to the PixyBlog system over the past month, nothing too significant, but lots of smaller changes. I'll just run-through a few of them in summary here.

Search Improved

As the number of photos on PixyBlog grows, search plays an increasingly important role. We now have some photoblogs with close to 1000 images. In these cases clicking through page after page of thumbnails to find an image can be rather tedious, and this is where search comes into it's own.

Currently on PixyBlog we have two types of search; Keywords and Tags. I won't go into the specifics of each now as they've been covered before on our news blog, and more recently Jacques Bron has written an excellent article about optimizing your photos for search on PixyBlog - well worth a read. However, I would like to inform you of a couple of changes; the keyword search now searches over the Tags and Gallery Names, but no longer the Users Comments. You can also use quotes "" to provide more specific results when searching with more-than-one word.

Bulk Uploader

From an ongoing discussion in our Report a Bug forum it became evident that there were some problems with our Bulk Uploader. We've been working on this all week and have now got a new & improved version of the uploader online which should address those reported problems.

PixyBlog front page tweaks

Some of you may have noticed a few minor tweaks to the design of pixyblog.com front page. These are designed to give easier access to more areas of the site.

Alternate Image

Finally, there have been some requests on a way to display an alternate version of an image on a photoblog. We've come-up with a solution which both Sven and Jacques have been experimenting with, and we've written a short wiki article about it as well. It looks like a great feature, and we're now working on a way to make this standard across all photoblogs; watch this space.

Posted at 07:51AM Oct 24, 2008 by Richard Jones | Comments[0]

High-res and bulk uploads

Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

We are pleased to offer our customers a new option when uploading their photos to PixyBlog. With the move to AWS we can now allow uploads of up to 200mb. This allows our customers to store their high-resolution photos with us. To do this we have released a new upload tool which can handle uploading of multiple high-resolution photos.

This new upload tool does not replace our existing upload method, rather it offers an alternate method for the uploading of higher resolution photos. Our customers can find the new upload tool by logging-in and going to "Photos > Upload".

Posted at 11:46AM Apr 23, 2008 by Richard Jones |

PixyBlog moves to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

Today PixyBlog moved it's hosting to the Amazon Web Services Platform (AWS). This is a revolutionary way to host websites and webservices and allows us to offer our customers a much improved service. Currently we use two of Amazon's services:

EC2 allows us to host the PixyBlog service on a significantly faster server and network. Visitors should notice faster loading of pages and images, and our customers should also notice greater speeds when uploading photos.

S3 allows us to offer improved storage and backup for all our customers photos. We can now allow uploads of up to 200mb (a slight improvement over our original 3mb), this allows storage of high-resolution photos and we have also released a new bulk upload tool; more information about this shortly.

We see AWS as our long-term home for PixyBlog and we will be tweaking and tuning our service to take advantage of this awesome technology and pass-on the benefits to our customers.

Posted at 11:44AM Apr 23, 2008 by Richard Jones | Comments[2]