Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Delicious is dead. Long live Delicious.

Plenty has been said in this blog about the social bookmarking service Delicious over the years.   Lately, discussions of the Delicious fate were falling into the sadness.  After the web service was bought by Yahoo, it was maintained and developed for a while and then began to slow down.  Things got so bad in fact, that Yahoo announced that it was selling the property.  That was a moment of panic for many – after all, good or bad, Delicious was a storage of vasts amount of wisdom for many people.  Pretty much every user at the moment exported data and made a few backups.  Most looked at the alternative services.  Some started moving over.  I was in that group as well, migrating all my bookmarks to Evernote.

Anyhow, Delicious was acquired by a couple of guys who are famous for their work on YouTube, back in the day.  And that was a glimpse of hope.  Finally, I thought, geeky techies will know what to do with it.  They will know how to breath some life into the project and bring its much deserved popularity back.  They will prove me moving all my stuff to Evernote wrong.

Finally, a few days ago, the new Delicious went live.  Fresh look, new features – things that we all were waiting for.  Or so it seemed.  Upon a closer look it turned out that most of the old useful features are gone.  And the new features aren’t the ones everyone was waiting for.  Overall, this is a huge transformation of the service that Delicious is.  Part of it is still Delicious – there are still bookmarks and tags.  But part of it is something new – stacks, improved multimedia previews, missing networking, cropped tag navigation, and such.  The primary focus of the service moved.  Before it was primarily a storage of bookmarks.  And secondly, a place to share bookmark wisdom via networking with friends, tagging, and search.  Now, it’s more of a fancy multimedia collections or something of a sort.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for new and exciting technologies.  But for me personally, Delicious was something completely different.  And now, with this new release, the last hope of that old Delicious the memory of which I love and cherish, is gone.  It’s no more.  The end of an era.  It’s time to move on and explore the new age.  Delicious is dead.  Long live Delicious.

SlideShare moves from Flash to HTML5

SlideShare is a social network where people share presentations and other documents.  If you ever attended any conferences, talks or group meetings, chances are the slides for that were uploaded and made available on the SlideShare.  Until now, though, using those slides was a bit awkward, since they were always converted to Flash.  Your browser had to have a plugin, it was difficult or impossible to copy-paste text from slides, search was weird, and access from the mobile was very limited.  Gladly, SlideShare announced that they are moving from Flash to HTML5 which by itself should fix all those nuances and provide for some more useful features.

Here are their reasons for switching:

  1. The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers. This is great from an operations perspective. This saves us from extra storage costs, and maximizes the cache hit ration on our CDN (since a desktop request fills the cache for a mobile request, and vice-versa). It’s also great from a software engineering perspective, because we can put all our energy into supporting one format and making it really great.
  2. Documents load 30% faster and are 40% smaller. ‘Nuff said on that front, faster is ALWAYS better.
  3. The documents are semantic and accessible. Google can parse it and index the documents, and so can any other bot, scraper, spider, or screen-reader. This means that you can write code that does interesting things with the text on the slideshare pages. You can even copy and paste text from a SlideShare document, something that was always a pain with Flash.

Read the full story to learn about some of the difficulties they experienced during this migration.

Happy birthday, CloudFlare! Thank you for IPv6

Yesterday I received some very good news from the service that makes this website faster for people all around the world – CloudFlare.  In summary: it is CloudFlare’s first birthday since they went public, and to celebrate this they implemented an extremely easy to setup IPv6 gateway service.  Anyone using CloudFlare can enable the IPv6 gateway either for the whole domain or for specific hosts, and it only takes a couple of clicks.  Of course, I’ve done so and used a few testing tools around the web to confirm that my website is now accessible via IPv6 also.

Thank you, CloudFlare!  Happy birthday!  And please, by all means, keep doing what you are doing.

Continue reading Happy birthday, CloudFlare! Thank you for IPv6

myGengo – human translation service that scales

Via this GigaOm blog post I came across an interesting service – myGengo.  I’ve had plenty of projects that dealt with multi-lingual issues, and professional, punctual translations were always a pain in the process.  So it is nice to see a company that uses, in my opinion, a very correct approach to the problem.

Right now, the translation market has two main segments: a high-end market dominated by full-time in-house translators, and a low-end market dominated by Google Translate. myGengo’s service aims to occupy the space in between the two markets by offering “human translation services at scale.”

Essentially, myGengo is like an oDesk built specifically for translation services. myGengo has assembled a group of more than 3,000 translators worldwide who work on a freelance basis through myGengo’s own dedicated software program. myGengo serves clients directly, and also has an API to let other startups include myGengo’s translation services in their apps. myGengo says it is targeted at people and businesses who occasionally need high-quality, fast translation services, but aren’t in the market to hire an in-house translator for the job.

0.5 USD cents per word, 1 to 16 hours per page (depending on the complexity of the document), human translation with pre-tested personnel, API integration – it sounds almost like a dream.  Of course, for now they only support a dozen or so languages, but given that they just received a $5.25 million Series A funding, I expect the service to expand quite a bit in the nearest future.