Posts Tagged inkzee
New UI redesign
As we said before, since we got back from the Bay Area we’ve been working on getting the site out of alpha status. Our goal is to open it up to everyone as soon as possible. This plan requires 3 steps:
- Redesign the UI and make it more user-friendly
- Redesign the database architecture and alleviate the current scalability bottlenecks we are experiencing
- Move all infrastructure to Amazon Web Services for easy horizontal scaling.
To date we’ve accomplished the first milestone. We did a complete overhaul of the UI for Inkzee. It wasn’t just the design but we needed to add a lot of help features. One thing we’ve seen is that most users just use a small fraction of the features the site has (and there aren’t too many). Because the current version was on alpha status, there where no help pages whatsoever. That meant that only the most advanced users were able to navigate the site. Our goal is to make it plain simple for everyone and so we realized we needed a complete help system.
So, off we went and added a lot of help features into the site. For starters, we added a help page where you a a complete (or so we think) guide to Inkzee. In there you’ll, hopefully, find the answers to the most common questions you might have.
Secondly, we changed most of our cryptic icons and turned them into fully blown buttons with their textual meaning apart from the icon.
We also added a bunch of widgets to the main page so you now will have the latest news of this blog on the main page. We also added a much more interactive “get started” widget than the old plain text layer we had before.
And finally but not least, we added help bubbles all over the interface with tips about the feature at hand.
The first reviews from our alpha users has been very positive but we will love to get some feedback from everyone. Found a spelling mistake? Couldn’t find help about a specific topic? Do you still don’t undeerstand what that button or feature does? Feel free to contact us with your suggestions and ideas!
The Inkzee Team
Back from Silicon Valley
Hello everybody!
Sorry for this long lasting silence. It’s funny how easily we preach the value of blogs but we don’t apply it to ourselves. Anyhow we are back with some news. We recently went to Silicon Valley and had some really amazing conversations with a lot of entrepreneurs there. We should say that one of the most enlightening conversations was with Cameron Koczon. We talked about a lot of things but one struck as really important. We can still remember his words: “Dude, you’ve got everything, the idea, the prototype, the users, what are you waiting for?“. And of course he was right.
There is nothing like getting trapped in your own web. We kept pushing our final release date because we wanted to finish this or that. After getting back from the Valley we realized we just needed to focus on getting Inkzee out of the door and not that much about individual features. So all of our late efforts have been oriented towards that goal. The first stage we’ve accomplished was a complete UI redesign. Right now we are working on a couple of things we still need before opening Inkzee to the world.
In conclusion, we are still working for you guys and you’ll see some results very soon!
The Inkzee team
Archiving news, what a wonderful thing
Hi all,
Some days ago we rolled out a new release. Apart from fixing a bunch of minor bugs, we implemented an internal improvement. One of the problems we were running into is the huge amount of posts the system is tracking (last week was something around 650.000 posts). Problem is that accessing a single table with that amount of records in it can be time expensive. The solution was simple, most of the posts that are stored are quite old (more than 3 or 4 months old) so we decided to move all those old posts to some other tables where they would be access much less. That meant that we offloaded a lot of information from the main post table, keeping the number of records there under control.
As usual, implementing this things isn’t as straight forward as we would like and we had to implement a specific logic so that if a user wanted to read more posts from a blog that had been archived we would return them to the user in a seamless way. It’s finally working and the site’s performance is considerably better, so we are quite happy.
During the next weeks we’ll be partitioning some tables so that the site goes even faster, we’ll keep you posted.
Thanks for your patient!
The Inkzee Team
New theme for our blog
We have to say this: FINALLY! Yeah, we’ve managed to get some time to deploy a new theme for our blog. It’s nothing fancy, one of the thousands of WordPress themes but it’s much slicker than the old one. Hope you guys like it 
The Inkzee Team
The not so simple case of folder management
Today I want to tell all our readers a little tale, the case of the folder management. Folders has been one of the most asked features we got asked for in our first round of alpha testing. Users wanted to be able to group their feeds into folders. We started an early development and suddenly realized doing it wasn’t as simple as expected.
Technology seems easy to everyone except for the tech guys. Features that seem very straight forward become real nightmares to develop. The folder management was one of those. There where 2 steps we needed to take to implement it. The first one was to add all the necessary code in the user interface that enabled the user to drag and drop feeds into folders and within folders. That part was kind of easy, just some Javascript code here and there.
The second part wasn’t easy at all. We needed a way to store all the positions of all feeds and folders for a given user at any time. The easy way was to create a list to store the feed with the user’s position. Problem was that we needed to be able to reorder that list. That meant we needed to be able to change all the feeds ranking when a feed was reordered. Doing that translated into a lot of write operations to that list (and in conclusion to the servers disk). To those that aren’t tech geeks, write operations to any hard drive are very expensive, they take a long time and a lot of resources. Though if you want your servers to keep up with a big load of web traffic you need to minimize the number of write operations.
So we had this problem, if we had to change the ranking of all feeds every time some user reorder one of them, it meant a lot of write operations. The best case scenario was that the user dropped a feed at the end of this list, and so, we only needed to update this feeds rank. The worst case scenario was having the user drop a feed at the beginning of the list. In that case we needed to update all the other users feeds rank. When this list has only 10 feeds, then it’s ok, but if the list is as long as 800 feeds, those are a lot of write operations. Finally, if you start thinking we could have several users dragging and dropping feeds simultaneously, the number of possible write operations in the worst case was alarmingly high.
To solve the problem we partitioned the rank space so that ranks had a gap of x numbers in between. That allowed us to minimized the number of ranks we needed to update at a single moment. This added an extra layer of difficulty as we needed to track the number of free slots available before we needed to reorder the whole feed list.
At the same time we needed to track if a feed was being dragged, before or after another feed, before or after a folder or if it was being dropped inside a folder. So we had to check the type of operation, where, which folder and if we had free slots there.
When we finally had all this stuff right we had to translate this internal structure into the export / import mechanism that produces or reads opml files (xml files). We needed to be able to read an opml file with folders and translate it into our internal representation and ranking list so it would be correctly displayed to the users.
All in all, it was fun but a very hard work for something that initially seemed so trivial to accomplish. The system is working now and apart from eventual glitches it should work. We still want to get a better UI for the drag & drop thing as it seems to us it’s still a little bit clumsy, but we’ll get there.
So now you know that even the simplest feature requires a hard work, so choose wisely what you want us to develop next 
El Economista Interview
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay but the newspaper interview was published 2 weeks ago in the EcoAula section. Nevertheless, they also published it online for all of you who want to read about it.
You can find it here, and although it’s in Spanish I’m sure most of our readers can understand it
Cheers all!
Radio and newspaper interviews
Hi all,
This Sunday we were interviewed on Radio 5 @ RNE, a Spanish radio. It was a very short interview, but hey, publicity is publicity
Because it was broadcasted really early, we record it and we are uploading it here for everyone to listen.
We also did an interview for El Economista, a local newspaper. In theory the interview should be printed in tomorrows edition. I’ll update this post with a link to the interview as soon as it gets out.
1st price of the EOI School of Business Entrepreneur contest
Hello all,
Today we have great news! Yesterday our company was selected as the winner of the VI Edition of the EOI School of Business nation wide Entrepreneur contest. We are very excited about it as it’s a great revalidation of our work. The prize is also a good amount of cash that will keep us running longer, something that is extremely valuable, especially during this financial meltdown.
We want to thank all members of EOI that made this contest possible and all the other entrepreneurs that competed with really cool ideas too. Keep them going!
More links to the same news (In Spanish):
Facultad de Informática (UPM)
Economía Hoy
El Correo Gallego
Región Digital
Ibercampus
El Periódico de Extremadura
Campus Red
If you find new posts about it, please leave a comment with the link and we’ll update the post
Architectural changes
Summer has been a slow month but we’ve been working on a new architecture for Inkzee. Right now, and even though we enabled new internal features, the current server where the alpha is hosted is too slow for the application and so we are migrating it to a bigger server.
Before we complete the migration, we are finishing some big changes to the way the application works. The new changes will make the application much faster and much more scalable. That way, if the new server isn’t enough, we’ll be able to add new machines to the application and scale horizontally.
The architectural changes will be finished by next week, so the migration will happen very soon and hopefully we’ll be able to send more invitations for the current alpha.
Thanks a lot for the comprehension and we hope everyone had a good summer!
The Inkzee team
Entrepreneur contest finalists
Hello everybody,
Today we have great news! Inkzee has been selected as one of the 10 finalists for the Entrepreneur contest run by the EOI School of Business. It’s been an honor to have reached the final stage and we’ll try everything in our hand to take the first prize.
The next phase will be the 29th and 30th of September and we’ll have to do a presentation of Inkzee in front of a jury who will elect the winners.
Even though we haven’t won, the fact of being in the final is really great for us. It revalidates our business idea and most importantly, that our business plan is a solid one. Let’s hope we can at least achieve one of the top prizes.
Wish us good luck!!
