Posts tagged as “behind-the-scenes”
As mentioned here before, the del.icio.us team is presently in the midst of a major project: building a new platform which will speed up the site and help us grow even faster. At the same time we’re also taking a close look at our UI and exploring ways to make it both easier to use and more functional. Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Many folks like the simple and terse nature of the site, while others take issue with certain elements of the design (shockingly, some of you think that light-blue-on-salmon-pink is not a good color combination; more shockingly, some of you think that it is). Our challenge then is to make del.icio.us better without messing up the stuff that already works.
We’ve been working on some new design ideas and recently conducted a series of usability tests to see if these ideas work. We brought in about a dozen people, both existing users and a few people who were new to del.icio.us. Yahoo! (our parent company) has some great facilities for this sort of thing which we basically moved into and hogged for about a week. It was a lot of fun for us (and, it seemed, for the participants), and we learned a lot from watching people use the site and try out our new designs. As we expected, we heard feedback all across the spectrum, and nearly all of it is proving deeply useful in our continuing work.
Here’s some stats from the tests:
- 20 participants
- Over 2000 post-it notes used
- 562 unique observations recorded
- Hundreds of design tweaks made as a result of feedback
- 62 cups of drip coffee and 23 lattes consumed
- Most disappointing thing overheard: “I don’t really get tags”
- Most gratifying thing overheard: “del.icio.us has totally changed my life”
- Funniest thing overheard: “I’m pleased; this new design doesn’t look like an angry fruit salad”
In the very near future we’re going to have a beta of the new design so we can get even more feedback (watch this space for announcements). Please also feel free to use this blog to share your thoughts about what you’d like to see different in del.icio.us. More cowbell? Less pink? Let us know.
Stephen Hood
Product Manager
July 9th, 2007
We’ve been busy: since our announcement in september of our millionth signup, another half-million users have joined the fun. And because of this, we’ve been more quiet then I would like, and I want to apologize.
It feels that we’ve spent almost all of our time uncomfortably bursting at the seams; we’ve always been at pretty much close to capacity. We’ve worked very hard to keep the system as stable as possible and as fast as possible in that time. However, I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the delicious community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.
For starters, even though it feels like we’ve been doing less feature work, we still have been doing weekly releases to improve performance (the new Firefox extension gets a new revision every few days it seems). Going forward, we’re going to be talking much more about what’s changed, where the bugs are, and in general, more explicit about what we’re doing.
While we’ve done some integration work with Yahoo, it’s now time to do more meaningful joint development work to take advantage of all the great technology that a company that does one hojillion hits a day has at its disposal. Doing this is pretty involved, and we’re going to take the opportunity to redo things like the UI and fix many of the less-beloved historical design quirks that still linger from my original implementation. Doing such large changes in the dark is, I think, a huge mistake, and I want to try to have a phased rollout so that everyone can get comfortable as we figure out what the future product looks like.
Late last year, our team was joined by Abe’s team, whose previous project was the backend for the new Yahoo Photos and MyWeb 1 before that. These guys know scalability like nobody’s business. On the front-end, we’ve been joined by Erik and his team of all-around asskickers. And Patrick has built a team to develop a new set of browser plugins that allow for much deeper browser integration. I have high hopes that our expanded team will be able to release a new and tastier delicious someday in the not-too distant future.
We’ve still got many questions to answer — Commas or spaces? In what way should we allow logins from Yahoo!? How should a next-generation API work? Should we do something about the dots in the name? and many more, and I look forward to figuring these things out with you in the future.
Here’s to a new year and a lot more conversation.
Joshua
February 1st, 2007
We had our party this week, and thanks to all the folks who came to help us celebrate our million user milestone and third birthday. I had a great time meeting everyone and we all were flabbergasted at the response, we were expecting maybe 100 to show up and we had at least twice as many!
A big thanks to everyone who could make it- but especially to Dan and Clara who created a meta version of our cake icon in the form of an actual cake! Finally, we’re sorry that we haven’t invented the beaming technology that could bring all our users to Sunnyvale, but we do have photos. Check them out at http://del.icio.us/party2006!
October 5th, 2006
And I’m Britta Gustafson (the one on the left), which may sound vaguely familiar if you’ve ever complained to support@del.icio.us, because I’m probably the person who answered you. I actually used to respond to all the emails from my dorm room between classes, annoying my roommate with endless typing and mumbles of “import…tags…passwords…gmrhhhf.” But summer finally arrived, and then I got whisked away to a few hundred miles north, where I am immersed in del.icio.us-ness without the distractions of things like uh, education. Yes, I’m the official summer intern now, working on support and other community-related projects (you’ll see). So keep sending us comments, questions, suggestions, kvetchings, and ideas. They’re very helpful to us, and I enjoy reading the crazy things you guys come up with.
July 26th, 2006
Please join Flickr, Upcoming.org, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo!, for Happy Hour on Sunday March 12 at Iron Cactus on the corner of Trinity and 6th from 5 to 7-ish. It’ll be fun!
Terms of Service:
User Generated Content:
Note: Space is limited, so please mark that you’re attending this event to get on the guest list. Yup, this means you need to have an Upcoming.org account to RSVP (cads!), but I’m sure you already have one!
Update: If you are a Flickr, del.icio.us or Upcoming.org user but don’t have a SXSW badge, please RSVP here and we’ll get you in!
March 4th, 2006
Today, del.icio.us turns two years old. Thanks to everyone who tolerated our burps along the way.
Speaking of burps: After several days of having our web proxy crash at precisely 6:26am EST, we’ve figured it out. Apologies to everyone who has been inconvenienced.
September 15th, 2005
As of early June, del.icio.us officially added me into the mix. Since joining the team, my tasks have included building new servers, taking James to the Shake Shake, setting up various network monitoring utilities, eating with the VCs at the Shake Shack, coding, sitting in a lawn chair dreaming of the Shake Shack, and starting a new diet.
Yesterday, I racked five new servers, bringing the current total up to 14. This will allow us to implement some power-hungry new features within the coming week or so.
July 19th, 2005
We will be moving to new serversWe will be moving to new servers on Sunday, June 5 starting at noon EST and hopefully completing by 4 PM. The site will be unavailable during this time.
Updates will be posted to this blog during that time, and we will also have live status at #delicious on irc.del.icio.us.
update 12:02 pm EDT: I’ve brought down the website and begun the database backup. This part takes about 20 minutes.
update 12:27 pm EDT: I’m moving the backups to the new server and restoring the backup. This takes about 20-60 minutes depending on the network.
update 12:40 pm EDT: I’ve begun restoring the database on the new servers. This takes about 30 minutes.
update 1:03 pm EDT: I’ve begun rebuilding the tag indices (this is faster than restoring them.) There are two of them and they take about one hour each.
update 2:31 pm EDT: I’ve begun rebuilding the second index.
update 4:04 pm EDT: The new servers are up. Some functionality is missing and will come online over the next few hours, including Related Tags, Search and Inbox.
update 6:12 pm EDT: I misconfigured something and some users were seeing the “banned” messages. Hopefully this is fixed, please let me know if you see any further problems.
update Monday, 12:02pm EDT: Looks like everything caught up overnight. The inbox is slowly replaying, should catch up in a day or two.
June 2nd, 2005
Two years ago, Joshua and I were discussing ideas for something very similar to del.icio.us. In fact, it was del.icio.us as Joshua wrote the first version shortly afterwards. The conversations and the pleasant pattern continued - I got to talk a lot, Joshua did all the actual work and every now and then, one of my suggestions would magically wind its way into the site.
Earlier this year, as Joshua was considering taking on investment and working on del.icio.us full-time, he asked me if I’d be interested in joining the yet-nonexistent company. I thoughtlessly said “Yeah, sure” much in the way you might say “Yeah, sure” if approached by a hobbyist musician friend and asked if you’d like to fly around the world and party on his private jet when he becomes a mega-rockstar.
This carelessness has cost me dearly as I now find myself at the del.icio.us office, krazy-glued to a lawnchair with no hope of escape until I implement the top 50 features demanded by del.icio.us users, starting with ‘free pony for every 100 bookmarks’.
May 24th, 2005
In the two years that I’ve been running delicious, I’ve had to move the site to bigger and faster hardware every few months as it grew. Originally it ran on a little celeron machine that I use for all my various projects, and just a few months later, it moved to a very, very loud dual Xeon IBM intellistation, where it was happy for a while. unfortunately, I had chosen to go with FreeBSD 4, which caused a lot of problems with the MySQL backend.
In January of 2005, we moved moved to an HP sent to me by a friend, colocated in a real ISP somewhere in downtown Manhattan. I added to that an inexpensive single-CPU Dell for running apache and so on.
Once again we find ourselves out of hardware, so we have procured five new dual-Xeon servers from Dell and three new dual-Opteron machines from Sun. On Monday, we’ll be moving them to the colo facility. Hopefully in the coming weeks they’ll be online and the site will, once again, move to bigger and faster hardware.
May 13th, 2005
