Storytlr Blog

Hello everyone,

If you have been following lifestreaming related news, you must have seen that this week was tough week for lifestreaming services. As Mark Krynsky points out in his post, Swurl has closed, Profilactic is looking for a new home, and Dandelife is refocusing. Mark also raises the question of data availability after such a service closes and advocates for Data Portability.

We fully agree. You having the control of your data is of major importance to us. We will have a developper API, and we will implement Data Portability when deemed mature enough. In the meanwhile, you already have access to our backup function, that lets you download all of your data as csv files.

We also wanted to stress that we have a reliable and tested backup system (based on LVM snapshoting, and mysqldumps, with remote storage). We actually had to use our recovery procedure following our failed update and it worked like a charm ! Yet, as the Ma.gnolia incident showed, even these can fail. We therefore encourage you to backup your data using our backup tool on a regular basis. If you would like us to facilitate this process even more, let us know on the feedback forum.

Reliability is also much better since our move to our new server. We have not experienced any downtime or slowdowns lately and don't see any reasons for this to happen in the future either. Slicehost.com is a fantastic solution !

Finally, as you know, storytlr is not a company but just a project we are running for fun. This means that we are not under financial pressure due to the crisis. We are actually working hard on our next release, bringing exciting new features such as unified tagging !

We are young, not funded, and we understand that this may scare some of you. We hope that this message answers concerns you may have. If you have any questions or ideas, do not hesitate to email us and we'll reply as soon as humanly possible !

Thanks all for your ongoing support,

Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Hello Storytellers !

Just in time for the spring, we bring you a fresh new release with two really exciting new features and various little tweaks and bug fixes. We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do ! If you want to directly see the new features in action, have a look at eschnou's page.

We introduce the notion of Pages, available in the Configure->Pages section. A page is a different view at your data than the standard lifestream. For example a picture page will display all your pictures, accross all sources, in a nice gallery format. You can also add as many 'lifestream' page as you like, and select which content to display on each. This is only the begining, now that the foundation is in place we have many ideas of new kind of pages leveraging your data in innovative ways !

Tagging is finally there, and unified accross all data sources. A tag cloud widget is also provided to help you navigate your data. Note that tags will be imported from now on, so if you want them for past data, you'll have to reimport your sources (but this can destroy stories and comments associated with old items).

A new theme is added, and this time it is a contribution from one of our users ! Thanks a lot to stumblepeach for this ! We really appreciate !

Amongst the other tweaks, it is worth pointing out that you can now edit the title of any widget (yes, you can get rid of the 'my web 2.0 life' title if you want :-). We've also added a remember me box, especially useful for all of you using the bookmarklet.

That's it for now. Please send us your feedback, tell us what you think and if you spot any issue, contact us and we'll try to fix asap !

Thank you all for the fantastic support,

Cheers,

-Laurent & Alard

Following our new release, we've received the same request from various users: "how did eschnou add a 'blog' tab showing only his blog entries ?". It is really easy to do, but not necessarily obvious (something to make easier in the next release). Here is how to do it:

• Add another page of the type 'lifestream'
• Click the 'customize' link
• Select the sources (storytlr is one of them) that you want to display
• Select the type of data to show (here, blog only)
• Pick a nice title
• Click save and you are done !

You can also reorganize the order of the tabs. The one on top will always be the first one displayed when a user visits your page. So yes, you can also get rid of the default lifestream page if you don't like it.

Figure 1: You can add and customize additional 'lifestream' pages