Storytlr Blog

Hi storytellers !

As you may have read a while ago, we have been invited by Google to present Storytlr, in San Francisco, at the Developer Sandbox of Google I/O.  This will be on May 27th & 28th.

In addition to that, we'll participate to a very special SFNewTech event, on May 26th, together with five other belgian startups. You can get your ticket here.

We still have some time available for additional meetings in the Bay area. So, if you would like to meet us and cannot make it to Google I/O or to SFNewTech, just send us an email and we'll try to setup something.

Looking forward meeting you there,

Cheers,

-Laurent

A quick post to let you know that as part of the weekly maintenance we ran today, we also rolled out a new architecture with a reverse proxy. Nothing to be afraid of, this is just a really cool trick to reduce the load on a server by letting a lightweight server (nginx) deal with static content, and only using Apache for the PHP heavy-lifting.

The performance improvement on a per page load is noticeable, but the major impact in on our average server load. However, this may break stuff if we serve the wrong files with the wrong server. So, we count on you to tell us if you spot anything weird while using the service in the coming days.

This new step is part of our 'scaling' plan that we started in January when we had our first performances issues. We will continue executing on this plan on a 'as needed' basis.

Cheers,

-Laurent

Today and tomorrow we're presenting Storytlr at Google I/O in San Francisco. We thought it would be a good opportunity to announce an exciting new location feature.

Lifestreaming services typically offers a reverse chronological view of all your online activities. Although such a view can be insightful, we at Storytlr believe there are other meaningful ways to showcase your content, besides the story format you are used to by now. 

Mainly due to maturing location technology available on today’s high end mobile devices, location is becoming available as an extra piece of information about your content. We want to leverage this location in two different ways. 

First, by offering a map view of stories where all items of a story that have location are plotted on a map (See sample - Please note that this sample only works in Firefox/Safari).

Second, you can display and browse the latest items that contain location information in reverse chronological order on a special map page (See sample - Please note that this sample only works in Firefox/Safari).

Since location is not yet ubiquitous across all sources, you can easily add location to any item on your site. We think this an exciting and new way to consume content.

In addition to location, Storytlr goes social and announces integration with Google Friend Connect. With Google Friend Connect it is easy to create a community around your Storytlr page.

Both the location and the Friend Connect features will be made public in the coming weeks. If you are around, feel free to drop by our booth at the Google I/O Developer Sandbox.

We trust you will let us know what you think!

Cheers - Alard & Laurent