Project mailing lists

I received a lot of thoughtful feedback for my interface design study of the upcoming version 0.3. Thank you everybody! I have updated the mock-up with some of your suggestions. If you want to look at it and maybe test the new URL checker, click here and then enter "microsoft.com" without http://.

In case anybody is interested in further discussion, I have set up some mailing lists for that. Just click on the list name below and subscribe.

• browsershots-announce: Software release announcements.
• browsershots-commits: Subversion commit messages for developers.
• browsershots-dev: Discussion among developers.
• browsershots-factories: About running a screenshot factory.
• browsershots-i18n: Translating the web interface into other languages.
• browsershots-ui: Designing the web-based user interface.

Mock-up for Browsershots 0.3

I have started designing the user interface for the next version of Browsershots. Now I'd love to get feedback and ideas for it. Please have a look and tell me what you think. Remember that it's only a mock-up with no real functionality so far.

You can either post a comment right here, or send Email, or open a Trac ticket. If you are a web designer, send me a scribble with your ideas! I'm particularly interested in the following points:

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Queue limit reduced from 24 hours to one

For most factories, the demand is consistently higher than the throughput, so they are always near the queue limit that used to be 24 hours. I have now reduced the queue limit to 60 minutes. The effect is that the same number of jobs will be rejected because the queue is full, but the turnaround time and the length of the queue are slashed.

Drastic queue cleanup

At the moment, most factories are busy with jobs that have been submitted more than a week ago. Chances are that nobody will ever look at the results. Also, the hard drive on the server is getting very full because of the screenshots that are kept until the last factory for an URL is finished. So I have decided to trim the queue manually and install a queue limit. I'm sorry for those who were really waiting two weeks for their last screenshots to come through.

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Filtering for recent screenshots

Thanks to the wonders of MySQL, you can now select recent screenshots by URL, browser, and screen resolution. Just append snippets of text to the URL, separated by slashes. The overview will only show screenshots that match all of your filters. A few examples:

• browsershots.org
• Japanese sites
• Safari browser
• Screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels

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Email notification for completed jobs

Since yesterday, an automated email will be sent when all browsershots for a given URL have been uploaded. The recipient address is guessed from the URL: notifications for www.example.com will be sent to webmaster@example.com. It is quite surprising how many people ignore RFC 2142 and reject messages for the webmaster.

Layout makeover completed

With some help from a fellow webdesigner in Stuttgart, I have finished the layout makeover for browsershots.org today. The Trac and Blog pages should be fully integrated with the new design now. I still need to do some cross-browser testing. Wasn't there a free online service for that somewhere?

Start page design study updated

With your invaluable feedback, I have created an improved version of the live design study for the new start page. What do you think?

• Smaller logo but with text.
• New colors for links.
• Better button captions.
• One line of "what is this".
• Lighter language selector.
• Replaced tab bar with some links above the URL input field.

Unlimited storage (almost)

Until recently, your finished screenshots were stored on the server for only 4 days. From now on, files will only get deleted if they haven't been accessed in a week. This means that if you hotlink to the images and there is traffic, the files will be kept on the server, and the corresponding database entries too.

Design study for new start page

Google is a good example for a simple user interface. I'm planning to replace the start page with a similar minimalistic submit form. Here is a live design study for it (but the buttons are not working yet). Your feedback is very welcome.

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Snurf for Browsershots

I have set up a blog system called Snurf for the Browsershots project. It was written in Python by Mark Rowe. All entries are stored in plain files, no database is needed. Simplicity rules!

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Trac for Browsershots

I have set up a source code management system called Trac for the Browsershots project. The project documentation will slowly be moved to the Trac wiki. There is also a roadmap and a ticket system. Everybody can edit the wiki or create a new ticket with a bug report or request for enhancement.

New features

It seems that the server load has gone down to comfortable levels.

Have a look at the search that I added today. Does that work for you? And I have improved the job queue to show only the oldest and newest jobs, not the 7000 jobs in between.

Server overload

Now there you have it. Too many visitors! The server is coming to a grinding halt since 8:00 UTC. As emergency measures I have tried the following:

• Only 2 screen resolutions instead of 6.
• Only 2 active screenshot factories instead of 8.
• Only 5 recent screenshots instead of 30.
• Maximum of 6 pages per screenshot instead of 10.

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The rush isn't over

We never expected the project to take off like this. Yesterday we had 3617 visitors from 2226 sites, which is not really big deal. But you have eaten 5 gigabytes of traffic and submitted jobs like crazy. The job queue is already 14 hours long. Woot!

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www.browsershots.org

After deciding the new name for the project, I have started moving to the new domain http://www.browsershots.org. At the same time, I'm rewriting the content manager from PHP to Python and translating the documentation from English to German.

Powered by Snurf: a Python-based Blogging System