28 posts tagged “vox”

I built a new little Vox widget over the last couple of weeks. It scrapes your Vox favorites and shows them in a square that changes every five seconds to show a new one at random. Check it:

You can use it too! The code is below (make sure you change "pop.vox.com" to your own Vox domain. You can embed it anywhere that allows you to embed an iframe (which Vox does, obviously). It fits nicely in your Vox sidebar, as you can see on my blog. Enjoy!

UPDATE: You want to set this script to run on *vox.com/compose* in the Greasemonkey settings. Sorry about that.

Here's a little Greasemonkey script for you. What it does is make linking stuff from your Vox entry a little easier. How to use:

First, type some stuff in Compose. Next, highlight the word or phrase you want to link. Now, normally, you'd click the link button and type the URL... With the script installed, you get a couple of extras: If you hold down SHIFT while you click the link button, Greasemonkey will go off and grab the URL for the top search result for the term you highlighted, and fill it in for you. If instead you hold down ALT while clicking the link button, Greasemonkey will fill in the box with a Wikipedia link for whatever you highlighted. Try it out and let me know what you think!

I just got my first set of prints from the big test order I made before we turned on our Qoop integration and I have to say, they came out great! Even the crappiest camera phone shots look good. I chose the non-glossy finish, and mostly 4x6s, although I did get a couple of 5x7s that were originally shot with my dSLR or my five megapix Optio. Those came out really amazingly. I printed the shots from my Nokia N75 and a couple from the N93i I took to Hawaii a few months ago as 4x6s and they're really great as well. There are some old ones from my Cingular 8125 that, while not amazing, are still not bad at all. Qoop did a good job of scaling and resizing the oddly cropped ones and the print quality is awesome. Can't wait to get my poster and my mug!

Oh, also... this first batch only took three days from the time I placed the order to arrival at my desk. Nice.

Release days around here at the Vox Blog Factory[tm] are always stressful. We're pushing out code that we've been working on for the last couple of weeks, and often by the time it goes out the door, we've had a couple of solid days of last minute bug fixes, fire fighting, re-tooling, and refactoring. I'm always proud when we push out a release and it flies away without crashing full speed in to a plate glass window.

For the most part, people love what we do. I feel like we're all connected to this community deeply enough that we understand (pretty much) what people like and don't like. Almost all of us that work on Vox have been here since the beginning, and we hold the spirit of the product and the close-knit community dear, and we try to do things that are innovative and interesting, and in the best interest of our users. I think we're pretty good at it, and it usually shows as we proudly read through reactions to our new releases and bask in praise and Vox love.

Then there are days like today, where it seems like the hatin' machine has fired up to eleven. A good number of people seem unimpressed with the Neighborhood Activity module that we put on the home page. We got a lot of comments, which I personally don't want to address (not that I'm expected to) in the post because for one thing, most of them are downright rude, and for another, I don't think they're particularly well thought-through. I'll talk more about that in a minute, but first I want to talk about what I like about the new features and that module in particular.

Here at Vox, we have a sort of secret server where we put up builds of our new release a few days ahead of time so we can play around with it using real world data before we turn it live. It's sort of a baby step between being in QA with all test data and being live for everyone to see. We've had the build up and have been playing with it since Monday or Tuesday.

I have to admit that at first, I wasn't interested in the Neighborhood Activity module. Not being a Facebook type, it didn't really push any buttons for me, and like a lot of people, I didn't really see myself needing some of this information.

I changed my attitude quickly though, and I've found myself going back there a few times a day to see what people are up to. Here's the main reason why: Vox, for me, is about building a little community of people that I like and sharing stuff with each other in that community. When I see that Lilia has favorited a photo, that's meaningful to me, because I like a lot of the types of photos that Lilia likes. When I see that Garth or Lisa have joined a particular group, that's also meaningful, because I have so much in common with those two that I would probably find groups that they join interesting. Same thing with new neighbors.

Then there's the theme change announcement. Now, granted, these are a little broken right now. We're working on de-duping the information so you don't get like fifty notices when one of your friends can't decide on a theme. When it's all done, you'll get one notice, telling you about the latest theme they chose. It'll work for when your friend puts up a new custom banner. I like this a lot. If I spend a few hours making a new banner for my Vox, I want my friends to know I did it and go check it out!

I like this module, and I look forward to us refining it as we go.

Still, I know it's not for everyone. Some people want to lead a slightly more private life and that's cool. That's why we gave you the option to turn off your broadcast. Also, did you know that all of this information can be found elsewhere on the site anyway? I can go to your blog and see what theme you have. I can look at your neighbors list. I can go to your profile and see what (public) groups you're a member of. None of this is newly exposed data. We've simply made what we think is the most interesting stuff more accessible.

We've said all along that one of the most important things in Vox is privacy. In my opinion, that's as true today as it was on the first day. If it weren't, I'm not sure I'd be here. I've been blogging for my friends and family for over six years now, and the reason I use these particular products, and the reason I wanted to come work here on them in the first place, is because I know that I can control who sees what.

As for the rest of the features:

Links and Vox This are so awesome and I'm incredibly excited to have them. We still have some work to do to completely build them out, but this feature is shaping up really nicely. I'm proud to have had a lot of input in to the design of this feature, and everyone around here just loves the Vox This button that I made for my last Team Vox post (right, Lilia?). Seriously, I think this will prove to be really useful in sharing stuff I find around the web; a lot of what I write (rant) about is information I've found in news articles or other blogs, and it's nice to provide a way for people to get to the same source information I used.

Edit & Share menus: Pretty good, I think. I'm not a design person, but it's nice to have less clutter. I generally shy away from having a zillion accounts on every social bookmarking/networking/music sharing/news reading/dog walking site out there, but I know I'm not the only use case, so it's nice that we give people an easy way to share content with the other communities they belong to. For the haters, keep in mind that this is not new functionality either. While we have made it easy to Digg a post via the link on the post, you always could have just gone to Digg before and put in the URL of the post anyway. As one could expect, we don't allow sharing of non-public assets. Never will.

Themes: Yay themes!! I like that we've started doing themes that can change colors depending on factors like time of day. We've been thinking about this for a while, and it's cool that someone actually paid us to develop it. The possibilities are endless with this, and it's exciting to see what else comes out of it.

Tag line in the sidebar: Kind of cool. I don't know why this upsets people. I think it's fun to see what goofy things people have changed that line to. And, if you don't like people having such free and unadulterated access to your tag line, you can always just set it to nothing I suppose.

So there it is. I like this release, and frankly, I busted balls to make sure it was a good one. I get that not everyone is going to love everything that we do, and that's totally cool with me. I don't delude myself in to thinking we can please everyone all of the time. I wish people would be less rude and insistent that they're entitled to having their minds read and having exactly everything they personally want and nothing more implemented, but I guess that's expecting too much. I guess the best thing to do is to keep doing what we always do: listening to the ENTIRE community and building as much good stuff as we can.

One last thing, for anyone in my own neighborhood who's reading this and who may have commented on the post: Please don't feel like, just because I'm whining about the reactions, you have to "behave" when you know I or someone at Team Vox is watching, or like you have to shield us from your anger or disappointment. We know that we make you mad sometimes and we truly do value ALL of the feedback we get about the product. We are pretty insistent about using the Feedback link, as opposed to the comments on Team Vox, and that's mostly because procedurally that's the only way we can manage the ever growing user base. For my homies, though, and you know who you are, you can always feel free to contact me with your thoughts about Vox. I like hearing from you, good or bad and I'll always keep you in mind when I'm in meetings where we're trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.

Word.

Yesterday, we pushed out Release 32 of Vox, the release notes for which can be found here. We turned out some cool features, but there's one new bit of functionality in there that we didn't tell you about yet. We're calling it Vox This and it's an API that allows you to easily bring content from other sites in to your Vox. For you Web 2.0 geeks out there, it's similar to the "Digg This" API, and we hope it's not long before we see other sites out there adding Vox This buttons to their pages.

In the meantime, though, we've come up with a way for you to be able to use Vox This as you roam the non-Vox web (it's still out there, right?). Simply drag the bookmarklet (at the right) to your bookmark toolbar in your browser (in Firefox) or right-click it and add it to your favorites (in Internet Explorer, you probably want to put it in the Links folder). Then, whenever you come across something on the web that you want to Vox about, you just hit your Vox This button.

So what happens when you use Vox This? I'm glad you asked that. Or... I'm glad I asked that for you.

When you Vox This, you'll be taken to a landing page where you'll confirm that you want to add the item to your library. If you Vox'd This on a supported Vox conduit partner's item, like a Flickr photo or YouTube video, then you'll be prompted to add it to your library and optionally compose a post. If you Vox This on a non-partner's site, like a CNN story perhaps, then you'll be prompted to add that to your links library (more about link libraries later) and write a post about it. The landing page will do its best to figure out the title of whatever you Vox'd, and it will let you pick an image from those found on the page to use as a thumbnail. If you had any text highlighted, then that will be brought in as the description. The link will be added in to your post with the thumbnail and description. As with any other enclosure, you can hover over it to get to the format tool which will let you left/right/center align it or resize it within your post.

Give it a try and let us know what you think. We hope this makes it easy for you to write about news or events, or other interesting stuff you find out on the web.

It doesn't work so good.

Nick has a internetz

It didn't give me a headache at all, and the massive beer that I'm about to go drink has nothing to do with it. 

Today is a significant day. One year ago today, Junior made the first post to Vox. Back then, it was simply called "Project Comet" and the URL was http://www.notcomet.com (because it would NOT continue to be called Comet). I wasn't around then - I would join Six Apart eleven days later on March 13th, and make my first post then.

As Ben said in our meeting this morning, we should all be proud of what we've built. I think that goes for 6a employees and non-employees alike, because this is not only a seriously kick ass piece of software, but a really great community as well. Like a fine wine, or perhaps a stinky cheese, it gets better every day. I'm glad to be here.

Here are some early screenshots (mostly from bug reports that I wrote, so they show *gasp* defects!):

And here's an old error dialog that Harold designed:

Try again... if you dare.

5 comments

Startups can sometimes be a royal pain in the ass. Sometimes you have to miss out on a vacation or a night out. You don't have a start and end time to work. You're always at work. You check email constantly. You put out little fires All. The. Time. Most of the time, the personalities at a startup are strong ones, so you fight. You fight like siblings who've been sharing a room a little too long. You're never the smartest one. Someone can always kick you down a peg. You don't roll in money, even when all your friends are. Instead, you lovingly stroke a little pile of stock options, hoping that they'll one day be worth more than the paper they're printed on. There's no Christmas bonus. There's no 20 paid holidays per year. What there is is a lot of work to do and not a lot of time in which to do it.

I love every minute, though. I love working with insanely smart people who are passionate about what they do. I love working on products that I'm proud of, and that people GET. I love that every day is a learning experience, and that my drive to become better never stagnates. I love that my ideas are listened to and considered, regardless of my job title or how inappropriate it would be at some larger companies for me to contribute them. These are the rewards of the startup, and to me they're worth more than money or public stock or job security.

Today, though... I'm loving on THIS startup. Don't get me wrong, I'm usually loving on this startup, but today it moves me. I love that I work on a product that would move someone to write this, and that I work for a company that would reward such an action with this (those last two links are very much worth clicking on). I know I'll get half a dozen private messages or IMs from people telling me what a fucking cornball I am, but I don't really care. I'm very proud and happy to work here and be part of what Six Apart does, both in terms of innovation and technical achievement, and personal connections and relationships.

Throughout my career, connecting with customers has always been my first priority. It might be because of my tech support background, or all those long nights at AAA I spent sending tow trucks out to pull peoples' cars out of the washes in rural parts of Arizona. One way or another, it was pushed in to my brain early on that you are nothing without your customers, and you'd better not ever forget it. I never do. I form relationships with them. I make time for them. I appreciate them. Six Apart does all of those things too and that's why I'm here. I like you guys, and I want you to like us.

That said, you tell anyone I wrote such sappy shit and I will cut you.

Last week, we pushed a release that included the ability to do full cross-posts to TypePad or LiveJournal. We've had cross-posting functionality for a while now, but before this release, we'd only send an excerpt of the post to TP or LJ. This would strip out all the images and formatting, and would only include a few lines. For some people, that's the exact behavior they wanted in their cross-posting functionality. Some of us, on the other hand, wanted to completely replicate our Vox posts to the other site, and that's where the full cross-posting comes in. With this feature enabled, your entire post will be cross-posted to your other blog, with all of the formatting, pictures, and assets intact. The media assets are clickable and linked back to their originals on Vox, and everything should pretty much look like it does on your Vox blog.

To enable this feature, you need to reconfigure your other blog. Simply go to Account, and then click on Outside Services. If you already have another blog configured, then you should see a link under "Your other blog" to reconfigure. Put in your other blog's credentials, authorize, and then check the "Yes, send full post to this blog" box. Save, and you're done. From now on, when you choose to cross-post your Vox entries to your other blog, it will be the full versions instead of excerpts. If you ever decide to go back to excerpts, then just follow this procedure again and don't check the box.