As a little side project to distract myself while I’m beefing up the IM server, I decided to implement a feature we’ve been thinking about for a long time: institutionalizing the @user convention.
Now, while you’re writing your response, you’ll see a pop-up list of users within the discussion when you start typing ‘@’, and all new @user links will be linkified.
Back to the real work, now! Whuppaaa!
You may have noticed some extra goodies during the last few days, namely:
If you use Firefox, you should try it out–it’s specially made by our friends at WebMynd so when you search Google you also search Fluther. Plus, it can record your search history in a nifty way.
When you’re doing your shopping this holiday season, please buy some stuff from this box on Fluther. If you click on something and buy it, we’ll get a little referral bonus which helps pay the bills during these cold winter nights.
Please let us know what you think!
Some of you may have noticed the hour that Fluther was down this afternoon. I thought I’d give you a little insight into what we’ve been I’ve been up to while Bacio fiddles the bits on the server.
Not wanting anyone to accuse us of not running with the cool kids, I decided to implement a STOMP messaging queue system* for Fluther in November. Now, whenever a question gets asked we can offload the matching algorithm to a different machine. The result? You get a much snappier Fluther.
I’ve also rewritten our twisted-based notify server to use the message queue as well, so watch out for better emails when there’s activity on your questions.
Here’s how this afternoon went down. Many of these steps are run automatically using our custom capistrano scripts:
In practice, there were a few snags (mostly dependency issues with the new codebase), but overall everything is running very smoothly now.
* The messaging system is a customized version of Brian Rosner’s engine library and resembles starling — it’s pluggable for different queue types, provides a nice interface for deferring functions, and has sample clients that consume messages off the queue. Let me know if this interests you!
Twenty-five years after the discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS and twenty years after the initial commemoration of World AIDS day, we are fortunate that the scientific community has rallied to discover much about the lifestyle of HIV, and in doing so, develop a host of effective medicines against HIV. In Western countries, HIV-AIDS has changed from a nearly universally fatal illness to a manageable, chronic disease. However, much work remains, as the successful implementation of either a vaccine or a cure for HIV-AIDS continues to be elusive.
Why is this so important? According to UNAIDS, there are approximately 33.2 million people living with AIDS. Of those with AIDS, approximately 2.1 million are children. Last year alone, 2 million adults and 250,000 children died from AIDS, staggering numbers considering that HIV is both preventable and treatable. When we consider that roughly two-thirds of all cases of HIV are in poverty-stricken Sub-Saharan Africa (where HIV prevalence rates vary from 5 to 25%), we can begin to understand why so many people are dying from AIDS.
In honor of World AIDS Day 2008, Fluther is wearing red.
What can you do? Pledge your leadership online, or get involved in local, national or international HIV-AIDS advocacy groups. This is a global problem, requiring a global response!
Written in collaboration with lefteh.
We’ve just put up our last project – part of our multi-faceted join-flow redesign – with Mark before he was hired away by some unknown startup.
Mark was key to our redesign back in March 2007, and he helped translate the ideas and brand we had bouncing around in our collective heads into a coherent message and design. We loved collaborating with him–he willingly shared his branding and experience with us while he incorporated our specific design ideas.
We were quite proud when we unveiled the new Fluther based on his mock-ups and the site worked (and felt!) better than all three of us had imagined, and we’re proud to count Mark as one of our friends.
Congratulations on your new job, Mark, and we can’t wait to see you soon!
Well, today I learned that I’m finally featured in the Apple ad:
Now I’ll forever be “working out”.
And lest we think this is only about me, check out our very own richardhenry’s NSFW site, cursebird. A brilliant idea, if you ask me.
Gailcalled is a well known and loved Flutherer, and for a good reason. She’s always on-hand to offer her years of experience and fine linguistic skills.
We talk about her connection to Fluther while she also reveals the lessons she learned over time that have made her the influential woman she is today.
WebMynd is a cool new Firefox plugin which lets you customize your Google searches and also store a visual history of pages you’ve visited. It’s pretty slick.
We’re really excited because they’ve added a Fluther integration module, which we think will make searching Fluther a snap:
Cool, right? Try it out and let us know what you think.
It’s stupid how little time this took, but I’ve thrown on permalinks to quips. Hover over the “action bar” on the quips to get a little permalink — which you can copy-paste when you want to refer to someone’s quip.
Consider this a rough draft… the implementation may change a little bit.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be speaking at my first conference: Defrag 2008. I’ll be on a panel addressing the question, “Can identity become a filter for information overload?”
In case you’ll be in Denver on Nov. 3rd-4th, you should check it out. I think it’s going to be an incredible conference, and I’m not just saying that because I’m involved. 
Also, you can use my discount code bf1 to get $200 off tickets.
Thanks, everyone!
