Stay Alive !

The party is slowly coming to an end, but you can stay Alive!

We're going to move the Alive software to some servers outside of the arena in the next hours, so please bear with a few smaller outages while we're doing that. We try to keep it down to the minimum and in the optimal case you won't notice.

The AssemblyTV videos are coming in and we're really excited that this year the demo videos are available quite soon.

When you get back home (and got your share of sleep) remember to put your videos, images and blogs that haven't found their way to Alive yet, into the system and let other people see what Assembly was like for you.

Enjoy the rest of the party and have a save way home!

The Assembly WebCrew

Alive 2.1.9

You may have noticed that our tag clouds weren't quite useful. We've updated Alive to include a better algorithm that seems to work out well in our tests. Hopefully the production site will benefit from this as well.

Enjoy!

Fixed video problems

Some of you might have seen that our embedded videos were upside down and that some downloads had multiplexing problems (making audio and video go out of sync).

LiveCrew fixed those encoding problems by now and we also have better Flash versions of the videos of this year, not only 30 seconds previews. Maybe we can get this for the 2006 videos as well, but that's not sure yet.

Enjoy the excellent footage provided by LiveCrew!

PS: See the "2007 compos" tag, the oldskool demos are already in!

Flickr problems

If it takes a long time until your images are imported, currently we found two sources of errors for this:

• You have a new account and flickr doesn't expose it via it's API yet. This will just take time and go away by itself once flickr reviews your account.
  
• You gave us the wrong account name. We need your flickr screen name.

Alive 2.1.8

For Alive 2.1.8 we acquired a new content source: AssemblyTV's video-on-demand files. You can watch them, alike the youtube videos, directly from Alive.

We have both videos from last year and this year available. This year's videos will appear slowly after they were aired and converted into various formats.

All the videos are available in various formats for download and watch on your computer, available formats include H264 and xvid. Bitrates range from 200kbit/s to 7Mbit/s.

In other news:

• Diagnosing problems with your YouTube or flickr accounts: go to your profile editing page and see whether we found a problem. If your images don't turn up, a hint might be found there.
• Videos now also display their playing length.
  

Enjoy!

PS: Yes, the import wasn't running in the last hours because I forgot to re-enable it after upgrading. Mea maxima culpa.

Alive 2.1.7

While watching some competitions this afternoon, we still made it for Alive 2.1.7. This time, we have some smaller enhancements (as requested) and a couple of fixes:

• Blog entries now display time stamps in the overview pages.
  
• Events are now marked in a way so you can distinguish whether they are in the future, currently happening or already over.
• More UI fixes including cleaning up the tile views and the front page.
  
• Display self-given tags for user profiles for other users.
  

In the next time we'll acquire a new content source for you: AssemblyTV. They will be sending out their videos to alive as well, so you can watch the AssemblyTV program from Alive! Stay tuned!

Alive 2.1.6

Another day, another update. Alive 2.1.6 was just installed and we're happy to announce the following updates:

Biggest improvements:

• We also display recent comments on the home page.
• Reversed the sorting on the All tab which seems to feel more natural. It now displays from old to new items.
• Paged navigation now shows which page you are on.
• Changed the rules for cooling content down. Content that reached 0 points can be made hot again if it reaches 240 points again. This should cover up for content that is found very late and lost all its points before anybody has seen it.
• The tag cloud on the front page now works on a new algorithm that tries to identify the overall hottest topic at Assembly, not just the recent hottest.

Other changes:

• Added the global Assembly navigation bar so you can reach the other Assembly sites easily from Alive.
• Fixed a bug in the flickr import. We now prefer to fetch a photo from a user instead of the global tag if it appears in both.
• Photos from Assembly's official FotoCrew now get automatically tagged with `FotoCrew`.
  
• And, last but not least, various smaller UI fixes.

We hope you enjoy Alive as much as we enjoy working on it!

Alive 2.1.5

Yay, 2.1.5 is out, here are the changes:

• The front page now doesn't display the greeting banner any more when you are logged in.
• We added the access key "F" for firing up some content.
  
• The back end that scales down phots is more robust now and should result in your photos getting into Alive much faster.
• The SSO server now uses a certificate signed by the Assembly CA.
• We started playing around with the balance of how many heat points are given to users and how many are required to reach hotness status etc. We now reduced the points we give away to 1 point every 2 minutes, instead of 2 points per minute.

The next update is on it's way, but this time we'll take it a bit slower and actually try to enjoy the party. See you around!

Alive blog started

Hey, the Webcrew is using Alive's blog aggregation feature now to tell you about the changes we make to Alive while you're using it.

We had a couple of outages outages in the last few hours but got the new system running pretty stable now. The last night was a very intensive sprint to get the system finished and polished to the level that you can see now.

We're currently running on version 2.1.4 and will be delivering 2.1.5 in the next hour or so.

The last fixes we did included: CSS and UI fixes and the annoying problem when trying to reload a page after deleting a tag from the search filter.

If you want to follow our postings, look out for blogs of the tag 'alive-updates'.