We just opened a Twitter account for Planetaki. We will use it for quick updates and informal stuff. Check it out and follow it, especially if you are one of those Netvibes design guys who secretly love us ;)
We just translated Planetaki to Galician, that beautiful language spoken in the also beautiful region of Galicia. If you happen to speak Galician and want it to be Planetaki’s default language, set it up on the preferences page of your planet.
Thanks to María Loureiro, from tecnoloxia.org for her unvaluable help.
Sam, the developer behind Planetaki, was so impressed with Ubiquity that he decided to make a command for adding websites to your planet.
If you are the kind of geek who likes to play with this stuff, just go to www.planetaki.com/ubiquity to install the command and you are done. The syntaxis is easy. Just go to the website you like, invoque Ubiquity and type “planetaki -”
And it will look something like this (look at the top-left corner):
Yeah, Ubiquity is something experimental and all that, but you know Sam…
We were very happy to see Planetaki on PC Actual, one of the main computer magazines in Spain. It’s on a report about web apps made here.
Here is a picture of the article, taken by Denegro:
It’s so cool to share these three pages with Unvlog and iwannagothere, two projects we admire, use and love.
It’s now easy to add Soitu’s channels to your planet. You can do so by going to their syndication page and clicking the “P” button of the section you like.
Soitu is one fo the most innovative projects in Spanish digital journalism these days. Their approach is completely unconventional, closer to the blog style than the classic online newspaper.
We are happy to see that both 20minutos and Soitu, being as innovative as they are, consider Planetaki as an important reference.
Sam and I will be partying all night at the great Unvlog Party, probably the most expected party of the year in Madrid. Here’s the flyer:
We are big fans of Unvlog, it’s like the place where you share the really good videos with your really good friends, without having to upload anything (just pointing to them on youtube, vimeo or whatever).
Don’t miss it if you are around Madrid tonight. See you there!
The guys at 20minutos.es just added Planetaki as one of the tools available to read the newspaper which is, by the way, the most succesful online paper in Spain. We are glad they did so, this way it will be easier for Planetaki users to add to their planets the specific sections they prefer. They just have to go there, chose and click on the orange ball.
All of this is at the syndication page of 20minutos.es.
We are looking for someone who is a native Chinese speaker and would like to translate Planetaki to simplified Chinese. It’s not a big deal of work (a couple of hours perhaps) but a great deal of responsability since there are many people who would use Planetaki in Chinese. The only requisites are good profficiency of both English and Chinese (simplified) and some familiarity with Planetaki as a user.
If you are that person and would like to volunteer, drop us a line at hello@planetaki.com.
We will credit you on the website and probably send you one of the ultra-cool tshirts we are designing.
PS: French, Italian, German and Catalan translations are on its way.
While for some people Friday the 13th is bad luck, we’re fortunate enough to be in Spain where Tuesday the 13th is supposed to be unlucky, and probably for this reason the last upgrade has gone quite smoothly. There were a few moments of downtime as the servers restarted, but nothing to worry about. Nonetheless, apologies if you didn’t manage to get your Planetaki hit when you wanted it.
There are quite a few little changes and fixes in this release and a major change to help us send out notifications which we’ll be trying out very soon. For the curious techy people, we’re now running Rails 2.1 to take advantage of some of its cool features.
One of the smaller fixes comes after a complaint from the guys at unvlog.com, where the videos from their blogs were not coming up properly in Planetaki. That should be working okay now, but please guys, no more Abba videos, and no, I don’t care if they sing in Spanish, its just not good for you ;-)
We’ve set up Planet Mac with the best sources on Apple and the Mac for you to follow today’s World Wide Developers Conference in case you are not phisically attending. We believe Planetaki may work as an amplifier for Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field ;)
You can either check the planet or add the blogs you like to your planet, where they will refresh content every two minutes or so.
We just made public some new features we’ve been releasing these days:
1. COPY THIS TO MY PLANET
Now you can go to someone else’s planet and copy any website they have to your own planet. There are two buttons next to each post: copy and email. The homepage may be a good starting point to find cool blogs and websites to feed your little monster.
2. BEAUTIFUL, RICH, SHINY NEW HOMEPAGE
Planetaki has a new homepage. It features some planets with a subject (sports, cooking, etc.) and also the newly created planets. That’s for you to read whenever your planet runs out of new content and you really need another dose. Check it at http://www.planetaki.com
3. AUTOMAGICAL UPDATES
Every two minutes your planet will go see if there is new content for you to read. If so it will appear automagically. You don’t have to hit the refresh button any more. Just leave your planet on a tab and take an occasional look at it (even the title on the tab tells you about it). Cool, eh?
4. WE SPEAK LAS LENGUAS DU MONDE
Planetaki is already available in Spanish and very soon will be in French, German, Chinese, Catalan and many others.
Planetaki tries to discover your language by checking your browser’s settings for you. That’s how it decides in which language it shows the interface but you can change it manually in the preferences section.
5. WE CARE ABOUT WEBMASTERS (AND BLOGGERS TOO)
You may be a blogger/webmaster who wants his site to be added to people’s planets and look gorgeous on them. If so, check our tools for you:
- Put a button on your homepage so planetizens can add your website to their planet with just one click (just like we did on this planet). Here’s how: http://www.planetaki.com/buttons
- Want your content to link to the proper avatar (that little 48×48 image)? Put the desired gif or png image on your website’s root folder and we’ll go get it on the last update. People reading your website will see it attached to your content.
We hope you find them useful!
Today Planetaki suffered from a couple hours of downtime as we struggled to implement a few database optimisations. Planetaki has been progressively getting slower these last few weeks and days and reached an unbearable point today as some users where provided a 404 error due to a queue of requests building up. Sorry for any inconvencience! On the upside, its a sure sign the service is getting more popular!
The performance enhancments are now in place and planets are now loading quite a bit faster. I also discovered a fairly significant bug where old posts where not being deleted correctly; this is now corrected, but will take some time to remove all the old entries, so we should see performance gradually improve even more.
Let us know if you have any problems, and stay tuned for some more major updates in the next few days!
The title pretty much sums up the idea of this post! Please come back for the latest news, updates, and comments from the Planetaki development team.
