Archive for the ‘Site status’ Category

Facebook Connect, Email alerts and lots of new features on WeGIF.

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

We’ve just added some great features tonight that we are really excited to share with you. More detailed articles about the individual features coming later this week.

Here’s what’s new:

  • Opening the site to everyone! - No more secret codes, no more invite only. If you want to join right now, we’re ready for you.
  • Facebook Connect - Link your WeGIF and Facebook accounts and automatically (or manually) have your wegifs posted to your wall. Like to let your friends know about your favorites? Have them published to Facebook as well.
  • Search Facebook contacts - See if your Facebook friends are on WeGIF already.
  • Log in to WeGIF with your Facebook account - Just pick a username the first time you do this if not on WeGIF already.
  • Related content - We have a brand new recommendation engine that will find cool wegifs related to the one currently being browsed and display them to you.
  • Email alerts - Like to know what’s happening on WeGIF? Now you can enable email notifications in your account settings and be notified when a friend accepts your invite, requests your friendship, replies to you or marks one of your wegifs as a favorite. It’s up to you how much or how little info you will receive.
  • Feedback page - We created a dedicated feedback page to make it even easier to get your input about what you would like to see on the site.
  • Notice bar - This is a bar that will sit at the top of the site and allow us to pass on valuable information about new features, maintenance or any other important news.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Site status | No Comments »

Short downtime today.

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

The WeGIF website was down for about 15 min today just before 3pm eastern time. We found the problem, fixed it and now everything is back to normal.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Site status | No Comments »

Getting your friends to join in on the fun.

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

WeGIF is more fun when your friends are on the site, making and sharing content. After all, WeGIF is all about communication, so we added some features to help you grow your network of friends.

If you have a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Live email account, you can use the Invite Email Contacts feature to import your contacts from you email’s contact list and either see if your contacts are allready on the site and request friendship to them, or select the contacts that  you wish to invite and send them invitations.

The people you invite this way, will automatically become your friends once they join the site, or if they are on the site allready, they will receive friendship requests.

This is just one of the first steps we’re taking into making WeGIF more social, and we’ll have more news soon.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Site status | No Comments »

WeGIF is getting some new clothes!

Monday, November 10th, 2008

We’re right in the middle of updating the WeGIF website with a brand new design. During this time the site won’t be available. The change should be completed before Tuesday (Nov 10, 2008) morning.

Even though the new design is way cooler and easier to use, the big change comes from being able to share all your WeGIF animations with others. Everyone will now have access to see the gif animations, (no more log-in required) just by visiting the site. This is really the first big step towards opening the site up to the public and we cannot be more excited.

During the upcoming week we may be tweeking things and will be checking if everything still works as expected. We hope you enjoy all the new features of the site.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Site status | No Comments »

The Near Future of WeGIF

Friday, September 19th, 2008

We have been keeping a low profile for the past month and have not released anything new, so I decided to write this post and let everyone know what we have in store for WeGIF, and what we have been up to.

This month we are working hard on two big tasks, the first being a complete redesign of WeGIF.com. WeGIF has been in a closed beta for a few months, and now we have a much better idea of how people like interacting with the site.

The current layout was meant to just make the site functional and to get the ball rolling. The new design is much more attractive and easy to use. We’ve reorganized some of the sections to make the experience of creating and browsing for animations easier and more entertaining.

Also with the release of the new design, we are making our views public so if you’re currently using the site you will be able to send links to your friends, and they will be able to view your animations without having to sign up for an account first. This is really important and is probably our first step in sharing WeGIF with the world.

WeGIF at work

The second big thing we’re addressing is the back end infrastructure of WeGIF. We are in the middle of moving to Amazon Web Services, which offers cloud computing and storage. This is also very important since when this move is complete, we will be able to accommodate a lot more users on the site, and we will be sending out invites to everybody on the waiting list.

Feature-wise we have a lot of ideas, and plan on releasing a few new things along with the new version of WeGIF next month. One of the features I’m most excited about is the ability to pick an animated gif (or flash) to be your status avatar. Think setting an away message on IM, or status message on a social networking site that tells the world what you’re doing or how you’re feeling, except that you can now do it with an animation right from WeGIF.

There may be some down time on the site when we make some of these changes and we will notify everyone a few days ahead of time.

Tags:
Posted in Site status | 1 Comment »

Uploading very large images now works!

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Some of you couldn’t fully participate on WeGIF before, because the Flash Gif Creator just wouldn’t let you upload very large images (specifically image dimensions above 2880×2880 px). While it is still recommended to re-size images before uploading, since the transfer time to our severs will be much shorter, for some people this is not as easy to do as it sounds.

The Create page will now accept much larger image files than before and re-size them for you. If you happen to be someone with one of those new 12 megapixel cameras and take pictures on full resolution, and don’t know how to resize them, you can now still upload your files to WeGIF (as long as the file size is less then 10 megabytes) and create gifs.

If you know your way around Photoshop and iPhoto and wish to resize your images before upload, you can resize them to fit in a 500×500px box.

Tags:
Posted in Site status, Troubleshooting | No Comments »