ScribbleLive Official Blog | Liveblog live blogging

We’re done moving ShiftEdit to its new home on GoGrid. GoGrid’s a great new hosting company in beta. They are a great fit for us. Using their web-based interface, we’ve set-up completely virtualized servers running in a grid configuration. Think Amazon EC2, but a heck-of-a-lot easier for Windows Servers and with a load balancer

As well as running redundant virtual servers, if we have a big live blog coming up *cough, Apple keynote, cough, cough* we can scale up quickly by popping in more servers as needed.

So don’t go DDoSing us just yet, but we are now running on a much stronger architecture that will grow as we do. Hurrah, for virtual servers!

With our traffic starting to ramp up, I’m getting a little worried keeping the ShiftEdit Alpha on shared hosting, as awesome as DiscountASP is as a host So I decided to move up our plan to move over to a load-balanced multi-server grid.

Because live blogs, by their very nature, have extremely spiky bandwidth, we’re moving into a server cloud that we can ramp up in a few hours if we need to. I’ll get into the details after the move.

But the moral of the story is: if ShiftEdit.com is a little messed up for a little bit tonight, that’s probably because I screwed something up Please drop me a comment here if you have any problems.

Thanks!

ShiftEdit has been getting some great press this weekend thanks to the writers at Ajaxian and Profy (thanks! ). Profy’s review, in particular, brought up a lot of great points I’ll address in future blog posts (it’s 1am, I’m tired ) but one thing they both mentioned, was the lack of an OpenID login on ShiftEdit.

We initially decided to launch with just Facebook and MSN/Live/Hotmail logins because with 64 million and 380 million users respectively, we thought that should cover just about anyone wanting to try our service But I think these writers both correctly identified the need to support the OpenID community. So I burned through a few cans of Gingerale, found a great OpenID library, yada yada yada, and ShiftEdit now supports OpenID login.

Long live the open Web!

UPDATE: I had some reports that Yahoo OpenID wasn’t working with my first implementation. Looks like the library I had used didn’t support the last OpenID 2.0 protocol. So I switched over to using the ExtremeSwank library. It has a better name anyhow Please try it out and let me know!

Just doing a little test tonight of an embedded version of Shift Edit that you can embed on your site. So far, so good

Go join the event here and try adding a few things. If you leave this page open, you should see your changes appear momentary. w00t!

For the last couple of months, Michael and I have been working on a mash-up of the technology behind my WYSIWYG wiki software, WhyYouShould, Facebook, Live, and Amazon S3. Our goal was to put the power of WhyYouShould towards live blogging.

I noticed early-on in WhyYouShould’s life, that people were using it as a quick way to create lists about events as they unfolded. I think it was mostly because it was easy and fast to create lists with your friends. A couple months ago, we decided to try to productize it, and here we are

Shift Edit is even easier to use than WhyYouShould, and people can watch your live blog without having to reload the page. New entries appear automatically and the page scrolls down to show them (if you’re scrolled to the bottom). You can upload images that will be resized and displayed. Editing entries you have already posted is as easy as clicking on the text, making your edit, and clicking back into the new entry box. Your edits will change in everyone’s browsers in seconds!

To login to Shift Edit, there’s no need to create another account. You can login using your Facebook account or your MSN account, and you’re in! Once you create a blog of your own, you get an invite code that your friends can use to live blog with you.

There’s a lot more features coming over the next few months, so keep an eye out. If you want to try it out yourself, you can create a new blog or join one I already started.

So I hope you like the new Alpha. Just drop me a comment if you have any suggestions for how to improve it. I’d love to hear your feedback!

Have fun!