Since we launched ScribbleLive a few weeks ago, we’ve been excited to see a lot of people from around the world starting to use it. I built the code from the ground-up to support other languages, but we weren’t planning on rolling anything out so soon. But because of all the great interest, we decided to launch our first international feature.

Now when you are blogging in any language, people from around the world can watch along through our new on-the-fly translation feature. We can translate to English, French, Spanish, Italian and German for now. More to come later.

Say you are blogging in Italian, visitors from around the world can choose a language from the “Translate” box, and all your posts will be translated to that language for them. Not only will it translate all the posts that are already there, but it will translate whatever you type when it appears on their screen.

The translation may still have a few bugs to shake out, but I’d love to get your thoughts. I’ve been catching up on the Italian WWDC blog myself

Have fun!

Yesterday was the first big test of ScribbleLive under load during the WWDC keynote where the iPhone 3G was announced. We burned a lot of hours over the last week getting ready, and I start off with a big thanks to our key service partners.

Akamai did their usual stellar job of handling the traffic the event generated, and deflected the vast majority of the traffic off our origin servers. We were able to feed continuous updates to almost 8,000 visitors with very little load on our systems. Now that we know our caching algorithm is stable, we can go bigger next time and get some real load on the servers

I’d also like to thank our host GoGrid for helping us get our servers ready for the event. Their dedicated cloud servers handled the bandwidth and the load without a hiccup. And it only cost $15 for the entire day! These guys have been a great option for a bootstrap startup like us.

Now to get down to the numbers

3.33 Pages/Visit
04:58 Avg. Time on Site
81.47% % New Visits
Akamai Page Views: 2.3 Million
Total Page Volume: 13.4 GB
S3 cost: $0.63
Peak bandwidth: 171 views/sec at 2:45pm 7.4 Mbits/sec at 1:10

Thanks to everyone who chose us to watch the keynote! There are lots of great events going on every day on ScribbleLive thanks to our great community. Check out the recent coverage of nextMEDIA: Future of Digital Content, Graphing Social Patterns East 2008, and STC 2008.

Happy Liveblogging!

This weekend, ScribbleLive is on the road attending the nextMEDIA: The Future of Digital Content (NM08) conference in Banff.

To mark, the occasion, we rolled out some new features on the event pages. If you check-out the event page for NM08, you’ll see a aggregated feed of all the live events and the posts from the conference. It doesn’t live-update via Ajax yet but give me a few more hours to play with the code and it should be going UPDATE: The aggregate pages now live-update too! You can watch all the posts going into multiple events via those pages..

If you see us around the conference, come say hi

Tonight we did a rollout of a few new features on ScribbleLive. We’ve got some other big ones coming this week, but hopefully these tied you over until then

Event URLs should now look a little cleaner. We dumped the /Thread.aspx?Id=#### format and moved to sexier URLs like http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/Video_is_Everywhere__mesh08. All the old URLs should redirect you automatically. If they don’t, please let me know in the comments.

When you login, you will now have a “Profile” link at the top-right corner. It will take you to a page where you can change your name, select your sort order, and give you an overview of all your latest posts. FYI, an API to retrieve all that information programmatically is coming out soon.

Behind the scenes, we’ve tried to fix a few bugs and make the site perform even faster. Please have a poke around — or just keep using it if you are already — and drop me a line in the comments with any bugs, suggestions, etc. Thanks!

Happy scribbling!