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Archive for January, 2009

New liveblog translation tools from ScribbleLive

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

We want to bring together as many people as possible with the liveblogs on ScribbleLive and as such, supporting writers around the world has been our goal since day 1. Now we have taken our on-the-fly translation and extended it to our embeds.

If your site supports many different languages, you can now easily embed the same liveblog and have it translated to any major language. For example, you could be writing in English, but your Spanish visitors could see the liveblog in spanish, your French visitors in french, etc.

It’s as easy as adding ?lang=fr (where “fr” is the shortcode for any language) to the src of our standard iframe embed which looks like this:
[sourcecode language="html"][/sourcecode]

For example, the same liveblog in french would be:
[sourcecode language="html"][/sourcecode]

Below is an example of the same embed translated into 4 other languages.

We hope you like our new feature and please keep the suggestions coming. Happy liveblogging!

Original:

English (?lang=en):

French (?lang=fr):

Spanish (?lang=es):

Russian (?lang=ru):

New Look, New Features

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

There’s nothing like a MacWorld in the world of liveblogging. I often tell people that it’s the quintessential example of liveblogging. This January, we wanted to have something special for the users of ScribbleLive. We’ve been working on a major redesign for weeks, and this week we officially go live. This launch brings, not only a new look, but a new set of features and service enhancements.

The first thing you’ll notice is the look-and-feel. Since liveblogs are all about reading, we’ve made everything on our site as easy to read as possible; big, clean fonts everywhere on soft backgrounds. There’s nothing like 80px fonts to enhance readability :) There’s also much more sliding using the script.aculo.us library.

We’ve been trying to get a Twitter integration that makes sense for months, and I think we have it now. Not only do we make it really easy to “follow” a Twitter account and pull all their tweets into your liveblog, but we have a new Twitter live-search that will constantly check Twitter for anyone talking about your topic. The tweets will appear right in the sidebar where you can easily pull them in as comments. This provides a never-ending stream of comments for your events. Here’s a video walkthrough of using Twitter in your liveblogs. And of course, you can login to ScribbleLive with your Twitter account.

Another great feature we now have are “sticky” posts. During your liveblog you can click the “stick” button next to any post to pin it at the top of your liveblog. It’s a great way to keep a score or video stream where everyone can see it, or just use it as promotion for your site. We can’t wait to see how people use it and look forward to your feedback. This video walkthrough also shows you how to use sticky posts.

We now support any Flash embed. Just copy-paste the HTML for your embed directly into the input box and we’ll take care of posting it. We always supported YouTube but now you can embed videos from Ustream, Qik, or any other Flash widget. You can even write your own and embed them!

As well as the features you can see, there’s several big changes under-the-hood. We completely changed how live-updates work to use the power of the Amazon cloud products to handle more watchers than ever before. On Tuesday we successfully served up over 11M hits without any performance impact. We don’t just want to be the flashiest live publishing platform out there, we also want to have the most horsepower.

There are many more changes with this launch and the best way to see them all is to try us out! Thanks to everyone who sent us suggestions and please keep them coming. We love to hear what you think.

Happy liveblogging!

Scribblelive screenshot