State of the Shake

Here's what we did last week:

• Move friends to the front page, removing the dashboard view.
• Ask to join shake. With all the notifications and messaging.
• NSFW Flag and hiding
• Deleting comments.

Here's what we're doing this week:

• Yearly subscriptions.
• Counts! Counts! Counts! Views, Favorites.
• Speed. Speeding up some things after having a popular file on Twitter we had a flood of activity that caused some slowness. We hate that.
• Some traffic growing alterations that we'll point out as we roll them out. There are a lot of them.

Still important:

• Rotate image and auto-rotate if there is orientation data.
• Release the API. Announce more API related stuff.
• Popular, interesting, and trending files.

The NSFW Flag

We just rolled out a feature we expect to evolve over the next few weeks. If you check out your settings you'll see a new option called "Remove NSFW Filter".

Files can now be marked as NSFW to help others browse MLKSHK at work. You can also mark your own files to cover them with a black box.

Use your best judgement. As we said we'll be tuning this feature so it works as well as it can in a large community site like MLKSHK. This is just a first step to make the site easier for you to look at files in a public environment where something might, uh, pop out.

State of the Shake

Here’s what we did and fixed last week:

• Likes are duplicated on your favorites view due to last week’s likes modification.
• You can’t follow your own group shakes so you miss out on contributions.
• If you’re a paid subscriber you’re going to be able to create 10 shakes rather than 3.
• Saving directly to specific shakes from your friend shake.

Here is what just went live:

• Move friends to the front page, removing the dashboard view.

Here are some things that are very nearly ready to go out the door and should get done this week:

• Ask to join shake.
• Yearly subscriptions.

Stuff still on the list for later:

• Rotate image and auto-rotate if there is orientation data.
• Emailing iPhone, Android, and other Twitter developers to put MLKSHK uploading and viewing in their app.
• Release the API. Announce more API related stuff.
• NSFW flag
• Popular, interesting, and trending files.
• Ability to close shake down that you’ve created.

And, two items to keep an eye on:

• Managing comments. Both editing and deleting.
• Counts. Both likes and views represented in one spot.

Weekly MLKSHK Roadmap

One of the things about having such a small team yet and trying to be as responsive as possible to users is that sometimes we have to push neat features and projects aside to take care of some important issues. This weekend and last week a couple came to light and so we’re focusing on the first half of the week on them.

First, here’s what we did last week:

• Inline comments and commenting. No need to jump to the perma-link page.
• Saves and likes also inline.
• Likes are shared up to the original file uploader.
• API updates for caching requests (work still in process)
• And I almost finished the invitation to a shake request, not quite done.

But, here’s some things we need to work on ASAP:

• Likes are duplicated on your favorites view due to last week’s likes modification.
• You can’t follow your own group shakes so you miss out on contributions.
• If you’re a paid subscriber you’re going to be able to create 10 shakes rather than 3.

Here are some things that are very nearly ready to go out the door and might get done this week:

• Ask to join shake.
• Saving directly to specific shakes from your friend shake.
• Yearly subscriptions.

Stuff still on the list for later:

• Rotate image and auto-rotate if there is orientation data.
• Emailing iPhone, Android, and other Twitter developers to put MLKSHK uploading and viewing in their app.
• Release the API. Announce more API related stuff.
• Move friends to the front page, removing the dashboard view.
• NSFW flag
• Popular, interesting, and trending files.
• Ability to close shake down that you’ve created.

Yesterday (Sunday) was our 3rd highest traffic day yet; behind our launch and day after launch. I feel like this week is when the real traffic is going to hit us and so we’re excited to welcome new visitors. Please tell your friends about us and share your files!

ShakeKit for Mac OSX and iOS

We’re very happy to finally be able to tell you that Justin Williams of Second Gear Software has made an Objective-C wrapper for MLKSHK. Here it is on Github: carpeaqua/ShakeKit.

We’re not very good Objective-C developers, in fact we’re probably terrible, but we can troubleshoot server-side API issues you might be having.

Now go build some apps and tell us about them!

State of the Site

Hey there, now that we’re live and slowly getting back to normal we wanted to write down a list (in no particular order) of what we’re working on and what we’re researching to see if we can get it done. We may not do all of these, but they are things on our master list we thought were worth sharing with you.

• Inline comments and commenting. No need to jump to the perma-link page.
• Rotate image and auto-rotate if there is orientation data.
• Emailing iPhone, Android, and other Twitter developers to put MLKSHK uploading and viewing in their app.
• Release the API. Announce more API related stuff.
• Move friends to the front page, removing the dashboard view.
• Yearly subscriptions.
• Ask to join shake.
• NSFW flag
• Popular, interesting, and trending files.
• Likes are shared up to the original file uploader (going live today!)
• Ability to close shake down that you’ve created.

If there are things you don’t see here, or things you think are not useful to you, do let us know in the comments or by email. I am going to make this a regular Monday morning post where we carry over from the previous week and report news.

Finally: Share the site with your friends! Share images on Twitter! If you have a paid account, use your RSS feed to share stuff through Tumblr or other readers. Thanks for all the support.

Amber And Andre

Where We Are

Hi, I just wanted to quickly leave a note about where we were these days. We have three things in process and one thing out there on the horizon.

1. Shakes. It's been a long road but we're nearing the end of that project. The ability to create group shakes with your friends. These will, as we already demonstrated, provide RSS feeds and can be followed like a regular user.

2. Payment. I am currently working on the payment process so we can stop freaking out about money. Because we're freaking. A little.

3. Dashboard. Amber is giving the dashboard an overhaul. She's way ahead of us on all the front-end pieces that need to be built so she's diving into redoing some of the aging interfaces starting with the dashboard.

4. On the horizon: The API. It's 90% done. It works for most things you'd want to do but doesn't do everything and that's just been a matter of me getting back to it. If you want access just let me know. User @cjereneta built a fantastic iPhone camera/upload app with it.

So thanks for coming back every day. There's lots to do and we're so small. We wish we could move faster for you all.

We're Close!

Hi Everyone,

We've been quiet the last couple of weeks because we have one big push going on right now to complete the last piece of MLKSHK that will allow us to open up the doors for everyone. It's a tricky piece and we've been putting all our time into it, so forgive us if we haven't been as attentive to tickets as we were in the past.

We're near the end, we're very excited, and very grateful everyone keeps coming back to share and enjoy the site. Thanks!

Amber and Andre

The Need For Speed

We at MLKSHK headquarters finally arrived at a milestone where we felt comfortable handing out some invitations. If you were among the first 300 people who were visited by the Invitation Viking yesterday morning you saw three invitations in your inbox to share with friends. If you don't see any, don't worry we're going to be handing more out by the end of the month.

One reason we wanted to get more people using the site is because we knew it'd shake out some performance bugs. We did find and squash a couple, but there's another we will be working on for the next few days.

While it probably isn't apparent to you, there is a minor .2 second wait while your friend shake is constructed. While that isn't really much of a problem now, it can be in the future as more people join the site, so we want to completely do away with that .2 seconds before it becomes noticeable.

Also, if you have specific questions about anything we're doing or building, please comment in this post or just @ us on Twitter. We love hearing from all of you.

DNS is Broken

Due to an unfortunate change in an IP addresses while moving some servers around our DNS is pointing at an incorrect location. The correct IP is 204.236.219.131. Until we get that IP in DNS propagated MLKSHK is not reachable by domain name.

If you're on a PC type this at a DOS prompt:

ipconfig /flushdns

If you're on a Mac type this in terminal:

dscacheutil -flushcache

or if 10.5.1 and before:

lookupd -flushcache