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

Scheduled Server Downtime

Some scaling issues we put off until later are being taken care of tonight at 10pm Pacific. The event should only take about 5-10 minutes to complete. We will have a nice downtime image someday soon, but for now it will likely throw an Nginx error.

(And no, you can't draw circles on it.)

Second Milestone

This week a few pushes of the site gets us to our second milestone we set out for ourselves. There are some odds and ends that need polishing, but this is a nice point to stop and talk about where we are and where we're going.

First off all, traffic and usage has been amazing. Thanks go to everyone who signed in, played with some of the features, and who keep coming back. Super big thanks to everyone sending us feedback and criticism. We appreciate hearing your thoughts and bug reports.

We were just laughing in the office about the first version of MLKSHK we pushed. It's kind of comical to think back now just how feature-less it was. But like the saying goes: "If you aren't embarrassed about what you just shipped then you waited too long."

I'm sure we'll look at today's updates the same way in a few months, but for now we're really happy about where the site is. The new navigation and notifications make for a fairly complete experience (though comment notifications are coming shortly) and the actual content being uploaded is just outstanding. I could not have predicted a better flow of images.

Up ahead we have some major back-end changes to make, specifically preparing for bigger traffic and decentralizing the systems so we can roll out changes and updates with less interruptions. The API is also on our priority list for the next couple of weeks. It might not be fully featured, but we want to have it at a point where we can start getting feedback on its use. We're also going to allow you to invite your friends, hence the upgrades.

Milestone three is the completion of the shake concept. Shakes can be singular or group, public or private. You can share into a specific shake and not into your personal one. We'll explain this in detail later, there's so much to do in the next week or two we don't want to get ahead of ourselves!

Thanks to all of you for your support!

No Dupe For You!

Since launching one common complaint about the friend timeline was that there were a lot of duplicate files. When something was very popular it would sometimes show up three times in a row shared by people we follow, who perhaps don't follow each other.

So last week we rewrote a ton of the backend to keep duplicate files in the friend view to a minimum. We rolled it out yesterday and it seems to be working well. You should see very few duplicate files (if any). There are still some cases where you might see something you've seen before, or even shared yourself, but we're working on suppressing those as well.

As always, send us an email at with any questions or wishlist items. Or even better: post them to our bug tracker: http://simpleform.lighthouseapp.com/.

We're (more) Live

We took down the infamous error page on MLKSHK so people can get on the invitation list and read a bit about us on the front page. We also added the start of some of the social bits we're going to use to power the group "shake" concept. So if you haven't already, sign in and "follow" some people you find interesting.

http://mlkshk.com/

While We Wait

Push is happening today. A few things need to get cleaned up HTML-wise but we're pretty happy with our testing.

I keep feeling like I want to start blogging a few links that either are inspiration or feel like what we're making and where we're going.

So here are two. A game we want to play: Ilomilo. A book we want to read: Ray Fenwick's "Mascots".

Almost Open For Business

Hi everyone!

This week feels like the week everything has been finally coming together. We rolled out an interim build on Monday that exposes things like favorites, sharing counts, and image views. The next few builds will have more of what we think is core to the site: the concept of a shake.

We'll get more into what a shake is later, but for now know that we are extremely close to shipping that feature and we can't be more excited about it. As soon as we ship all the bits that make up the shake we'll remove the secret portal page and all the early account holders will get invitations for their friends.

Just a reminder you can follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/mlkshk, you can leave bugs on Lighthouse, and as always you can mail us directly at .