Viddler

Besides the announcement of our revenue sharing features it has been over 4 months since we last let you know of all of the updates that have happened here at Viddler.

There are several reasons for this: First, we’re all incredibly busy fixing the bugs that you find, trying to build the feature requests you’ve asked for, and helping you to use Viddler better. The second reason would be that not many of these smaller updates aren’t worthy of a blog post all their own - so they sometimes aren’t announced. So, I thought I’d take a moment to go back through our Trac system and pick out some of the of the minor, yet incredibly important, adjustments we’ve made to Viddler over the last few months.

A few new things

We all love new stuff, don’t we? Over the last few months our monetization features are by far the largest and most complex set of new features that we’ve added to Viddler. I’m not going to cover the details of this area in this update because we’ve already done that and you can read some good coverage of this on TechCrunch as well.

Something you don’t get to see, but has been rebuilt several times in the last four months, is our site’s server infrastructure. Jason Waldrip (friend: jwaldrip), our Project Manager, will sit down with me someday and we’ll go over every detail of our latest architecture so that you can get a better feel for all of the hard work our team has done in order to keep Viddler up and running quickly and as inexpensively as possible. But I will say this; since I’ve started with Viddler in January of this year, the system behind Viddler has been updated several times and our latest configuration runs extremely well. Hats off to the team.

The Simple Uploader, now available in the Uploading area of our site, was added as a simple means to upload a file at a time without the need of the Flash plugin. Originally this was built as an easy-to-use alternative for people that upload one file at a time, but it came in mighty handy when Apple’s latest Operating System, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, was released and had issues with Flash so our Bulk Uploader was experiencing problems. Since then Adobe has released a new player and our Bulk Uploader works fine on Leopard - but we’re really happy we had the Simple Uploader during this time period.

The latest version of our player is by far the best we’ve offered yet. I think our player requires a post all its own but we’ve added statistics, a new Create Thumbnail feature for producers, Digg functionality, user and related video menus, and much more. Be sure to give the latest version of our player a thorough run through to see the most recent changes.

Our FAQ Group, recently created and growing each week, is being worked on constantly to add more questions and answers that we receive from our community on a daily basis. We’re striving to answer each FAQ with a short video tutorial and text-based instructions to make it quick and easy to find the answer you are looking for.

If you want to see something that we currently do not offer - the best way is to use the feature request forum. We look forward to hearing your ideas on how to make our service better!

Fixes and adjustments

If you go through each page of our bug report forum you’ll see many of the bugs we’ve either fixed already, are in the process of fixing, or will fix in the future. With each update we make to Viddler.com we try to roll out a few new features along with a few bug fixes. Here are a few of the more notable fixes we’ve made recently.

In June we announced a new uploader and trackbacks, but you may have noticed that trackbacks were taken down for a short time. The reason for this was we were getting a large amount of spam inside of those trackbacks. Our trackback system supports linkbacks, hrefbacks, and trackbacks (more information here) and so it was fairly easy to spam. We’ve now fixed these issues, though it is always a challenge to keep up with the spammers, so if you see any spam please report it immediately.

With version 2.11 of our site came Groups (you can read our announcement). Since then we’ve made a number of adjustments to our groups area and the group pages. While we look forward to being able to update the groups area even further, we love how well the groups area has taken off and how people are using them in exciting ways. If you don’t belong to a group - look around and see if anything interests you or maybe some of your videos fit into an existing group. If not, create your own group!

Vrrrooooomm!!! That was Viddler, loading quickly. Have you noticed how much faster our site loads recently? That is because our team has made huge strides in making our pages, and our videos, load faster than ever before. This is done with a combination of hardware improvements as well as making our web site’s code much more efficient. The next time a page loads quickly, know that a lot of hard work goes into making that happen.

We’ve been told about several type and grammatical errors we’ve had on our site. Several of these have been fixed and we have a few more to go. These are the little things that we don’t want to fall through the cracks, so please be sure to let us know when you find them.

These are only the tip of the iceberg. Over the last four months, at my last count, we’ve closed at least 300 tickets in our system. This includes new features, enhancements, bug fixes, grammatical errors, updates to our site’s code for faster load times, server changes, database tweaks, player upgrades, usability fixes, browser compatibility fixes, and much much more.

There is no doubt that we have come a long way, and even a lesser doubt that we have a long way to go, but I think our entire team deserves a big round of applause for the countless hours, nights, and weekends that they’ve put in to keep Viddler running smoothly and constantly moving forward in the world of online video. Thanks everyone!