We’ve released another update for SlideShowPro Director to address a few remaining image processing issues introduced in the previous few builds. It is now available via the in-app update process or the account center. For a full list of changes, see the version history.
Maintenance update for SlideShowPro Director now available
Today we are releasing an update for SlideShowPro Director 1.5.4 that addresses a variety of minor issues that users have reported over the last few months. It also includes a fix for a particularly nasty issue affecting users whose servers utilize the ImageMagick image processing library.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve had a growing number of users report about issues with ImageMagick, but there did not appear to be any common cause. Finally, a web host technician helped us by debugging deeper into the system and determined that the issue was specific to ImageMagick’s 64-bit version. So, as web hosts were upgrading their systems to 64-bit, we were seeing more and more users encounter the issue. Once the issue was identified, the fix was easy – and that fix is included in this updated build.
For a full list of the changes, please see the version history for SlideShowPro Director.
Our friend Mike Hartley, developer of a number of photographer sites we’ve featured over the years, has released a new portfolio template that anyone can use on their own server. The template ties-in with SlideShowPro Director for content management, so you can edit/update portfolio content just like you would a slideshow. There are a number of customization options available, which you can read more about (and view live examples) over at the full site.
For a limited time (end of October) you may purchase the bigflannel portfolio for 20% off the regular price by entering coupon code SSP20 at checkout.
The 2011 PDN Photo Annual, now out everywhere on newsstands, includes three web sites built with SlideShowPro products. They include Marco Di Lauro, Shannon Jensen and Mark Katzman. We featured all three sites last year as notable community examples, so we’re thrilled to see a major industry publication like Photo District News magazine feature them as well. Congratulations to all!
Director updated, new beta of DirectorPHP API kit available
Here’s a few updates for you Director users out there. First, a new maintenance build (Build 6705) is out for Director itself with a variety of bugfixes and a few additions. See the full list of changes for more information. The update is available via the account center or in-app update.
We’ve also released a new beta of the popular DirectorPHP API kit. We’ve made some internal changes that should show noticeable speed increases compared to the current stable 1.2.1 build. We’d love for you API users to test it out and let us know how it works for you. Before you do, please read this primer for more information, including some important upgrade instructions.
Director updated, important note for JavaScript developers
We’ve released a small but important Director maintenance fix today, build 6411. It fixes a few things, including one particularly major issue that has been affecting Internet Explorer users.
Recently, a Flash Player update began causing problems in some versions of Internet Explorer — in some cases causing the page to hang for several seconds. The problem traced back to how SlideShowPro communicates with the Director JavaScript embed library. We’ve fixed that in this build, but in the course of doing so found something more. Even with the fix, there is a certain performance cost associated with the the SWF to JS communication. And considering a very small number of our users actually use that functionality, we’ve decided to disable it by default in Director’s embed code. The net effect for most of you will be that you should notice your slideshows loading a bit faster after updating to this build. For those of you who do use that functionality, you will need to make a small change to your embed code. You will need to add the useExternalInterface parameter to the flashvars section of your embed code, setting it to true:
useExternalInterface: true
If you are confused as to whether or not you need to make this change, take a look at this wiki document. If you have never made use of the functionality described there, you do not need to make the above change. In other words, if you are using the stock embed code copied from inside Director, you do not need to change anything.
The update is now available via the in-app update and the account center. All SlideShowPro.com accounts have already been updated.
New in Director 1.5.3: Universal video embedding
With the addition of universal slideshow publishing and embedding in Director 1.5, we made it easier than ever to embed your slideshows for both desktop and mobile playback. Today we are extending that even further with the addition of universal video embedding in Director 1.5.3.
Universal video embedding allows you to quickly copy and paste embed code from Director to your HTML document. The embed code — which will look very familiar if you have been using Director’s built-in slideshow publishing — creates a poster image using your assigned video preview with a play button drawn on top. Once the poster is clicked, the embed library attempts to play the video using the HTML5 video element. If the browser doesn’t support the new video element or the video codec that is being used, it automatically falls back to the SlideShowPro player for video playback. The result is a system for embedding videos that works consistently and transparently on mobile and desktop systems.
Consult the wiki for more on using the new video embedding system. Director 1.5.3 is available now via the in-app update system or the account center. If you are a SlideShowPro.com customer, you already have the update and are ready to go.
For those of you who use our SlideShowPro.com service for worry-free Director installs, you have no doubt noticed that we haven’t quite lived up to that “worry-free” promise over the last few weeks. As SlideShowPro.com became more popular among our users, our infrastructure struggled to keep up and as a result some users saw slower than normal response times, while others were left with nearly unusable installations at times. We’ve been hard at work for the last week, making small gains each day, and are now glad to say that SlideShowPro.com is back to normal and perhaps better than ever. For those interested, here’s a rundown of what happened and the steps we’ve taken to resolve this problem — and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
The Cause
There was not a single event that led to these issues, rather a tipping point was reached sometime in mid to late January that saw some degradation in response times, particularly when using Director. As the problems spread, public facing content — in the form of slideshows and API based content — began to exhibit issues as well. The growth of SlideShowPro.com had placed a strain on the existing infrastructure to the point where it had to queue up requests until resources became available. As more and more responses got stacked up in the queue, things would grind to a halt.
The Remedy
We tackled the problem on several fronts. First, a misconfiguration was causing cached files not be recognized, increasing load unnecessarily on our application servers and storage node. We also were not properly utilizing the infrastructure that we had, so we reconfigured our 5 server cluster to better deal with the challenges we were facing. We now have redundant web servers out front for the fast delivery of static and cached contents. We also added a third application server to deal with the increase of PHP requests. Finally, we identified areas where we could more aggressively cache parts of the interface to both speed up page load times and decrease the pressure on the applications servers.
The Future
One key lesson we learned during this incident was that while we were monitoring our application externally, we needed more granular checks in place in order to identify weaknesses in our infrastructure before they spread and cause application wide issues. We’ve done that and hope that goes a long way in identifying and preventing issues in the future. Also, while we think SlideShowPro.com is running very well at the moment, we still think there is room for improvement and will continue to optimize parts of the application to allow for growth in the future.
We’d like to thank our loyal SlideShowPro.com customers for their patience. Many of you provided helpful information that helped us identify exactly where the issues were coming from. We understand that you’ve built sites and applications on top of our service and when our service suffers, you suffer along with it. One of the reasons for this post is to show you just how seriously we take that responsibility. We’re very sorry for the trouble this has caused you and we will be vigilant in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Today we’re pleased to announce that Lauren Smith has joined SlideShowPro as our new full-time Senior Web Application Engineer.
Lauren has worked as a front-end developer for a wide variety of clients and businesses, including everything from Fortune 500 companies down to week-old startups. He’s well-versed in JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP, MySQL, and enjoys nothing more than reading/writing JSON/XML and building dynamic, data-centric applications. Lauren’s work has been nominated for Webby, and has received numerous awards and features from a variety of web design publications.
Lauren will be an integral part of our core development team working on new product initiatives. We’re thrilled to have him!
SlideShowPro Director AS3 API kit released
Today we’re happy to announce that our new SlideShowPro Director AS3 API kit is out of beta and available for download.
What is it? It’s an ActionScript 3 library that provides a core set of classes, methods and utilities to load SlideShowPro Director content. Flash developers can use it to dynamically request any album, gallery, image and/or video from a self-installation of SlideShowPro Director or from a SlideShowPro.com subscription.
Use it to build full-blown portfolio sites, photo galleries, slideshows, or…whatever you want! The API gives Flash developers everything they need to use SlideShowPro Director as the dynamic media publishing backend for any project.
The kit is free and includes complete documentation, an example FLA and document class, plus the ActionScript library as a compiled SWC and in raw class form. To download, sign-in to the account center, then click the “Accessories” tab on your profile page.
Have fun Flash devs! And if you build something using the kit, share it with us. We’d love to see it.
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