Zero to Launch in Two Weeks (Rock-am-Ring Photo Site) June 14th, 2007 by info
Last week, around Monday or Tuesday, we got an urgent request from our longtime German customer, Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur:
We need a Rock-am-Ring photo upload and sharing site, ASAP!
So we hunkered down, conceived a rough concept, and Alex got to work from scratch designing and coding. About two weeks later, we just launched:
Rock-am-Ring Photo Sharing Site
This site is a good example of the productivity gains that can be realized (by great developers, of course!) with the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
Our new site features include:
User accounts, created from temporary accounts (i.e. every visitor instantly becomes a temporary user, which is migrated when they create their permanent account) with profiles. (This is an innovative technique that we’ll blog about soon.)
User uploading and management of images.
Probably the most advanced file upload interface on the web. You can select multiple files for upload (and we locally pre-filter by image size and type!), and they are sequentially uploaded and processed, with full interactive feedback to the user (You can literally upload hundreds of files at once.) We plan to publish this solution as Open Source.
Photo voting with AJAX (Digg-style, thumbs up/down). Notice we don’t display the count before voting, to avoid bias.
Photo commenting, with email notification, and 30 minute post-editing.
Community-based moderation. If three people mark an image as inappropriate, it’s no longer displayed, and we’re notified to consider suspending the user’s account.
Advanced slideshow viewer, with link emailing.
Photo tagging
AJAX implementation of carousel slider
Automatic creation of multiple sizes of uploaded files
Photo EXIF information display.
Lots of nice lightbox UI effects (signup, login, etc.)
Bilingual user interface (German/English)
Amazon S3 image storage and serving
Multi-tier server architecture
And lots and lots more…
There are still lots of features to add, but the main focus now is on database query optimization, to improve the page load times, and to support the large amount of traffic. (In the first 36 hours, we’ve got 900 images, and serviced 4 million database queries!)
All in all, this was a pretty amazing accomplishment, both in terms of what was produced and the time in which it was produced.
It was also a great (and fun!) team effort. Thanks to:
Alex, for working like a madman to get this designed, and coded in a week and a half.
Niall and Arto, for figuring out how to keep the servers handling the requests.
Christian, for being late to his movie, while providing the German translations.
Alvaro, Martin and Christian, for testing.
Nespresso, for creating the caffeine that kept us going.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[...] The feature-rich web application was developed in record time, and highlights a number of innovations, including possibly the most advanced multi-file upload technology currently in existence. (MakaluMedia plan to publish this as open source software.) Read more about the application features, and use of the Ruby on Rails web application development framework on the MakaluMedia Summit Blog. [...]