Today I am going to move the website to a new server as well as push updated versions of several of the back-room components into production.

Those of you already on the service (Thanks!) should notice nothing more than faster response from the website and less ‘wonkiness’ in the feeds.

The biggest visible change is the addition of ‘activation keys’. Activation keys make it much simpler to add a frame to FrameAlbum service.  These keys will be displayed on frames that connect to the FrameAlbum service but are not yet ‘owned’ by a registered user.  This replaces the image that included the ‘productID’ and ‘frameID’ values.  While these are very useful to me they are not so useful to the average user.

I’ve noticed that many folks that have registered for the service have not added any channels to their frames.  I accept that the website doesn’t exactly do a great job explaining how you go about getting pictures onto your frame.  I’m an engineer, not a user interface designer (as if that wasn’t painfully obvious to anyone who has tried to use the website 😉 ) – it makes perfect sense to me!  But, obviously, not to everyone.

Beginning today if your frame connects to the service but doesn’t have any channels programmed you will receive a message to visit the site and add channels. This is a very small step towards helping folks use the service.  I have a long way to go but at least you won’t have a blank frame and no idea why it is blank.

Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone but assuming all goes well today, I’ll be releasing the next batch of beta invites.  😉

Thanks for your support!

FrameAlbum is a victim of it’s own popularity.  The tiny server I have running the service isn’t up to the task now that there are several hundred people on the service.  This is the reason that some of your frames are reporting ‘invalid RSS feed’ or ‘cannot contact service’ or similar messages.

My bad, sorry about that.

The server I’m using is based on Amazon’s EC2 service.  This matters not to most of you but will be interesting to the .5% of you that are are geeks like me.  The ‘tiny’ instance type is a small fraction of a ‘real machine’ and when someone else on the same physical machine as my instance runs something heavy it takes away from me.  Well, it seems that someone is almost always running something heavy on the same machine as the FrameAlbum service.  As a result, the service is a bit wobbly.   I’ve tried stopping/starting the server a few times to get on a different physical machine but the problem persists.

I’m moving the service to another machine that is not shared.  This will cause the service to be a bit bumpy for the remainder of the day but will result in a much more stable and responsive service.

Thanks for your support and patience!

I’m running the FrameAlbum service on a very modest server.  I limited all the channels to a maximum of 100 photos to reduce the load on the server.

I’ve moved parts of the service to a new, more capable server.  I’ve increased the limit to 200 photos to see how this new machine performs.  Assuming it performs well I’ll bump it up again in the near future.

Enjoy!

I pushed some new code to the FrameAlbum website today.  This is a small update to improve the messaging on the status of a channel.  It will now inform you if the system was unable to find a matching username on Flickr/PicasaWeb.  It will also tell you how many photos were added to a channel during the last update cycle.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Well, not so much lazy as sleep deprivation induced hazy.  My days are full with several projects all peaking simultaneously.  My progress on FrameAlbum has slowed, limited by my waking hours being consumed by paying gigs.  I’ve focused on squashing the biggest bugs and helping folks take full advantage of the functionality that already exists within FrameAlbum.  I thought it appropriate to take a moment and share the new development priorities…

Improve Flickr and PicasaWeb channel building

There is a very high percentage of failed grabber searches on both the Flickr and PicasaWeb channel types.  The vast majority of these are ‘unknown username’ errors.  A few things need work here:

• Better feedback during the channel editing/building process.  Is this username you’ve just entered known on the service?
• Better error reporting.  Today, if an error occurs during the photo search it creates an error message display in the feed but there isn’t any info. on how to fix the problem.

I am working to replace the very simplistic channel build process with a more robust system.  This new method will check the username at the time you enter it and provide appropriate feedback.  This will greatly improve the success rate of the grabbers and get more photos onto more frames.

I am also updating the error displays to include guidance on how to resolve the issue that is being reported.  I’m also going to include better status reporting on the website so that you can more easily see what needs attention.

Facebook is next

Facebook photo feeds are first on the list of new channel types.  This is the most often requested ‘new feature’ on FrameAlbum.  Frankly, I would rather add other photo sharing sites (SmugMug, 500px, Photobucket, SnapFish, Shutterfly, WebShots, et. al.) but I have not seen a great interest in those services.

Informational channels

This is a broad category of new channels that will include weather forcasts, news headlines, stock market reports, etc..  This is a significant chunk of work on a rather amorphous set of channels.  I’d be happy for any thoughts folks have re: which of these is most interesting/desirable so that I can focus my earliest efforts in that direction.

That’s about it for now.  As always, I value your input and your support.  Ping me anytime with questions and suggestions — I won’t promise an immediate response, but I will respond.