Thursday, November 27, 2008
Kwippy.com would like to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to all its users!
In the United States there are two traditions on this day,eating turkey and watching football (that’s American football mind you the one that’s kinda like rugby with armour..)on the television.
Rest assured that all of us at Kwippy will continue hard at work providing you the best service possible.
Why we recently upgraded the way that conversation comments arrive in your email box (maybe you noticed ?) but more on that in a later blog.
So have a great and Happy Thanksgiving!
Team Kwippy.com
Sunday, November 23, 2008
We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from our users about the numerous notification emails that they get for comments on a particular thread. Things used to get particularly messy when you are a part of three-four hyperactive conversations. Lots of suggestions came and we realized that we can better this process of notifications by sending controlled messages. Keeping the problem and user feedback in mind we’ve made(and released) some changes to the notification process.
What it means ?
You will get a notification after the first comment and then no additional notifications until you visit the kwip, once you visit(or comment) on that thread again a singe email notification is sent on the next unread comment and so on.
These change is applicable to both notification emails and instant messages
We are sure you’ll love these change as it will reduce your task of managing notification emails in your inbox.
Let us know if you have suggestions/feedback about these change.
Happy Kwipping !!
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Hi Guys,
Got a question for us or a bug to report ? Head to our page on GetSatisfaction and create a topic. We’ll pick it up from there and do the needful. Here’s the link to our page http://getsatisfaction.com/kwippy
Hope to see some action there soon 
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
In my experience with both rails and django, i would have to admit that a lot of things need to be improved at the core of these platforms so that developers can truly deploy a really fast production site. Let talk about what we did at kwippy to make it that much more faster than the default Django setup.
- Use memcached properly : The trick in getting speed is to cache all logged out pages and heavy caching of the user objects when logged in. For example we recently got our sessions into the memcached cloud to see a good speed jump.
- Database structuring : Django does a lot of joins and magic in it ORM, and has a built in caching layer. But the problem is that we developers structure our tables to our percieved needs … not necessarily for the way the ORM works. One way is to start writing custom SQL inside your views, another is to understand the ORM better. Your choice :).
- Database connection pooling : It is pretty shocking to realize that Django does not do connection pooling, I have used DButils connection pooling for our needs. But IMHO it should be a default thing inside the application platform.
- SMTP is slow : Imagine the user filling up a form which is emailed to you, and your SMTP is down. There is a good chance that you will lose that data and the application will give a 500 :). To alleviate that i have created a command queue where emails are not sent within the application and a daemon is doing all the dirty work. I will put it all out in the market :), so that you guys can make you site that much more faster/robust.
- Pagination : To be honest, i still do not like django pagination. The problem was that it will getting all the objects and as the database is on a separate machine a lot of data was being transferred over the network. So i created my custom pagination which on the average is much faster than ObjectPaginator or Paginator.
Well there are all i could think of right now. Obviously there are some other optimizations that i keep doing …. and will keep writing about. Till the next time, feel free to contact me about these optimizations at dipankar@kwippy.com
Sunday, November 16, 2008
With every new feature that gets added to our platform, the possibilities multiply. Something similar happened when we released RSS and Atom integration with kwippy. The feature means that you can now integrate rss and atom feeds from your favorite blogs and websites and follow them on your gtalk. This (and love for our users) led us to the idea of implementing a “twitter-tracker”. Which means now you can track the twitterverse for keywords like “social media marketing” , “obama” or say your name on twitter via your gtalk.
For details read the post i wrote here
Let us know how you find this mashup and reply with the keywords you want to track
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Hi Guys,
If you are like us, you too probably would be following your favorite blogs and sites via some RSS reader or the other, and tend to invariably miss various updates or get them a bit too late. Ever thought it would be nice to get latest updates about your favorite blogs like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb served hot to you, as they happen ? If yes, you are in for a treat
We’ve just released the RSS and Atom integration for kwippy.
What it means ?
It means that now you can follow your favorite blogs and websites on your IM(gtalk for now). So every time there’s a new post on the blog you are following, you’ll be notified on your gtalk.
How it works?
To get IM notifications about blog and website updates, you need to follow the blog/website and ensure that you’ve turned on the IM notification option for that blog(under the change settings link on their kwips page)
How to integrate RSS and Atom feeds ?
We have integrated these blogs to start with
1) TechCrunch: http://www.kwippy.com/TechCrunchRSS
2) ReadWriteWeb: http://www.kwippy.com/ReadWriteWebRSS
3) GigaOm: http://www.kwippy.com/GigaOmRSS
4) Makeuseof: http://www.kwippy.com/MakeuseofRSS/
New Additions
5) Scobleizer: http://www.kwippy.com/scobleizerRSS/
6) 37Signals: http://www.kwippy.com/37signalsRSS
7) Dilbert: http://www.kwippy.com/DailyDilbertRSS
If you want to add more blogs that you would like to follow. Please let us know.
Play with and let us know what you think of it.
Happy Kwipping !!
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Hi Guys,
We would be having a small downtime for about half an hour shortly for maintenance and upgradation of our servers.
So if you don’t find site in order in the next hour, you know why.
Will update you once we are done with the maintenance and things are back to normal.
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