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Behind the scenes at My Opera community

The new My Opera

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my opera screenshot

Hi! Today we're launching a new version of My Opera. We have a new fresh look, 1GB of free space, localized interface in 7 languages (and more coming soon), a friends activity feed, an API for embedding My Opera photos on other sites, slideshows for the photo albums and much more. :smile:

This time we also had a bit of beta testing along the way. Special thanks to dantesoft, Tamil, thobi, rose-marie, sgunhouse, remcolanting, coxy, BAMAToNE, WillYum and Ramunas for helping out.

Design

As the lead My Opera designer I wanted to give the new site a strong visual identity with that special Opera feeling. The goal was to make a simple and functional design that highligted the content rather than just beeing decorative. I also wanted to simplify the site and make it easier to access features such as Opera Link. The new design is also made to fit well with the upcoming launch of our new Opera.com site.

For those of you that write your own blog CSS, you might want to read about the HTML changes.

Mobiles

The new My Opera features many optimizations for mobiles and there's even a function where you can view the mobile optimized version by clicking a button at the bottom of each page. We hope that this will inspire those of you who have not yet tried out Opera's excellent mobile browsers! :smile:

If you are already using a mobile to browse My Opera you might notice that you will, in most cases, get the mobile optimized version by default. If you want the full version you can switch to it by clicking the button in the footer, but we recommend using the optimized version as it's not just mobile friendly CSS but also smaller images and less code to make it faster.

Localization

One of the main features of the new site is localization. I'll let our lead developer Cosimo say a few words about that:

We started working on localizing My Opera around March this year. Initially this was thought to be impossible very hard with the existing architecture, but we tried to build the internationalization engine to be as simple and standard as possible, planning and documenting even the limitations. It's based on gettext and PO files. We even worked ourselves on the translations, and of course the italian is mine. So you can complain to me for that one :smile:

In the long-term this has been a fairly good choice. In the meantime we also refined our internal tools. One is a command line application that converts the PO files that translators hand us into some ready-to-use code that is loaded at runtime by the application servers.

The integration with our templating engine has been a bit tricky, but now it works whatever templating system we will choose in the future. The most exciting thing about the I18N "layer" has been when I first saw My Opera translated in Japanese and Chinese. Really exciting!

Scalability

We have made a lot of front-end and back-end improvements to speed up the site and increase scalability. Cosimo:

Work on application code and backends has been frantic in the last months. Some of the improvements that we have introduced are:

  • the skins section is much faster now, because all skin thumbnails are served statically using our new static.myopera.com server.
  • we have a full-page cache now, so many of the most used My Opera pages are served statically now, with a fine-grained control of how/when a request can be cached. Basically we took the ~20 most used pages and we cached them completely. Then we update those cached version every now and then... :smile:

We know there's still a lot to do. We will concentrate on improving the database performance to avoid proxy errors. Specially since some of the new features (activities feed, etc) will stress the database even more!

We have good idea of what is failing and why, thanks to a cool ajax monitoring application we wrote in our "spare" time. If you are interested in our scalability challenges and how we plan to solve them, take a look at a talk I gave at the last Perl Workshop in Italy. It's slightly outdated, but you can get the basic ideas.

Friends feed

Another important goal for the new My Opera was to increase activity and make it easier for you to communicate with your friends and follow their activities on the site. One of the main features for this is the friends feed. The feed is activated when you and your friend have both added each other as friends on My Opera. It does not activate if it's just a one way friendship.

Looking ahead

We hope that you like the new My Opera. It might be a bit shaky the first few days, as we have released a lot of new code, but we are sure it will be great. A lot of work has gone into this release and we see this as a good platform to build on.

Finally, a big thanks to the entire My Opera team and all of you My Opera members that make this a great community! :cool::happy::cheers::hat:

HTML changesNew My Opera missing some new features

Comments

Olihen 18. November 2008, 07:42

:hat: :drunk:

VJgamer 18. November 2008, 07:45

Can't wait! :yes:

theoddbod 18. November 2008, 07:45

:sherlock:

funz81 18. November 2008, 07:48

:hat:

thobi 18. November 2008, 08:02

Originally posted by fred:

This time we also had a bit of beta testing along the way. Special thanks to dantesoft, Tamil, thobi, rose-marie, sgunhouse, remcolanting, coxy, BAMAToNE, WillYum and Ramunas for helping out.

you are welcome/thank you :up:

Furie 18. November 2008, 08:08

Is this Friend's Feed anything like the godawful way Facebook does things? And if so, can we turn it off? :worried:

Zaphira 18. November 2008, 08:12

It does not activate if it's just a one way friendship.


Is there any plans on changing these "one way friendships", into a thing where both parts agree on being friends before we speak of a friendship? :smile:

Furie 18. November 2008, 08:19

Or at least killing people who keep doing that. :devil:

Drazick 18. November 2008, 08:20

Will you add RTL writing support?

Thanks.

Seji 18. November 2008, 18:44

Go! Opera! :)

Trackback, please!

LorenzoCelsi 18. November 2008, 21:33

Sorry I don't want to criticize but:
1. The different menus are inconsistent. Now I have got 3 "menu" bars, one on top-left (plain text items), another on top right (slightly 3D rounded buttons), then the blog menu aligned on the left under the blog header. Besides the inconsistency in the graphics, it is also difficult to identify the functions of the different menus. Like having 2 "friends" items in 2 different menus.

2. Some MyOpera features are difficult to understand, like:
a. adding friends - everybody can add you as friend without your permission and now it seems you can't see who added you as friend any more (I can't see "friendly people" any more in the "friends" page).
b. adding a friend does not subscribe his/her blog, what is the "add a friend" function for then?
c. subscriptions - why I am showed my own blog posts in the subscriptions? It makes no sense.
d. the chat widget sends me a message whenever I write on my own chat. This makes no sense again.

3. the top bar color is now pre-defined once you select the blog "design" while before you could select the color. Some of those bars are again inconsistent, like the red one on top of the grey design.

4. I am showed ALWAYS my own avatar once I am logged in. Completely useless because I know it already and I find it annoying and a waste of space on top.

5. Some features like searching members are now difficult to find/access from the blog page.

Thanks, regards.

rose-marie 18. November 2008, 22:10

So... where do I send my account number? :left:
p:

Keep up the good work :up:.

fred 18. November 2008, 22:16

Drazick,
maybe some day in the future but it's not in the current roadmap.

fred 18. November 2008, 22:20

Lorenzo,
I think the menus provide a more consistant navigation now when it's the same across the community. specially when you use the default blog design.

The add friends function will be revised. You will be subscribed to your friends feed if the friendship is accepted.

If someone leaves a comment in your blog you want to know about it, right? That's why it's in the subscriptions.

The chat message thing should have been fixed for this release. If not, it's a bug.

The top bar color can be selected just like before.

The avatar is shown to make the page more personal. I really like it.

Searching for members should be improved. More on that later..

theoddbod 18. November 2008, 22:21

@rose-marie : didn't you test properly? I guess you needed more martinis :D

LorenzoCelsi 18. November 2008, 22:37

@fred:
1. if you think having 3 different menus scattered around the page is good then ok. It is not what I would define "consistent". I am sure somebody had done some planning but seeing my blog page it looks, well... a mess.

2. About friends, I will wait the final version then. Right now the only "new feature" I can see is the "friendly people" removed.

3. Yeah, I know I am subscribed my own blog posts, but why I am showed them in the subscriptions list? That list should show only the subscriptions I made to other blogs and such, not my own.

4. Ok for the chat but it has been that way since I am blogging on MyOpera.

5. I can't find any way to select the top bar color. Where is it?

6. You like to see your own avatar on top? Man, It is like having your own picture framed on your desk.

7. I hope so, right now I have to go on "community" and scroll down to be able to browse the members (that should be the MAIN feature in a community like MyWhatever).

Thanks for the patience, regards.

rose-marie 18. November 2008, 22:42

Mart - Now you tell me Homer: Doh! p:

Lorenzo - I can still see all the "friendly people" who have added me...

And for the record, the chat message thing did work in the beta version so it must be a bug :smile:.

theoddbod 18. November 2008, 22:43

No problems with Friendly people here. I've seen no new bugs yet, just the vanishing profile pics which I know is just temporary :smile:.

Do you mean that your new blog posts are appearing in your subscription list without people commenting?

Top Bar colour is on the blog Design page.

LorenzoCelsi 18. November 2008, 22:47

I have checked some times before posting just in case I got crazy (ok, more crazy than usual) but I can't see "friendly people" (in the friends page) either the "top bar color selection" (in the design page). :smile:

I can survive both issues anyway.

RichardCooper 18. November 2008, 23:25

And portuguese? :cry:

fred 18. November 2008, 23:26

More languages are on the way.. It just takes a while for the translators to translate everything. It's a lot of text. :smile:

Dacotah 18. November 2008, 23:58

Fred, will you please help Bea, her blog is in another language:

http://my.opera.com/b_laudanum/blog/2008/11/18/what-the


Can her blog lanuage be set by the drop down box at the bottom of the sidebar or is there a setting somewhere in "My Accounts"?

Zaphira 19. November 2008, 07:27

I think it looks fine, from what I've seen so far. I have one question though:
Is it possible to keep the "news" in the header on all the pages? It would be nice to be able to avoid to click back to your own site to access your watchlist.

LorenzoCelsi 19. November 2008, 08:45

@fred:
I found the source of the two glitches about "friendly people" and about the "select top bar color".

The menu in the "friends" page appears ONLY when/if you have got at least one friend added. If your friends list is empty the page does not show any menu, despite you have been added as friend by other people.

The top bar color selection item appears only when you select a different design (I mean, to change your current one you must change theme and then switch back).

MAYBE both things should be different.

Furie 19. November 2008, 10:22

I ain't changed my theme and I can change topbar colour easily.

RichardCooper 19. November 2008, 23:10

Thanks frd :angel:

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