My Opera News

• Add new "phototagging" feature to the photo albums. See the post in the community blog for more details.
  
• Add new "Customize Design" functionality (see "My Page" -> "Design" -> "Customize your design"). It allows you to customize your page background and header without knowing CSS. Note that you can't customize your page if you use the default theme! See the post in the community blog for more details.
  
• New full-screen slideshow feature for photo albums.
  
• Improvements in social network integration: now you have the possibility of sharing your blog posts automatically on Facebook. We also fixed some bugs.
  
• New autocomplete feature when sending PMs: just start writing the username of a friend, and a drop-down will appear with possible completions.
  
• Add a new cool feature to the friend invite page and the messages page: you can now select a range of messages by clicking the checkbox for the first in the range, then Shift-clicking the checkbox for the last in the range.
  
• Add a "Accept all friend requests" button.
  
• Fixed a problem with "Save draft" that would change publication dates for blog posts.
  
• Add Twingly ping support for blog posts.
  
• Publish blog updates on other social networks when blogging via MMS.
  
• Photo ratings are now shown to the owner.
  
• Fixed an issue with multiple choice answers in polls and the preview function.
  
• Now attached images in forums link to the original.
  
• Other small fixes and tweaks to the forums.
  
• Small fixes for the Link interface, particularly for notes and Mini/Mobile.
  
• Add a date selection widget to the events/countdowns, no more typing dates by hand. You'll need a browser supporting the "date" input type, such as Opera, to see it.
  
• Fix some issues with avatar resizing. Some issues still pending, currently looking at them. If you have concrete issues that are not fixed, please add a comment with a link to the original image.
  
• Small bug fixes for the wallpapers section.
  
• OEmbed bug fix: property "provider_name" is now correctly named (it used to be "provider").
  

The Banana release has been out for 2 weeks now. It seems to have been one of the happiest upgrades that we've ever had in a while. Not that it's without bugs, of course, but...

EspenAO already told you about some of the changes that went into Banana.

We'd like to tell you about some other stuff, more from the "engine-room".

Captcha

We have a brand new captcha module, based on ReCaptcha. This took a while to make, because we built a generic Captcha module, that will allow us to use any captcha system out there if we need to switch. We find ReCaptcha very good so far. Some people of course disagree, but the old "string-only" captcha was far too easy to break, and our community/spam moderators had a hard time cleaning up the spam at times.

Legitimate users shouldn't have any big problem with it. In any case, if you're worried about comments in your blog, invite people to join My Opera, so they won't see any captcha anymore :-)

New static server

New users that upload their avatar or profile picture will probably notice (or probably not, if things work correctly) that their new picture is now served from http://static02.myopera.com. Now we have in fact 2 static servers, static01 and static02.

This is the first successful partitioning experiment on MyOpera. This means that some part of our users will see their pictures being served from static01.myopera.com, while others, tipically new users, will go to static02.myopera.com.

This is made possible by our Storage classes, that allow us to move users content around without too much work.

New Javascript framework

To modernize and improve the usability of My Opera, we officially adopted the YUI framework after carefully evaluating several available js frameworks out there. The last two contenders were jQuery and YUI. We chose YUI for several reasons, but they were very close as per speed, features and overall quality.

We were already using YUI in the past, but it wasn't really used that much, and it was an older version anyway. Now we also built a custom js library that "wraps" around YUI, so we don't use it directly, but we access its core functionality with our functions. An example is the new blog import tool. Example:

// JavaScript for the Yahoo 360 blog import page (/community/import/)
O.load_framework_dependencies(
    ['connection','selector'],
    init
);

function init() {
    O.add_event(
        'form[name="blog-import"]',
        'submit',
        blog_import
    );
}

// Form submit handler. Makes the ajax call to the Y360 blog preview script
function blog_import(e) {
    O.prevent_default(e);      // avoid double posting
    O.show('#spinner');
    // ...
    O.ajax(
        form.action,
        {
            success: show_preview,
            failure: preview_failed
        },
        data,
        {method: 'POST'}
    );
}

It allows us to write very clean js code, and tries to reasonably decouple the YUI libraries from our own code. O. stands for Opera library.
O.add_event() is the generic function that of course works for all browsers, to add a new event to the DOM.
O.ajax() is the XHR ajax wrapper, and so on...

This abstraction will also allow us, if needed, to use parts of different frameworks very easily, and even switch to a different framework in the future. But we might not want to do that, I hope.

More stuff

The Apricot release is now stabilized, after a few days of problems here and there.

The good thing is that we learned something more. The bad thing is that it took us a couple of days to realize what the real problem was.

I always like to say that My Opera becomes stronger and faster only after some "crisis" moments. It's those performance/stability/whatever problems that demand highest attention and you have to do something to fix them, no matter what. So, whatever doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. :-)

Initially, we thought the problems were in the new friends system code. After careful inspection and partial rewrite of both Sidebar and Friends components, it became evident that the problem had another cause. As many other sites, we use memcached on several machines. It acts as a distributed cache store that makes the site faster and able to serve more requests with the same hardware resources.

Before we started the emergency rewrite of the Sidebar module, we decided to take a closer look at the class that was handling the memcached connections and queries. What we found out (part of what My Opera is today is still legacy stuff for us...) is that this class was issuing a new connection to our memcached server each and every time we queried some data. This is obviously not optimal, so we decided to keep persistent connections to the servers.

As of now, we restored all the functionality in Sidebar and Friends. Sidebar and Friends data is now present on much more pages than before, and that means more backend power needed to serve the same pageviews. We also have a lot more features and queries to the database, but still we're able to cope with the traffic, which is btw quickly increasing.

The Sidebar in particular was broken because when we introduced caching for it, it happened that the same (cached) version of the Sidebar content was used for the /albums/ and for the /blog/ page, which is completely wrong. Now we keep two separate copies because they can, and will, be different. The Sidebar content is also kept in the cache for 30 minutes at most, unless you change your sidebar settings. The recent visitors list didn't update because of this caching. Now everything should be back to normal.
We will probably make sure that your sidebar is updated when you write a new blog post or when there's a new comment, etc... For now this is just planned...

In the meanwhile, our monitoring team (LOL) noticed that at peak time and at some random moments in the day, the site slows down for a couple of minutes, and then everything is back to normal. We're working to solve this by optimizing the code even more. Without breaking anything, if possible... :-)

Big surprises ahead... And you don't know the super-secret feature yet... :-)

• Brand new, beta, Flash-based photo uploader. You have to click on the "Switch to Flash uploader" button on the right to use it, and allows to select several pictures at once for upload. Please submit any problems you find.


• New friend system, so that only people who you have "approved" can add you as friends.


• Added as many as 9 new translations in this release. Now we have My Opera available in 17 languages!


• Improved design and usability in photo albums.


• New welcome page for people who has just signed up for a new account. Among others, it makes it easy and quick to specify your country, so you'll be able to find more people in the Members by country page.


• My Opera buttons are now text based, which is better for accessibility and for translation.


• Improvements in the skin section, especially for authors. Now you get suggestions for improvement when you upload a skin with commonly-made mistakes, and you can specify that your skin is for Opera 9.5 (ie. skin version 3).


• Now blog posts and comments are checked for correct syntax before being sent. That will avoid some problems people have had with broken XML, which used to "break" their blogs.


• We have also fixed some issues in Dev Opera, mostly related to profile editing.


• We have started a documentation page for our public APIs. It's linked from the bottom of the page.


• The order of the subscription items is now from newest to oldest, so it's easier to find your newest subscriptions.


• When you make a comment on a blog, the page correctly "jumps" to it again.


• Fixed a lot of bugs here and there, too many and too small to mention in detail.