My Opera News

Posts tagged with "launch"

The new My Opera

My Opera March 2007 Release Changelog

Site redesign

The people section

Customizable sidebar and new features

New top bar

Forums

Local vs Global

Signup and accessibility

Other Changes

The Flipside

Dev.Opera launched

Posts tagged with "launch"

Design

Mobiles

Localization

Scalability

Friends feed

Looking ahead

By Fredrik Andersson. Tuesday, 18. November 2008, 07:36:00

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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!

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...

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.

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.

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!

26 comments

By Fredrik Andersson. Saturday, 10. March 2007, 17:10:36

launch, new features, new design, changelog

Hi. This is the changelog for the recent My Opera update. It's a bit late, but better late than never, right?

The new design is made to be more light and fresh than the old one. We wanted to put focus on the content instead of the interface. The old interface had much stronger colors that took away the attention from the content.

When making the new design we decided to base it on pictures instead of text. We also wanted it to be more visual and have a personal feeling, and therefore we added more photos of the users.

Even though the new site design is more driven by pictures we still managed to make it lighter and faster to load. For example, the home page of My Opera is right now only 50% of the size that it was before the launch.

We also wanted the site to be better to use for mobiles and other devices. We optimized the code and made sure to use smaller pictures where possible to decrease the loading times.

The new site is also optimized for Nintendo Wii. You can actually see what it looks like by adding ?wii=true at the end of the url (example). As you can see the width of the site changes for Nintendo Wii to fit the TV screen, the font sizes are larger and there's only a two column layout.

Another big change for the site is that we moved the account section from the personal blog area to the community area. This might take some time to get used to but we hope that it will work out fine. We did it for several good reasons.

One of the reasons is that we are planning to add more features/services to My Opera in the future, and these things might not be directly connected to the personal blogs. Therefore it's better if the account pages are more integrated with the community design than the personal blog design. Another reason is that it's now easier and faster for both you and us to create new blog designs, since we don't need to worry about reinventing the account pages for each design anymore.

One of the major features of the new site is the people section. Here you can see the latest logged in users and browse your way though their user profiles. There's also a simple user search available.

In the people section you can also find My Opera member interviews. We have gathered a small team of dedicated My Opera members to help us with the interviewing.

We have added some new features to the blog sidebar, and you can easily disable individual components by clicking "my account" and selecting "sidebars and menus".

The new sidebar features are:

Friends - Shows 6 random persons from your friends list.
Latest blog comments - Shows the 6 latest comments in your blog.
Recent visitors - Shows the 6 latest visitors to your page.
If you do not want to be visible in these lists (as well as the list on the new people page, which shows last logins), you will have to set the 'logged in' setting in your profile to 'hide'.

The log in bar at the top of each My Opera page is now a bit different. [view code example]. You can currently choose between black or white color. It can be changed on the "sidebars and menus" page in your account.

We know that the topbar can potentially cause problems for some of you that have 100% customized designs, and we are looking into giving you more options.

The forums has a new design, just like the rest of the site. We have tried making it a bit more userfriendly. In-topic forum searches have been fixed and we have tried to improve forum searches in general. Results should now be better.

You can now also post inline images directly in forum posts. The images are visible for anyone who wants to see it, and others will see a link. To enable inline images, go to the forums page, click "my settings" and then check the box saying "allow inline images".

On the old blogs page there was a lot of mixed blog posts in many different languages. For the most of us, who don't read/speak 35 different languages , this was a problem. We have therefore introduced something we call local vs global. When you visit the blogs page you will now see posts that are based on your selected language settings. If you want to see all posts you can click the "global" tab.

This feature is still under development and there's some work to do to get it better. But we think we're on the right track.

We have made quite a lot of improvements to the signup pages. They have some nice AJAX features that helps new users signing up. We have also improved the accessibility of the signup page by switching the image based captcha to a text based one.

The last real My Opera update was in November. Since then we have made tons of changes. We can't list them all here, but below is a list of a few more things we have fixed. The next update should hopefully not take too long. We'll try to have many small updates in the future, instead of a few big ones.

A serious bug with regards to tagging has been resolved, which occationally introduced tag duplication.
Blog searches are now using proper fulltext searches, something which should make them more efficient and better.
Large photo albums are now broken up into pages when editing, hopefully eliminating some of the problems with editing large albums. Feedback appreciated.
We are now using scripts from Yahoo! UI Library for the photo sorting page.
Timezone offsets no longer broken for Indian users (and others with half-hour offsets).
Improvements to the blog post URL name suggester.
Added 2 new 'insert image' buttons to the blog post editor
Groups can now select 'forums' as default page.
Blog feeds now include excerpt properly.
'Logged in' status on users' about pages didn't work properly. This has been fixed.
Siginificant optimizations and forward-thinking changes to the underlying database schemas.
Introducing memcached driven caching of minor amounts of data. To be expanded greatly.
Backend code refactoring and cleanups which should hopefully not result in any visible changes .

Finally we want thank everyone for the great feedback!

20 comments

By Ole Kasper. Wednesday, 1. November 2006, 16:19:28

Upgrade, servers, launch, community

Finally, I think we can conclude that the site shows some promises of running smoothly. We are now running my.opera.com, widgets.opera.com, dev.opera.com, files.myopera.com and devfiles.myopera.com on completely different hardware than we did on Monday.

By Fredrik Andersson. Wednesday, 1. November 2006, 11:51:00

DevOpera, launch, beta

Today we are launching a new site ~ Dev.Opera ~ for all you developers out there. On Dev.Opera you'll find web development articles as well as resources like libraries of advanced JavaScript functions ready to use.

Dev.Opera is integrated with My.Opera, so you can use your normal My.Opera username and password to log in.

The exciting thing about Dev.Opera is that it's a community driven developer site. This means that you can contribute by writing and publishing your own articles.

The site is still under development, so if you find any problems or have ideas for improvements, please tell us in the beta thread.

November 2009January 2010