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October 28, 2008

Upcoming System Maintenance - Preparation for Migration

Over the past few months, we have been working on a migration plan that will move us from our current infrastructure at our colocation facility in San Diego to a superb AOL datacenter.  This move will allow us to provide our users with additional scalability and performance boosts.  The boxes are all in place, they're fully configured and we're planning on performing the migration toward the end of next week - we'll make sure to give you more information about that in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, we are going to be performing system maintenance tomorrow to ensure that the actual migration will go smoothly.  The system maintenance will last from 6pm Pacific until 6am Pacific, although it is our expectation that we should be able to restore full operation of the system earlier.  During this time, the widgets will continue to be served and tracked as you would expect them to, but our site will be in maintenance mode, so you will not be able to access the dashboard or any of the components of the dashboard including reporting. 

Stay tuned for additional information and improvements...

Posted by Bill Carliss on October 28, 2008 at 04:41 PM in maintenance | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 27, 2008

Netvibes and myAOL welcome yourminis users

Both Netvibes and myAOL have been great partners to us throughout the years.  Now that we are closing our own startpage, both groups have put together blog posts to welcome yourminis startpage users - complete with instructions as to how to import your OMPL files to their systems.  Please take a look at the Netvibes post and at the myAOL post for more information.  You will see that both groups have terrific startpages, and we encourage you to take them for a spin. 

Posted by Goowy on October 27, 2008 at 03:56 PM in general info | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 09, 2008

yourminis startpage closing

We're sorry to inform you that as of October 27, 2008, we will no longer support the yourminis startpage.  You already know that one of the best things about widgets is their ability to give you access to the content and features you value from different locations across the Web.   Because there are already so many great startpage solutions out there supporting yourminis (like myAOL, iGoogle or Netvibes), we've decided to let the startpage experts take care of the startpages, so we could focus on what we do best -- building widgets.

The startpage link will be removed from the site shortly, and the startpage itself will be completely removed on October 27, 2008, so please make sure to export all of your content from the site prior to this date.  Although we know that this is an inconvenience, you can export your feeds data as an OPML file, take most of your content, and import it into other startpage solutions (see instructions below). yourminis widgets will continue to work on other sites as they have in the past. 

We're also going to be making some changes to the gallery.  The details page for each widget will still exist, but we will be removing browsing, favoriting, and statistics functionality from the consumer gallery.

To export your feeds data to another startpage:
1.) Simply click "Add Content" at the upper left hand side of the yourminis startpage.
2.) Click "Export OPML" at the bottom of the menu and save the OPML file to your desktop.
3.) Go to your favorite startpage and follow their instructions for importing the OPML file that you exported in step #2.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we make these changes.  If you have any further questions, please feel free to comment below.

Posted by Goowy on October 09, 2008 at 05:54 PM in product updates | | Comments (52) | TrackBack (0)

October 06, 2008

myAOL & More Facebook Enhancements

In our latest update to the yourminis widget platform, we've added support for the myAOL startpage in two ways.  First, all widgets now have the "Copy to myAOL" icon available on the syndication panel.  Clicking this will allow a user to add the widget to their myAOL page.  Second, we've added myAOL as an available gallery option, allowing you the administrative ability to submit your widget to the myAOL gallery for additional distribution opportunity.

In addition, we've continued to enhance our Facebook support. You'll notice that the "add application" to Facebook workflow has been revamped, making it significantly easier to convert your widgets into Facebook Applications.  From the frontend perspective, we now display images in the profile view and direct users to the canvas page to interact with the widget, ultimately resulting in a better user experience for most of our existing widgets.  The new Facebook interface introduced a maximum size restriction of 180x250 for the display of a widget within the left rail of a user's profile page.  Most widgets are built to a standard size of 300x250 and thus will not work well within the new limited space. You can customize the image to be displayed within this space via the Settings>Manage Thumbnails section of your dashboard.Finally, we've implemented the Facebook template bundles and associated publishUserAction() API call.  This allows you to register a feed template bundle and then leverage it within the API to message actions within the widget to the user's activity feed.

Posted by Bill Carliss on October 06, 2008 at 02:07 PM in product updates | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)