Category Archives: Updates & Upgrades

Better Screenshots, a New Commitment

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Almost exactly a year ago I posted that we had come back to life, then promptly disappeared. We didn’t disappear entirely, though, and are now back with a revamped team, new focus, and even some site updates.

Our goal is to make BonzoBox fast & easy to understand and use, and we’d like your help in making that happen. Leave comments on our blog posts, E-mail us, make suggestions in our UserVoice Forum, and say hi @bonzobox on Twitter. I’ll do my best to write back and together we can make BonzoBox great, (yes, there’s a little cheese there).

So, what have we been working on over the past year? The system that makes the thumbnails has been completely rewritten from the ground up. Screenshots should now come in much faster and look better. We’re still ironing out the kinks but it’s already a big improvement on our old system.

Will it be another year before we post? No. We’re not going to write unless we have something to write, but we’re going to make sure that we have things worth sharing here.

Now, head on over to BonzoBox and see what we’ve done!

 

 

We’re Alive: The New BonzoBox

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It’s been over a year since we posted here, and today we finally revealed what we’ve been working on – the next generation of BonzoBox.  We got some strong critiques when we first launched and we listened.  Today we are bringing the new, simpler, BonzoBox to the entire BonzoBox community.

The new BonzoBox gets rid of most of those tabs we used to have, increases the size of the thumbnails by almost half, and is designed with speed in mind, (although, admittedly, we’re having some server speed issues – they will be addressed shortly).

We’ve focused even more on communication with this release.  We’re not done yet and we want to make BonzoBox into the best tool possible.  We realize that we’re not there yet and that’s where you come in.  Tell us what you want and need, on our New Uservoice Forum, by E-mail at feedback [at] bonzobox [dot] com, or by clicking on one of the feedback or contact links on the site.  We’re listening. Hard.

We’ve posted a full introduction to the new BonzoBox as part of BonzoBox itself, so check it out for the nitty-gritty details, and let us know what we can do even better.

bz.am – URL Shortener

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Powered by Bonzobox, the bz.am URL shortener is coming soon (sounds like Bizzamm!). bz.am is synced with Bonzobox and every URL shortened will be added to our database. The shortener will also give you the ability to look at the history and statistics of your shortened URLs. Right now, if you visit bz.am you can add your email address to our notification list so we can let you know when we launch!

BonzoBox Conference – June 2009

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bonzobox
As BonzoBox continues to grow we are all excited for new upgrades and features to come. Our weekend conference begins today to discuss which features we will implement as 2010 approaches. There is no doubt that programming jargon surrounding everything from BonzoBox Mobile to comprehensive search algorithms and  URL shortening will be discussed. Whatever it is, these features will be tailored towards enhancing your online experience and making it easier for you to navigate the web, find great websites, and share them anywhere in the world with anyone you would like in fun and interactive ways. BonzoBox is now available in Spanish, Portuguese, and Deutsch with more languages to come!  Remember this weekend and the following developments and changes to come are for you. So if you’re a BonzoBox veteran or a brand new user, get excited as there is a plethora of upgrades to come. Stay tuned for a summary of this weekend and what will be coming soon to BonzoBox.com. It’s sure to be a hard working, brain bashing, and entertaining weekend at the BonzoBox office.

Thank You for continuing to use BonzoBox.com,

Ryan Ozonian - Chief Creative Development
John Beales - Chief Technology Officer
Programming - Aniket Dixit, Ashit Vora, Gaurav Jotwani, Jonathan Sebastian, Vishwas Pandya, & Yash Patel
Marketing - Ken Yashamita, Gabe Wolpa

Welcome Back from the Long Weekend

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Well, it’s Tuesday and I hope that all of you BonzoBoxers in the US had a great long weekend, maybe fired up the grill, and honored the memory of the brave men and women that gave their lives to keep the country strong and free. 

We saw that you were not spending your time on BonzoBox this weekend, and while you were away we did a bunch of small upgrades.  Most of them were small and make things a little faster or work a little better.  The thing you will most likely notice that when you look at a buddy’s websites, (like mine at bonzobox.com/johnbeales), you shouldn’t see which providers your buddy was using in his E-mail tab.

There are a bunch more small updates scheduled to roll out throughout the week to help improve your experience on BonzoBox.  We won’t be blogging about them all, but we will try to post most of them on Twitter so if you’re not already doing it, follow us at twitter.com/bonzobox.  

Have a great week.

Announcing Facebook Connect on BonzoBox

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A few minutes ago we pushed a major update that adds Facebook Connect to BonzoBox.  We’re pretty excited about this and hope that you will be too!

Facebook Connect allows you to sign in to BonzoBox by authenticating with Facebook instead of creating a username and password on BonzoBox.  If you already have a BonzoBox account you can add Facebook authentication to your account by going to Settings, (by your name in the top right), then choosing Account Linking. If you don’t already have a BonzoBox account simply click the Facebook Connect button in the Sign Up screen.  To sign in using Facebook Connect click the Facebook Connect button in the BonzoBox Sign In screen.

This is only our first step with the Facebook platform here on BonzoBox. We are planning even deeper integration with the Facebook platform and there is more to come.

Performance Issues Resolved

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You may have noticed that sometimes BonzoBox has been extremely slow to load over the past 2 weeks.  We noticed too and set to work finding out why. 

It turns out that the program that imports our updated screenshots was very hard on the database and as a result whenever it started working, (at least every 5 minutes), the database would be overloaded and BonzoBox pages would stop loading properly.  This is why BonzoBox sometimes appeared to be up one minute, down the next, and back up 2 minutes after that.  To fix the problem we rewrote the program that imports the updated screenshots so be much nicer to the database and everything seems to be running fine now, and has been since last night.  As an added bonus updated screenshots are now imported much faster!

Thank you for your patience while we hunted down the cause of the problem and got it fixed.

BonzoBox is Faster

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Since the New Year the BonzoBox community has been experiencing explosive growth. As a result of that growth, we’ve been planning to upgrade our servers for a while. The plan was to smoothly transition to the newer, faster servers. Well, last Sunday, due to circumstances beyond our control, our old server was shut down for a day and a half, so I went into overdrive to move everything to our new server and bring the site back. By the time our old server was brought back online we were far enough into moving everything to the new server that the decision was made to offer limited functionality to existing BonzoBoxers during the move then re-open everything once we were ready for prime-time on the new system. We opened everything up again on Wednesday, and brought back the final missing feature, on-demand screenshots, on Saturday. We are sorry for the problems that the downtime caused. We understand that it was a headache, it was for us too. While we were down we weren’t able to bookmark the reference sites we were using to bring everything back up! However, we’re back now, and better than ever.

We are really excited about our new server. Here are some highlights:

  • 5.5 times the processing power of the old server
  • 8 times the memory of the old server
  • 4.5 times the storage of the old server

On top of that we have moved the system that generates screenshots into an environment where we have access to virtually unlimited computing power.

We have improved our backups too. We now back-up all of your data every hour to a secure location. We also have nightly on-site backups of absolutely everything, and nightly offsite backups of absolutely all data, (even the stuff that we’re already doing hourly). This means that even if the data center where our servers are housed burns to the ground your data is safe.

Now we’re settled into our new home, We can finally fix some bugs that you have discovered and improving BonzoBox. For all of you who have been patiently waiting for something, (like better bookmark import), hold on, it’s coming. Now go and enjoy the new, speedy, servers

BonzoBox for Everyone

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We just pushed a major upgrade to the site and we’re pretty excited about it.

The first and most obvious change is that sign-in is no longer obligitory.  Of course you should sign in to access your own personal BonzoBox, but if you just want to pop in and do a quick Google search then you can.

The second major change is that you no longer have a Bonzo Name, but you do have a Personal BonzoBox URL.  We have decided to move toward having everyone use their real first names here on BonzoBox.  Your old Bonzo Name is now your Personal URL, for example, if your Bonzo Name was johnbeales, (like me), your Personal BonzoBox URL would be http://bonzobox.com/johnbeales. If your old Bonzo Name has strange characters in it that don’t work in a URL contact us using the feedback link at the bottom of the page and we’ll get it updated for you.

That’s it for the moment.  More is coming over the next week.  Stay tuned.

New Feedback & Upgrades

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Our new feedback tab.

Our new feedback tab.

Great new feedback system from Get Satisfaction

Here on BonzoBox there’s always been a link at the very bottom of the site that allows you to send feedback to us, but it’s not very obvious and just sends an E-mail – not very 21st century of us, so this week we have pushed an update that gives all of you BonzoBoxers out there a way to participate in making BonzoBox better:  Feedback powered by Get Satisfaction.

Get Satisfaction allows you to send us questions, ideas, problem reports, and even praise, and it lets others see what’s going on and let us know their thoughts on the subject.  For example, if Sally wants the ability to make her BonzoBox sing to her she can post an idea that says “BonzoBox should sing to me.”  Then, if Jane likes the idea she can tell us so from the same web page and start following the idea so she knows what’s going on.  This will allow us to know which ideas are the most loved, (or hated).  It also means that the survey will be closed down by the end of the weekend.

You will notice a black tab on the left side of most BonzoBox pages that says “Feedback.”  Just click it and tell us your ideas, wishes, and gripes.

Back-End improvements to allow for faster updates

You may not be aware, but BonzoBox is multi-lingual, we have both English and Spanish versions of BonzoBox, and have a couple more languages coming soon.  However, it’s tough to quickly add new features to a website when everything has to be done in four languages! So, a major part of our updates this week consisted of code changes that allow us to update the different languages independently as the translations are ready.  This means that for those of you using BonzoBox in English, you may see features slightly faster than those of you using BonzoBox in other languages.  This will allow us to keep on innovating and experimenting at breakneck speed!

Who is this John guy?

You may have noticed that this post is not written by the Bonzo Guy.  It’s written by John.  I am the Chief Technology Officer of BonzoBox and I will be writing about new features and upgrades to BonzoBox, and maybe something else once in a while if I feel like it.  Want to know what’s in my BonzoBox?  Check it out here.