If you have been following our Twitter account over the last week then you may have noticed we were performing a series of infrastructure upgrades last week to respond to keep up with demand for Apture.
I’m excited to announce now that we’ve completed the massive overhaul of our backend infrastructure that makes Apture not only more stable, but faster as well. We apologize for any slowdowns you may have experienced last week, but a lot of testing was needed to ensure things went smoothly. If you are interested technically in what we did the blog post is here. In the process of examining the code we actually were able to add a few new bells and whistles to Apture.
1. Wikipedia
We did some retooling on the backend and came up with a way to cache all of Wikipedia. What it means to you is when you link to a Wikipedia document it should load nearly instantly. Speed gains on some of the larger articles with this overhaul are near 50x
2. Scribd/PDF Document handling
Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking with many users and noticed they were having trouble with Scribd documents loading slowly or not loading at all. It turns out Scribd had some larger bugs in their API that we helped them fix. 99% of the documents should load properly and a few remaining bugs Scribd promised us they would fix in their next software release. Please let us know if you see any remaining Scribd related issues so we can help track them down.
3. New Animations Results now open in a way that we feel visually communicates what is happening when an Apture link is clicked. We think this will result in users clicking on more of the links you take the time to make. Send us your feedback simply by replying to this email. You can view a brief video of it here .
We appreciate your patience last week and hope you enjoy the improvements we’ve made. As always, if you have any feedback or are having any issues using Apture please feel free to reach out to me so we can look into it right away.
Also we are working on the NEXT version of Apture. Its very different and we’d love to show you an early version of it. Simply send an email to drew @ apture dot com with your site url and we’ll look into getting you set-up.
Andrew Machado
Community Manager
www.facebook.com/apture
