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

We are pleased to announce support for Drupal.  Now all of the sites powered by Drupal can install the Apture plugin and enjoy content on their site from over 50+ different sources.

The Drupal plugin works with a large subset of rich text editors, including (but not limited to) the major editors: TinyMCE, FCKEditor and YUI Editor.  In addition to the supported editors listed above the plugin also supports placing aptureized content in Drupal blocks.

Already a few sites are using the plugin such as Civic Actions and the Personal Democracy Forum.

Below is what the community is saying about the Drupal plugin on Twitter.

The plugin is officially compatible with Drupal 5 and higher.

If you are a Drupal user you can download the plugin here.

Today we are pleased to announce support for Wikinvest.  By supporting Wikinvest, Apture users are now able to insert stock charts within their Apturized embeds and links.  With this addition you are now able to not only able to tell show your readers what people on Twitter are saying about Bing but also how it has affected Microsoft’s stock price.

In addition to being able to embed financial charts you the user can also select how much data to show your viewers from one day to the full financial history.   All charts are updated in real time and display annotations which display key news about the company.

Current Apture users do not need to download a new version of the plugin to get access to Wikinvest.  The charts will begin showing up in your Apture recommended results when you search for a company name or a ticker symbol.

As always, Apture works with WordPress, TypePad, MovableType, Drupal, Ning, Tumblr, Movable Type and Blogger. You can download the plugin here.