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

Since ProBlogger’s great post about How To Use Apture we have been receiving a wealth of emails and questions about Apture’s feature set.  Well today I wanted to talk a little bit about what is Apture Auto Enhance.

What is Auto Enhance?

Auto Enhance is the quickest way to use Apture on your site.  You simply check one box when either registering or if you already have Apture simply Login.

Once enabled outbound links to popular sites are automatically enhanced with Apture so your readers can view the contents of the outbound link without leaving your site.  You have to do zero additional effort while writing your posts for this feature to work and you get all of the SEO benefit of outbound links.

What Can Auto Enhance Do For You?

Instead of your users leaving your site when you link to an article about Seal, they can simply view it right on your site.

Maybe you wanted to link your user to the Twitter Stream of Chris Johnson, the best running back in the National Football League.

Or better yet you saw a great commercial the other night for Avatar and wanted your reader’s to see it without having to embed the video on your blog.

What Content can Apture Auto Enhance?

Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Hulu, Scribd and many others.

Find out how to Enable Auto Enhance here or if you do not have Apture installed on your blog we can solve that.

Have you ever wanted to embed or “bloom” content from the Portugese, Spanish, German or French versions of Wikipedia?  Now you can using Apture.  Read below for instructions on how to enable this great feature.

How Do Enable International Wikipedia Support?

1.  Start by highlighting a word and launching the Apture Media Hub.

2.  Once you have launched the Apture Media Hub click on the customize sources button.

3.  You will be given a list of all the different types of sources Apture supports.  Click on Reference and select Wikipedia.

4.  After selecting Wikipedia you will see a pulldown menu to select which version of Wikipedia you want to select.  Simply pick English, French, German, Spanish or Portuguese and click Save Changes.

That it!  You have now enabled Wikipedia support in either English, French, German, Spanish or even Portugese within Apture.

Please Note:

Once you have saved your language change for Wikipedia Apture will default to it unless you change the language again.

We are really excited about this feature.  With our international user base growing we want to give them the proper publishing tools to educate their readers even further.

For more Tips & Tricks click here.