After Flickr, you can now link your Picasa account to your gallery with WM!

Most of you have asked us for it in your feedback the Gallery new options.

From now on it became possible. The operation is quite similar (almost simpler), as now it’s not necessary to insert a key to link the Picasa account to your WM gallery. To activate this service, please go to the NETWORK > Web 2.0 and enter your Picasa user name/login.

Once all the settings are complete, your latest 10 public Picasa albums will be displayed in your Gallery. By the way, some nice pictures of the WM team have been recently added to Picasa.

WMaker team members are at the Micro-companies Exhibition until 8th October. Do not hesitate to come to meet us, if you are in Paris. Lesia, Jerôme Pietri, Sébastien and me will be there on Thursday.

The exhibition is held in the Congress Palace, porte Maillot. We are at the stand D8, which we share with French School of Heuristics, our new partner who will offer very soon a module to initiate you into the use of your favorite CMS.

You’re welcome to visit our stand!

A week ago we put into production a new file server SANDY 2. This is a SUN x4540 server supplied with 48 hard disk drives with new disk controllers. This server works wonders; it’s very quick and speeds up your website.

Now there remain just some services stored at his “little brother” Sandy: a SUN x4500 server that also has 48 hard disk drives, but which is a previous-generation server. We will completely reformat this server, as it has encountered some performance problems during these last 2 months. We will use this operation to introduce a very new SSD-based system.

Instead of writing and reading directly to the hard drives we will use a group of disk buffers (Intel SSD). The SSDs (flash memory-based) highly improve reading and writing of small files that a website contains (images, microchips, buttons etc.).

We will create 2 groups of SSDs, one for SLC-based writing and a group of MLC-based disk buffers. We are waiting for a factor x40 at the performance level of the file server.

We will test this new procedure during one month. If it’s as reliable and efficient as we think, we’ll add this new system to Sandy2.

Due to these servers we can increase our storage capacity up to 160 To, and above all we’ll have high-performance file servers. Hopefully, before the end of the year we could shorten the page generation time down to 100 milliseconds.

Just for your information, until now the values of dynamic pages generation have been equal to 140-200 ms (which is already excellent).

Beyond the high display speed we manage to serve more pages with the same electric power, which means that your websites eat up less energy.
At WMaker the rate of hardware update is very high: during these last years we’ve been changing the hardware every year and half (according to advancements in hardware energetic performance).

We have a lot of reasons to do this:

-We care about our environmental impact.
-We like experiments with new technologies.
-It’s an economical decision as energy is very expensive in the data center (700€/month for 10 A).

Normally, this operation should not cause any interruption. Still, if our team must carry out a short break at night, we’ll notice you about it 1 or 2 hours beforehand in your back office.

Since last Monday, our new job position was filled up by the new trainee, Jean-François.

Jean-François is a student at the University of Corsica. He’s decided to get this training contract, and we’re very pleased to welcome him in WM!

To get started, he will take part in development of the SNS V2. He’ll be working in close collaboration with Jean-Mathieu. They already know very well each other, guess why?

You’ve been using all the features of the renewed gallery for a week now. We haven’t mentioned it yet, but the complete overhaul of a webservice usually calls forth titanic efforts.
Indeed, our human engineers, designers, developers and administrators have been all gathered. It’s crucial to involve all our specialists on every key step of the overhaul in order to ensure usability, technical feasibility and performance of new features.

We cared for your feedback to our new gallery and closely looked through your comments to meet your adjustment requirements as soon as possible:

• It’s possible to add hyperlinks in the images description (thanks to Gerald from www.competencephoto.com
• The problem with the thumbnail in slideshow was settled up (thanks to Alex from www.kiditou.net)

We also followed the exchange in tips to introduce the slideshow into other pages with an iframe. We will stick at beacon tag embed. From now on, it will be easier to use :).

Another recurrent requirement concerns sub-categories in the Gallery. However, in our opinion it’s a false good idea. The tags will do better. We will try to introduce this option soon.

There is a small disappointment concerning the Flickr import :( I have the impression that this feature is not of interest to you. Personally, we use it in our blog, and find it very useful. Don’t you think so?

I forgot one last thing! The list mode in the back office. This display mode allows you to treat your pictures by lots (delete, change the status, move from one album to another...)

There is a good advancement in the new gallery, it just remains to trim up some details to further improve your websites... ;)

To close the list of new features in the gallery, we’ve prepared a little surprise for you.

If you have a Flickr account, you could display your Flickr pictures in your Gallery.

You can even choose which of your Flickr albums will be displayed in the Gallery.

To activate this service please go to the menu Network > Web 2.0 and enter your flickr key as well as you login and password information. You’ll find more details in our online help.

For instance, WMaker regularly replenish their flickr account with some photos illustrating the company’s news. From now on, all these pictures are available in the gallery of our blog.

It has been a real pleasure for our team to overhaul the gallery webservice and the gallery module. Now the matter depends only on you. You are to take wonderful pictures and put them online to your webzine.

Furthermore, we started working on the new flash slideshow, which is in beta now. And we already have some ideas for further improvements ;)

Yesterday, we offered gallery module improvements. Now it’s the turn of the Gallery itself.

The gallery is divided into 3 browse levels: homepage, albums page, photos page. We offer new options for each level.

Several months ago we launched the overhaul of all our modules. Among the main modules used to display webservices content it has just remained to update the gallery ... And now it’s done.

Now we put online module improvements. New options for intern pages will be introduced in the days to come.

It certainly has been quite a busy summer for us. Even if the office was rather empty, it has helped progress in our pending projects in the WM LABS.

Now we’ve returned to our regular work rhythm, and at present you’re welcome to post the articles that you publish to your site directly to your Twitter account.