Graspr (sharing the wealth of knowledge)

New home page matrix, new video urls, search enhancement and more...

If you've been visiting the site regularly, you may have noticed that the videos in the home page matrix are  a lot more dynamic than before. Previously we were cycling through a smaller list of featured videos which wasn't much fun for repeat visitors looking to explore Graspr. We have implemented a 'randomize' algorithm that serves up a fresh batch of videos from our vast repository of instructional videos every time you visit the home page. This works for all 4 tabs. So go ahead - hover & traverse your mouse on the video matrix and if none catches your fancy, hit the refresh button until you stumble upon an interesting one.

We also changed the url scheme for videos to make it more friendly. Previously we had cryptic looking urls like this one:
http://www.graspr.com/videos/b9009beb804fa097c04d226a8ba5102e

The new url for the above video looks like this:
http://www.graspr.com/videos/Crafts/Origami/100-second-Origami-Flapping-Bird/

We also pushed out a subtle yet useful change to search. For all searches, the match count is being displayed in Videos, Series and People tabs. In the left navigation menu, only those categories (and sub-categories) with matching videos are returned along with the corresponding counts. These changes should hopefully get you to your desired instructional video a lot faster.

One final change (to be pushed out tomorrow) is the resurrection of the Inbox link on the top header.

Thanks for visiting.... and keep coming back!

- Vishy

New year resolutions & Web 2.0

You are probably thinking "but 2008 is 2 months away". Right, but the new year started early for me with the public beta launch of Graspr :) My new year resolution is to blog more often. As you can imagine, we've been hard at work this past month fixing bugs, adding features, fixing more bugs, adding processes, tech-support calls with our hosting provider... you get the drift.

First & foremost, I would like to thank all you early users for being patient with us. We have been pushing production updates almost incessantly - in the 1st half of Oct, we were doing daily pushes, now it's more like 2-3 pushes a week. The perfect time to blog invariably seemed to be 'after the next push' - not anymore... Which brings me mention a favorite Web 2.0 principle, one which we've been following quite diligently - End of the software release cycle.

You may have noticed that our url schemas have changed. A few weeks ago, we successfully migrated all our PHP script urls into SEO-friendly urls. Tomorrow's push will include a final tweak to the video url after which we'll rest easy - at least on 'this' front.

You may have also noticed that our pages are not real zippy. The good news is that, thanks to the folks at Yahoo Exceptional Performance Team we know exactly what to do to speed up our pages. We are hard at work on this and you will see a noticeable difference soon.

Thanks.
- Vishy