This month the guys from Art House Co-op have joined our kindly sponsors. They want to spread the word about The Sketchbook Project, which is as they said “like a concert tour but with a sketchbook“! Sounds cool, right?

The idea is that you receive a Moleskine sketchbook and a theme, which may be something as inspiring as “Things found on restaurant napkins” or “Make mine a double“, and after complete it with whatever is on your creative mind, you send back to them and your sketchbook go on a tour to be exhibited at galleries and museums in the US. They also will be part of the permanent collection at The Brooklyn Art Library once the tour ends.

Anyone from any part of the world can participate! It’s a great opportunity to unleash your creativity and give some exposure to your work ;) For more details on ‘The Sketchbook Project’, check out its website over here.

Hey all!

After an intense weekend of migration, and the rest of the following week tweaking zillions of things, we can proudly say that Visualize Us is running on the cloud! That doesn’t mean we have our head in the clouds, but still our servers! (yeah, bad joke :D)

We’re using the awesome Amazon EC2 infrastructure to run VisualizeUs, and probably in the following days we’d give a more techie approach about our setup for those of you interested. We hope EC2 is going to provide us with all the scalability we are needing in a easy and painless way!

As a bit of an anecdote, we spent the Friday night awaken just chasing a darn bug, obviosly with the site completely down (sorry for that!). It was kind of a hackathon but bug oriented ;) That’d proved our point about migrations: No matter how well you test everything beforehand, just expect everything possible to strangely fails at the last moment!

So, enough for the words, let’s just get inspired!!

ul#visualizeus {padding:0 !important; font:13px Arial,Sans serif !important; list-style-type:none !important; width:480px !important; border:1px solid #ddd !important; margin-bottom:1em!important; background-color:#fff !important; } #visualizeus li {display:inline !important; border:0 !important; margin:0 !important; padding:0 !important; text-indent:0 !important; } #visualizeus li a { border: none; } #visualizeus li:hover { border: none; } #visualizeus img {margin:10px !important; margin-bottom:0 !important; border:0 !important; } #visualizeus a#logo {font-weight:normal; text-decoration:none; width:95px; display:block; background-color:#2386b4; color:#fff; margin-top:12px; text-align:center; padding:2px 0; line-height:1.3em; }

function vslzBadge(posts) { var ul = document.getElementById("visualizeus");for (var i=0, post; post = posts[i]; i++) { var li = document.createElement("li"); var a = document.createElement("a"); a.setAttribute("href", post.url);a.setAttribute("title", post.title);var img = document.createElement("img");img.src = post.img;a.appendChild(img);li.appendChild(a);ul.appendChild(li); } var li = document.createElement("li");var a = document.createElement("a");a.setAttribute("id", "logo"); a.setAttribute("href", "http://vi.sualize.us/popular/" ); a.setAttribute("title", "my vi.sualize.us account"); a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("vi.sualize.us"));li.appendChild(a);ul.appendChild(li); }

Hi everyone!

As most of you probably know, the new Safari 5 now supports extensions, which is great news for all the Safari users out there. And then, the logical following question for a lot of people in the VisualizeUs community was: “How about a Safari 5 extension for VisualizeUs?”

Wait no more! Thanks to the effort of Valerii Hiora (@vhbit in Twitter) there’s now available a Safari 5 extension for VisualizeUs!

You can download it here: VisualizeUs Safari Extension

Kudos goes to him!

ps: Anyone dares with Google Chrome? ;)

Hey there!

The other day I received this mail from Joan Ross:

Hi Victor, Im on a small team of 4 graduate students at the University of
Washington. We’re interested in learning more
about your site as we’re researching social bookmarking sites. We have a
proposed survey for your users, it would be really nice if you could blog
about it and we’d be interested in doing more to help out.

Joan is part of a team together with Amanda, Nicole and Charles at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Their class is titled, “User-Centered Design” in the department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering within the College of Engineering.

So after reading his email, I liked a lot the idea. I took a look to the survey and it was very clear to me: At the same time the VisualizeUs community would be helping Joan and his friends to get A+ in their class, it would be helpful for the site and the future improvements as well to know better the community interests. A classic win-win scenario ;)

So please, spend 5 minutes of your day filling the survey! Is painless and easy, and it will make a lot of people happy, you among them as a VisualizeUs user!

Here’s the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LZLK567

From Joan and his friends, and also from me, a big thanks in advanced!

Sorry pals, during the weekend the database has been suffering some desynchronization issues. That’s why some of you didn’t see your latest bookmarks, or saw weird unfresh things, or have problems with the sign up… and so on and so forth.

Should be fixed now, but if you find more glitches, please tell me!

Finally you can browse Visualizeus with only one hand, and even more, with only one key! But consider yourself warned: It’s addictive. Period. A lot more than before.

So, I’ve followed the usual j/k hotkeys approach to scroll up and down the site, similar as Google Reader does, plus some a/s/d/f hotkeys bonus, for those like me with one hand in the w/a/s/d area and the other in the mouse (yeah, too much Q3 in the early days). Also the space key is handy ;)

Just play around and see which combination works better for you!

Some other random user interface improvements are below. Suggestions are welcomed, as always!

Well, it only took me seven months to finally find the time to polish the last tiny details and publish this new/old feature. I guess I should apply more the first part of the “release soon, release often” motto :P

Whatever, I’m very glad to finally announce this feature to you! And what better than a video to show it? Enjoy!

Just a short post to let you know that the Visualizeus Firefox add on is now compatible with the new 3.5 version. I’ve received a lot of mails about this issue so I’ve been working hard to release it as fast as possible.

I’ve just uploaded it to the Mozilla Add-ons official page but will take a couple of days until an editor review it and make it public. So, till then you can upgrade your current version by hand installing yourself the new version:

http://vi.sualize.us/files/visualizeus-0.5.2.xpi

Some of the changes and bug fixes in the new version:

• Compatible with Firefox 3.5
• Added support for frames: Before when posting images from a framed page the url of the image was wrongly retrieved and the image never got a thumbnail.
• Better support for Tumblr and Google Reader: Now if you bookmark a picture from your Tumblr Dashboard, it will get the proper reference URL, not the internal dashboard one. Same for Google Reader (credit goes to Metello for this one!)
• Faster! Some users have experienced some slowness when starting Firefox, because of the way the extension loaded. Now this is fixed and the extension is faster than ever ;)
• Fixed bug with Google Calendar: With the old version of the add on, the arrow image to go back in your Google Calendar disappeared.

Thanks to all of you who reported those issues!

Hey all!

Finally, and thanks to Metello who did a great work developing it (kudos to him!), now you can use Visualizeus in Facebook. Say hello to the Visualizeus Facebook application.

The application allows you to publish in your wall any of your recent bookmarked pictures. You can also embed it in your profile, as a Facebook badge.

So, if you’re in Facebook, go ahead and give it a try, I’m sure Metello would love to have some feedback! ;)

Also you can check the official Visualizeus page in Facebook and become a fan of it!