This is where the Vostok crew blogs
Articles clasified as "Planetaki"
Go back to the homepageIn this video Timo gives us an update on the iPad app for Planetaki and shows us a preview of what’s to come. We hope to have it ready in a month.
In short:
Hi Everybody,
I just wanted to say thanks for sending a t-shirt all the way to Alaska! You have a great portfolio. Keep rockin’ the minimalism.
Mikaela
No, thank you Mikaela!
Alicia Chen did the Chinese (Mandarin) translation of Planetaki and now it’s available for you to use. You can switch languages from the “preferences” link on the top right-hand of your planet. FYI: Planetaki is also available in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Galician and Romanian.
Here’s the announcement in video. Enjoy (especially after 32s).
Thank you Alicia :)
WARNING: Here comes a rather technical post. Stay away if you are here just for the fancy videos and occasional eyecandy…
As part of the rebuilding of Planetaki we’ve switched from MySQL databases to MongoDB. It is quite a big change and the results are already noticeable. You can feel the wond in your face when in front of your planet. It’s fast, very fast.
Sam wrote a post about how it’s all set up. The techie inside you will enjoy it. Here are a few excerpts:
Planetaki caches huge amounts of data from posts all over the internet resulting in very large rows. The result is that the traditional database caching and optimisation techniques just aren’t as effective, and Planetaki was getting progressively slower and harder to manage.
[...]
Planetaki now uses a hybrid solution for storing data. The complex feeds and their entries are stored in MongoDB, and user data is stored in a traditional Postgresql database. This allows us to split the system into two parts, on one side we have the feed “reaping”, and on the other the website which mainly accesses the tables of data.
Read the full article: Planetaki powered by MongoDB
So yesterday we were googling Planetaki (you know, just for kicks) and were surprised to find out that a couple of months ago one of Spain’s leading newspapers, El País, did a small article on it. You can read it here.
Sam Lown has been recently tweaking the web version of Planetaki. He has made some improvements and minor alterations for a new version that’ll be released this Summer. Watch the video for more info.
Senior designer Mark MacKay and Vostok’s most recent acquisition, Timo Taglieber, are working hard to develop an iPad version for Planetaki. None of the feed readers out there are up to par with the iPad. We’re hoping to change that. Watch the video for more.
Today we replaced our ageing white theme with a minimal theme named Helvetiplanet.
It’s no secret we’re huge Swiss nostalgics, and this is a little homage to one of our favorite typefaces, Helvetica. We hope you don’t mind us being retro-stylish once in a while!
To check it out in action just set ‘Helvetiplanet’ color in your preferences. Don’t have a Planetaki account? Sign up here, it will take you less than a minute, really.
When Bloglines goes bonkers you get their shrugging plumber:
So we were amused to find out that Planetaki’s logo is also a Formula One flag. The ever revealing Wikipedia article says:
Ha! Outta the race Bloglines!
Check this out. It’s the pre-pre-alpha of our brand new iPhone version of Planetaki. Out from the oven and still hot. Kudos to Sam!
We still need to do a lot of work on many details, especially those related to design so we can keep the same user experience we already have on the website. It’s not done yet but… It works!
Yeah, we will miss her. She loved us, we love her. And with this little homage we finally found a good use for those thousands of avatars we have at Planetaki ;)
BTW, the big-sized poster is at the Planetaki Blog, in case you want to find your website in the image.
At Vostok we have added another cosmonaut to the crew, María Munuera. María is no stranger to Vostok, as she had been doing a great job working part-time for Planetaki.
María, a Journalist by formation (jack-of-all-trades in practice) brings serious communication and organization skills to the table, plus some design fire power for the ultra-cool projects lining up at Vostok for 2009. María lived two years in Turin, and speaks fluent Italian. She also claims to make a mean tiramisu. This, however, has not been personally verified by the rest of the team (hint hint).
Despite looking and acting vampirishly dark, María is the sunshine of the office. She has geeky sense of humor, and will laugh at almost any joke you make, no matter how dorky and stupid. Or probably she is just being condescending with us. In any case, we are extremely pleased to have a great talent and personality at the office.
Estos días pasados he asistido al UCAM Medialab en Murcia, una jornadas que se celebran cada año, centradas en nuevos medios y comunicacón. He ido invitado por Josep Martínez Polo y José Manuel Noguera, que me sugirieron hablar sobre Planetaki. Para que no fuera sólo “hablar de mi libro”, intenté que Planetaki fuera la excusa para hablar de diseño para medios de comunicación en internet y ansiedad informacional.
RosaJC tuvo el detalle de grabar casi toda mi charla, donde hablo de la metáfora del fregadero y la fuente en los lectores de feeds (además de algunos otros conceptos).
Autobombo aparte, las jornadas estuvieron francamente bien. El público era jovencito, casi todos estudiantes de comunicación y a pesar de la edad se les notaba un nivel alto de “avispamiento digital” y bastante madurez a la hora de hablar de ciertos temas tecnológicos. Supongo que el mérito de esto es en parte por la labor de los profes de Comunicación de la UCAM.
También me gustó que el nivel de palabrería dospuntocerista estuviera controlado. No se habló de modelos de negocio, de inversiones ni de emprendimientos y eso contribuyó a mi paz de espíritu.
Yo fui ilusionado por poder oir a gente con mucha experiencia como Chiqui de la Fuente o Georgina Cisquella, pero también disfruté de las charlas de Rosa Jiménez Cano o de Juanlu Sánchez, por mencionar algunos, o de las conversaciones con el resto de ponentes, alumnos y la gente de la organización que estuvieron muy atentos con nosotros.
Hace no mucho hemos empezado a postear curiosidades que vamos viendo dentro de Planetaki. Las estamos posteando en el blog en español de Planetaki, por si a alguien le interesan este tipo de cosas. Dicho queda.
Planetaki has been translated to Galician!!!
(thanks to María Loureiro)
Sam couldn’t stand it and made a Ubiquity command for Planetaki, so it’s easier to add websites to a planet from the website itself. Plain simple, just type
planetaki -
I am super-happy to share this news about Planetaki: we already implemented a feature to embed a planet in whatever website you want. Ain’t that cool or what?
If you are a Planetaki user and want to try it out, experiment a bit or just do some good to your website readers, try embedding this ultra-tiny piece of code inside your html:
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://www.planetaki.com/javiercanada.js”></script>
Make sure you change the “javiercanada” piece for your planet slug or it will be my planet showing up on your own house :)
These are some of the latest blogs I added to my planet at Planetaki:
La Antena – add it to your planet
Voltage Blog – add it to your planet
lightgreen – add it to your planet
materialicious – add it to your planet
Have a nice week ;)
I was very happy to see Planetaki on PC Actual, one of the main computer magazines in Spain. It’s on a report about web apps made here.
Here is a picture of the article, taken by Denegro:
It’s so cool to share these three pages with Unvlog and iwannagothere, two projects we admire, use and love.
These are the last websites I added to my planet. I know, I just started to write in English and I come here with all this stuff in Spanish… Anyway… here they are:
Cuarto derechahttp://www.cuartoderecha.com
Viruete.comhttp://www.viruete.com/
proyeccioneshttp://www.proyecciones.org
20Minutos – Tecnologíahttp://www.20minutos.es/
233grados.comhttp://www.233grados.com/blog/
