share news & announcements blog
 
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
11:30 pm UTC

Got my April Groove Going...

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 0 comments
A week into April and the next cool feature is being started. Collaborative document editing, along with revision history and rollbacks, publishing, and synchronization is now starting to be developed. Good news, since this is easily one of the most important features to date.

In the past month, while I have been busy with the end of school work and finding out about a job in NY, I have not been at the SRL helm as often as I have been in the past few months. But that's all over, since I will hopefully be employed at a news publishing start-up in SoHo.

Expect to see subtle changes around the site as I also begin to work in the Responses feed and refactor the existing Activity feed to work in the differences between the two feeds.

Oh, and lastly, I have created an RSS writer that now attaches itself to all share blogs. I will attach the RSS feeds to each share feature as I build them, but because the blogs have been finished, they get the RSS feed first. I am also planning to create feed links throughout shares, as well as a big RSS feed that grabs all activities on a share. Pretty neat, huh?
CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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Monday, March 10, 2008
9:25 pm UTC

What's the plan for March?

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 0 comments
February, while slower than previous months, was host to a new of improvements, as well as the beginnings of some bigger features.

Not only was I able to completely tie up the activities feed, but I added a responses feed which tracks updates on the content you produce. Content being blog comments, discussions, documents you have edited or are watching, etc. Responses track content. Activities track actions.

Activities now also show the relationship to the user providing the action. In other words, if you are following the user, or are following the share, or are just involved the share, then all of this information is displayed on the right of the activity.

Additionally, activities also show the type of content that the action is being done on. For instance, somebody you follow makes a comment on a blog, and the activity shows 'Blog comment' done by a 'follow'. Pretty simply, right? Well, it makes the activity feed a whole lot more useful to see the organization of the content and people.

On top of that, activity feeds can now be organized and sorted by both relationships and content types. These preferences are saved across all activity feeds, including those that are not even on your 'me' page, such as user profiles and share main pages.

You may have noticed a number of aesthetic changes. These are part of the continual update of what should hopefully be an aesthetic and intuitive design. Post your thoughts.
CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
5:14 pm UTC

Lots of Little Bits

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 3 comments
I've been busy. Oh boy, have I been busy. During the past two weeks, I have been designing a number of new features as well as working on fixing and maintained older features, including modifying a ton of smaller items, such as:
  • Revised relative dates -- Now dates read as "2 weeks, 6 days ago" or "2 days, 4 hours ago". This is a finer granularity without being a useless exact date.
  • User stats -- This listing of # of projects, friends, followers, followings, visitors, visits, posts, and comments--all depending on what type of page you are at--is starting to show how users and projects will be able to keep track of their vitals.
  • Activity Feeds -- There have been a number of changes:
    • the aesthetic has been cleaned up; colors & sizes are now standardized.
    • deletion of activity feeds can be undone
    • if an activity is by a friend, a following, or a project you are in or are following, the type is displayed in the activity feed.
  • A number of other image refinements have taken place, as you may see in the Getting Started module, the What is SunRayLab module, as well as in a few other places.
  • Profile images have been upgraded to allow all users (including new) to select one of 18 pre-made profile images. New users even have the choice of uploading their profile image during registration.
  • A number of bugs have been squashed, such as blog archives, previewing and adding comments, cropping images, and activity feed types.
  • The 'People' tab has been updated to show more details.
  • Your personal profile is starting to show some person effects, such as your profile photos (all of them), personal bio, stats/vitals, and your friends, followers, and followings. Privacy controls will be introduced later on as I start to figure out what else will be in the profile.
As soon as I finish up my to-do list (about a dozen items), I will begin to implement the forums and photo galleries. Expect me to get that far in the next month.
CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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Wednesday, January 9, 2008
8:22 pm UTC

Expanded Activity Feed & User Profiles

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 0 comments
I've been hard at work adding in new activity feeds, as well as working on completing user profiles and relationships. I am also planning to finish user profiles by the end of the week, as well as begin project profiles and discovery.

You may notice that activity feeds are beginning to show a lot more than just the few items that have been sticking around on the homepage for the past couple of weeks. Activity feeds also show private events that only the user can see, such as followings, friends, and project follows and joins. These feeds should hopefully begin to populate as any user-actionable activity will show up on the activity feeds.

The activity feeds should also look completely different. I worked to integrate how easily readable and aesthetic the feeds are relative to the rest of the SunRayLab experience. The results are pretty good, in my opinion. I wasn't happy with the first iteration of how the feeds looked, since it was too text-heavy and looked burdensome to read. Hopefully that is cleared up now.

User Profiles are also beginning to come together. User profile photos are now displayed prominently on user profiles, and I will begin to get additional information, such as taglines, user bio, and custom text, to show up in the profile.

Please leave me feedback and comments here. I would love to hear what the few pre-launch visitors think of the quickly developing SunRayLab.
CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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Saturday, December 29, 2007
6:10 pm UTC

Let's Make Everything Easy

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 0 comments
As usual, I have been keeping myself busy implementing new features like the profile photos, user profiles, and the beginnings of the social network. But the coolest part is that no matter where you go on SunRayLab, you always know where you are, and it doesn't take you very long to get there.

Think about this: When you are customizing your settings, whether it's your personal profile bio, your links of interest, or even uploading a photo, you don't have to wait forever for the page to reload. When you upload a photo, as soon as the photo is uploaded, it just appears in the photo gallery. No reloads, no waiting. It is just there.

Similarly, when you customize your profile, you don't have to save each and every detail. Everything saves automatically, leaving you free to click between option panes and easily adjust your details. No waiting on saving the "About Me" section and have the entire page re-draw.

It's tough to get all of these little design bits working as you would expect them, but once you get down to it, you realize that the SunRayLab methodology of interacting with the page just makes sense. I also made sure that every single page is easy to find, meaning that there are no hidden pages which leave you wondering how you got there and where to go from there.

You may notice that every single page is clickable from the top-right menu, where you select a "page", i.e. me, collaborate, projects, people, or community, and then select a "panel", i.e. profile & friends in the people page. That's it. There are no pages or panels that are not exposed in that top menu. There can't be, because I designed the navigation system to prevent hidden pages. Sure, it takes a lot of thought to make sure that the navigation isn't overloaded or over-complicated, but it works out, because the user's conceptual model of where things go makes intuitive sense.

I am continuing to work hard to make SunRayLab as intuitive, aesthetic, and secure as it should be. Project collaboration should just make sense. Networking between projects should not be a burdensome experience.

Keep sending me feedback. I take everything to heart and if you notice, most of the changes that I have made here are because of users like you who are speaking up about the site.
CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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Saturday, December 22, 2007
5:31 pm UTC

Activity Feeds Give the Full Skinny

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 1 comment
Alright, activity feeds are done. They now work for Everybody (as shown on the Home page and your Me page), your friends and follows on your Me page, and for projects on each project's Collaboration Overview page.

The point of having activity feeds is that instead of having to check every blog post for new comments, forum thread for replies, projects for updates, and photo galleries for new images, all of these "actions" will now be sent directly to your activity feed on your Me page. This includes users you are following, your friends, and everything you have contributed to (including updates on blog postings that you have replied to).

This sprang out of an obvious need, but also in the first blog post on this blog, I noticed that I had to keep coming back to the posting to check for new comments.Now new comments show up on my Me page, as well as a snippet of the actual text, updatedinformationabout the blog post itself (total # of comments, blog title, date of action, and accompanying project), and a way to tell one action from another (icons & grey explanations).

Of course I will continue to update the functionality of the activity feeds to support more actions and events, but the overall structure and feel are there. You should even see this entry on the activity feed!

Please post comments and feedback about the activity feed. I will do my best to address everything I hear.

Lastly, just so everybody realizes, I came back from London a week ago and took a couple days off (one to travel, one to get set up back in Cleveland). As with all traveling, I ended up sick immediately afterwards. Well, it turned into the flu, and I am only just now recovered. Development worked stalled a bit, but all I could keep thinking about were which features should I work on as soon as I feel better.

My priority right now is to work on public-facing pages (user profiles, project discovery, user discovery, the Home page, your Me page, etc.) but I continue on the Collaboration features.
CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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Sunday, December 9, 2007
2:42 am UTC

The Basics: What is SunRayLab?

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 10 comments

Hello folks. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Samuel Clay, and I am currently a student. SunRayLab is a free project collaboration social network. This is called SunRayLab because of the influence of a few bands, namely

  • Sun - The Essex Green
    (The album "Everything is Green" is Sun-themed. Big Sur & EiG is my original inspiration.)
  • Ray - The Velvet Underground
    (The inspiring song is called Sister Ray.)
  • Lab - Stereolab
    (For obvious reasons.)

SunRayLab is really just a very simple idea: Allow users to have documents, charts, timelines, maps, notebooks, blogs, photos, videos, forums, and file storage, and based on the relationships and context, there is a social graph that binds users and their content together. All document editing is collaborative, with complete revisioning and simultaneous input.

The point of SunRayLab is to allow students, professionals, and people from all over the world to collaborate on projects together. Projects can be small one-time efforts that are based on similar locations, or an on-going work that requires all of SunRayLabs features. I just want to make it easy for anybody to collaborate with others.

Everything on SunRayLab is free and I will do my best to keep it free. I also want low barriers for people, especially students, to start their own projects and collaboratively manage all of the project's data easily. This is the tough part.

I have been working on SunRayLab for a few months now and have about a year of development to go. Luckily, since I am a student, I can (and do) dedicate 18 hours a day on it. It's fun.

Please give me feedbackon design, on the business goals, or even on the market. Post a comment here or just e-mail me directly. I have some worthwhile experience behind me, so I definitely know what I am getting myself into. :-D

(P.S. This blog/news posting was composed entirely in the SunRayLab blog editor. It is a graphical text editor that shows you what will be posted as you are writing it. It does previewing, drafting, editing, and collaboration. It's really neat!)

CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
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blog info
blog description

Official SunRayLab Project Blog

Swinging

The purpose of the Official SunRayLab Project is to showcase features, offer insight into how to better use SunRayLab, and to serve as the official community of SunRayLab.

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Since November 2007
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