Monday, February 27, 2006

infogami

For the past few months our friend Aaron Swartz has been working with us here at reddit hq. He is now an official member of the reddit team and has written a blog post detailing the entire story.

aaron

Welcome, Aaron!

Until recently, Aaron has been helping out on the reddit side of things. Together we've written a flexible back-end system that will allow us to build powerful web applications very easily. We spent the last week moving reddit over into this new system, and this week, Aaron has started working on infogami again. Infogami is a website for quickly building other websites. Right now, it provides basic wiki/blog functionality, but a lot of cool things are on the way. Be sure to check out the feature request list and lets us know what's up next.

if you want something done right, do it yourself

We took a small break from subreddits this weekend to move our speedy new servers into a nearby datacenter. Compared to the old ones, these things really scream. The site should feel pretty snappy.

In addition, we fixed a bug in the search results ordering, so those should be a little more relevant now, and the automatic title fetching for foreign language sites should be smarter as well. Enjoy.

Friday, February 24, 2006

crossposting

We added a little dropdown on the submit page this evening to make is easy to submit posts to other subreddits. Granted, there aren't many to choose from at this point. When submitting to a subreddit, there is also the option of cross-posting on reddit.com as well.

The is another psuedo-subreddit for viewing everything on the site. The new page is particularly interesting.

This is going to pave the way for the "my reddit" feature that will allow users to specify which subreddits they always want to see. We're going to get this working before we create any more subreddits to ensure that users will be able to use the site in the same manner as now, but also have the option of looking deeper into a particular group.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

subreddit fun

Subreddits seem to be working pretty well, and we've been creating a lot of language subreddits lately. Languages are easy because they basically exist separate from the regular reddit. The topical reddits, however, are a little more delicate.

We've been watching the subreddit request and feature suggest reddits and have a good idea of how we're going to approach the other subreddits. The key thing to know is that we'll try to avoid creating subreddits for a specific topic per se, but rather we'll create them for a specific group of people. For example, a developer reddit for people interested in programming and the likes.

There are certainly cases where a topical reddit is warranted (music, sports, science, politics, etc), and we'll get these in due time. However, an important point to remember is that subreddits are not tags. We'll likely implement tagging later as a method of organizing your saved sites and categorizing links in finer detail, and these will coexist with subreddits. The distinction between tags and groups (subreddits) often becomes fuzzy, and we even had to write on our whiteboard about a month ago "groups are for people, tags are for topics" so we wouldn't lose focus.

Anyway, stay tuned, we should have some more non-language-based subreddits up very soon. We just need to figures out a few other features (cross-posting, aggregating, etc) first. A major priority during the process is to make sure we don't take away anything from the current reddit. We want to provide a home for the links that may of interest to some group of people, but not necessarily to the reddit community at large.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

more languages and a shoutout (in english)

Steve just uploaded the following languages:

basque (eu) euskara
catalan (ca) català
dutch (nl) nederlands
esperanto (eo) esperanto
hungarian (hu) magyar
indonesian (id) bahasa indonesia
italian (it) italiano
norwegian (no) norsk
polish (pl) polski
portuguese (pt) português
romanian (ro) română
russian (ru) pусский
turkish (tr) türkçe
vietnamese (vi) tiếng việt

note: you all don't really need to tell us how many speakers there are of your suggested language -- heck, we just uploaded esperanto ;-)

Please keep the language requests coming, but also keep in mind that we're depending on you as "reddit ambassadors" to help build these communities. None of us on the team speak esperanto, for instance, so we are relying on you, our multilingual users, to help sustain this and other language reddits in their infancy. Users are what make reddit work, users are what make reddit worth reading, so please let your fellow [insert language]-speakers know where they can go for what's new and interesting (and in their preferred language) online.

Now for the shoutout:
Pat McCarthy kindly made a slick FeedBurner FeedFlare (how's that for alliteration, eh?) for reddit, so if you're into the FeedBurner thing, here's the link. Very cool, thanks Pat.

Monday, February 20, 2006

reddit becomes multilingual

I've been looking forward to announcing this feature ever since we first started drawing up plans for reddit in Steve's notebook.

Over the months (and as recently as yesterday), we've gotten requests for reddits in a number of languages, but subreddits now make this possible (using language codes as subdomains, a la wikipedia). Translating the interface is the next step, but for now, you can read/submit/share links written in your preferred langauge(s) through the english UI. Based on requests, we've started with chinese (zh.reddit.com), french (fr.reddit.com), german (de.reddit.com), japanese (ja.reddit.com), korean (ko.reddit.com), and spanish (es.reddit.com), but we're going to continue adding new languages as you request them. For instance, we'll roll out norwegian reddit as soon as you let us know which form you'd prefer. (On a side note: the idea that someone in Oslo [or anywhere across the globe] would be using reddit in his/her native tongue is just too cool).

If you'd like a reddit in your language, please email us with the request and we'll get it online. All we ask is that you tell all of your [insert language]-speaking friends about it (and that you let us know if we screw something up in translation). We'll also be quite pleased if you can translate "happy redditing."

Sunday, February 19, 2006

it's about time we added something new

We've uploaded a couple new things today:

A reddit for the olympics
A reddit for suggesting features
A reddit for requesting reddits

Last but not least...

A reddit of reddits

Each of these subreddits is a fully-functional reddit just like the main site. We want to make a home for things that wouldn't normally get submitted to reddit itself, but could still benefit from a community of voters choosing the best.

Also, it is now possible to submit a link to reddit that refers to itself. This has been done by hand a couple of times to pose a question to the reddit community, and see the answer in the comments. It is now possible to do this automatically by submitting with the url of "self".

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

downtime

We've had a particularly tough couple of days here at reddit headquarters. In particular, this evening our database server crashed completely. We're quickly outgrowing our current servers, and as a result, have been experiencing some growing pains.

The good news is we're installing three brand new servers in a new data center later this week to avoid these problems in the future. Sorry for all the trouble and thanks for sticking with us.