Buzz This!

Update

...and in case you're wondering. The new Linebuzz version is coming soon... :)

Get Voicemail on Facebook

Joe Heitzeberg, the good mate who has been helping us communicate with our Japanese users, is also the CEO of Snapvine. They provide an awesome voicemail widget for bloggers and Snapvine just launched on Facebook. So instead of just leaving wall comments you can leave voice comments. Hit this page to get the Snapvine player for your Facebook profile.

They support the USA and quite a few other countries including New Zealand, UK and Japan and most Euro countries. If you want to see what it looks like with a few messages, check out Joe's Facebook profile here, and leave him a voice message.  

The craziest week

This week has been crazy.

First a few US bloggers started using us, including some of the folks that covered our Launch. Then Japan discovered us when a high profile Japanese website had us as dot-com of the day. On Thursday 20% of our traffic came from Tokyo alone. Then we started getting users in India and a few Arabic bloggers. About 24 hours ago China discovered LineBuzz and our traffic has spiked again.

So during the last week we've learned a lot about internationalization. Did you know there are two Japanese character sets that don't map properly to UTF-8? Or that Safari's Regex engine is completely broken for Unicode characters? I do - I know that now. And I've coded workarounds to deal with those issues and many many more.

We have a new version of LineBuzz on the slab here and we've been poking at it and prodding it. We were hoping to put it out tonight, but it needs to be kicked around a bit more to make sure it's bullet proof. I'm not going to give you an ETA, but we're working fast and we will get it to you hot off the press as soon as possible!

If last week was any indication, this coming week is going to be insane.

Quick Internationalization update

We've almost got the bugs ironed out of this internationalization fix, but it needs a bit more testing. It's 8am and we've been working through the night, so we're going to get some sleep. If all goes well during testing later today we will release it tonight (PST).

This release also fixes a few Safari bugs and some bugs that cause comments to not appear once posted.

Hang in there, we're working as fast as we can. Hopefully tonight if all goes well.

Mark.

看到来自中国的大量访问，LineBuzz

看到来自中国的大量访问，LineBuzz公司的全体工作人员对

此感觉异常欣喜。同时，LineBuzz也非常清楚地知道：目前我们的服务在对中文字符的支持上还存在很多问题。因此，LineBuzz现在正倾尽全力以解决这些问题。现在是西雅图时间凌晨四点，我们将通宵工作，以便让我们来自中国的新朋友能尽快使用上我们的服务。初步预计，我们将在稍后几小时提供更新版本。

Mark Maunder
LineBuzz Founder and CEO.

Translation kindly provided by our good friend, He Caitou based in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, P. R. China.

ps: If you're an English user, we are getting a lot of new visitors from China and are currently working around the clock to fix some issues with Chinese characters. We expect to have a fix out in a few hours.

Lagopi's TechnoPark

One of our newest bloggers,  Ramanathan Annamalai (aka. Lagopi), is a full-time blogger and has an awesome blog focused on India Tech. His latest entry exposes a rather embarrassing flaw in Windows Live Mail and Hotmail. They flag mails from IRCTC, India's largest e-commerce website, as Phishing attempts.

Lagopi also wrote a great article about LineBuzz a few days ago and uses LineBuzz on his website. So head over to his blog and be sure to post a few inline comments by highlighting text with your mouse!

Mark.

New bloggers

Want to find out how to get a gun for your 10 month old baby? Check out Stuff Jen Says - one of our newest bloggers. Jen has LineBuzz installed, so go ahead and interrupt her by highlighting some text while you're on her blog.

More Japanese fixes

We've been working flat-out for the last two days on Internationalization fixes mostly for our Japanese users. This morning at 5am we rolled out another big fix. We now support our Japanese bloggers using UTF8, EUC-JP and the SHIFT-JIS character sets. You should also see improvements using other character sets like Cyrillic. We've also fixed the blank blog titles, selected text and comments for Japanese users.

We still have a few minor issues we're working on and we'll be fixing those over the coming days. Please let us know if you have any more bug reports or feature requests. We're here to help.

Mark.

Are all your widgets fast and polite?

Widgets are all the rage. LineBuzz is a widget and we like to think it rages too. We've built it to be very fast and very polite.

It's fast because we hook into the web page onload event and only do stuff that might be slow after your page has loaded and your users have something to read and look at.

Many widgets don't do that, and that's bad because if their servers go down or slow down then your page slows down too. Your page will stop loading at the point where you've inserted their Javascript and the browser will wait for their servers to respond. Your user waits about 3 seconds and then goes to someone else's blog.

LineBuzz is also very polite. We've written it to respect the needs of other widgets. We hook into the page onload event, but we make sure that anyone else who is using 'onload' will still run just fine. Here's the code we use - it's called a closure and is a well known javascript technique:

function LBSetup(){
        var oldonload = window.onload;
        if (typeof window.onload != 'function') {
                window.onload = LBOnLoad;
        } else {
                window.onload = function() {
                        oldonload();
                        LBOnLoad();
                }
        }
}

We even run everyone else's code before ours because we're super polite. :)

One of our users is using a widget from a company who shall remain nameless and they simply do this:

window.onload = myVeryRudeFunction;

Everything that uses onload on the page breaks. Very naughty. So I think our user is probably going to remove the other company's script because it may break more than just LineBuzz on the page.

So when you choose which widgets to run on your blog, make sure they're fast and polite.

Japanese support update

We  have been working through the night to add Japanese support to Linebuzz. This is a very high priority for us. Yesterday 20% of our traffic to LineBuzz came from Tokyo alone!

Some of our fixes are now live. We now have basic Japanese support and you shouldn't have a problem if your blog is the UTF8 character set.

But there are a few more things we need to fix. Specifically, we need to support the CP932 character set, which is why you are seeing some blank comments, comment titles and blog titles.

We're going to get some sleep (it's 6am here and we've been working for 22 hours now) and then keep working until we get this fixed for you guys.

Thanks for being patient with us. :)

Regards,

Mark & Kerry
The LineBuzz founders.