Author Archive for Jos

New statistics and other improvements

Published
by
Jos
on August 30, 2008
in Mininova-related news
. 19 Comments

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while since we launched our Content Distribution (CD) service. From now on it is more convenient to browse the CD (”featured”) torrents. Like all other torrents, the featured torrents can be browsed by category and subcategory.

Screenshot of the new CD statsEach featured torrent now has its own statistics page (example). This page shows how many times the torrent has been downloaded and from which countries. Similar statistics are also available for the publishers of featured content on their My statistics page.

Moreover, the general website statistics have also been changed. On the Mininova statistics page you can see a detailed overview of the number of downloads, uploads and search queries.

For those who’re wondering: all graphs on the statistics pages mentioned above are generated using the Google Chart API.

Mininova office buildingSome other news: the Mininova team moved into a new office, see the contact page for details. This also means that we will be able to work more efficiently on Mininova and our other projects.

And more things have been improved, including the IRC page. This page now features a live (AJAX) IRC chat window, so you don’t have to install an IRC client to join our channel.

Please let us know if you have more ideas and suggestions.

Cheers! :D

Updates for Mininova and Snotr

Published
by
Jos
on September 21, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 79 Comments

It’s been a while since the last technical update. So today, we added some new functionality for Mininova and Snotr to make your life easier :)

Updates for Mininova:

  • Number of comments in the tables. If a torrent has one or more comments, the Comment icon icon and the number of comments is shown. Clicking on the number or icon will take you to the comment page of the torrent.
  • Subcategory information in the tables. When you move the mouse cursor over a torrent, its subcategory shows up next to its name.

Updates for Snotr:

  • The video cloud. An interesting way to browse the videos.
  • The video wall. A quick way to find a specific video if you remember its thumbnail image.
  • Quick submit link. Explained on the submit page. This link makes it easier to submit videos to Snotr.
  • Animated thumbnails. When you move the mouse cursor over a thumbnail, an animated version of the thumbnail is shown.
  • Better video encoding method. Already in use since a few weeks, and results in smaller file sizes.
  • Some bug fixes.

As always, we would like to hear your suggestions and ideas. Please comment on this blog post to share your thoughts.

Edit (24 September):

Two more small improvements for Mininova:

  • Comments posted by the uploader of the torrent are shown in green. Example here.
  • The “number of comments” icon (see above) is now always at the right side of the column, so it’s easier to compare torrents in a table.

Mininova team launches new web site: Snotr

Published
by
Jos
on July 20, 2007
in Interesting links and Mininova-related news
. 89 Comments

We’re excited to announce that we are launching a new web site today: Snotr. We worked more than 2 years on this web site, mainly due to a lack of time. But after dozens of delayed milestones, we think that Snotr is finally ready for public.

So what exactly is Snotr? From the Snotr FAQ:

Snotr is a source for short and funny or interesting videos. Everyone can submit a video, which will be reviewed by our team. If we accept your video, it will be listed on the front page and other pages. Users can rate videos and post comments to share their opinion with others. Please note that we try to keep this website family-safe, so adult submissions are not allowed.

Some of the unique features of Snotr (compared to the other “funny videos” sites out there) are:

  • Clean interface, no adult content, SFW
  • High-quality videos
  • Real-time video resizing (just drag the video-size slider)
  • Audio volume leveled (no need to change the volume for every video)

So to be clear: Snotr is NOT a YouTube/Metacafe/Dailymotion/whatever killer, if you’re looking for a place to dump your videos, stick to those sites. But in case you have some spare time to spend (*cough* work *cough*), try Snotr :)

See you there!

Update: For those who are wondering what the name ‘Snotr’ means: it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s just a catchy name.

P.S. If you spot any bugs, please post them here.

Design and server updates

Published
by
Jos
on November 29, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 69 Comments

Hi all!

It’s been a month since we wrote our previous blog post about redesigning Mininova. We got an enormous amount of feedback (thanks everyone!), and incorporated much of this in our ongoing redesigning process. We’re happy to announce that a new version of our redesign is ready for beta testing at http://beta.mininova.org/.

A lot has been changed since the previous beta version, the main differences are a new color scheme, the navigation menu (back and improved at the top) and the advertisement spot (switched back from left to right).

Of course we would still like to hear your opinions on the redesign. If you spot any bugs, please let us know! Constructive criticism is always welcome :)

On another note, many users asked us why the site is so slow lately. The answer is simple: the site grew very big last months (both in amount of torrents and popularity) and we couldn’t add more server power. But no worries: we decided to switch large parts of Mininova to another hosting provider. The new server farm will be opened early December, so stay tuned for a blazing fast Mininova soon!

Mininova’s new design (beta)

Published
by
Jos
on October 30, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 243 Comments

Almost two years after its launch, we have redesigned Mininova.

The new design is not completely finished yet, but you can see it in action at http://beta.mininova.org/.

We are planning to publish this new layout, which should make Mininova less complicated and easier to use, along with some new features/improvements. Some of these features are already implemented, like:

  • Better “General information” of torrents.
  • Redesigned Upload page.
  • The download content of a torrent is shown as a folder tree (example). This tree view works best with modern browsers, which have CSS3 support. The icons we used are from the well-known Silk Icon set, made by Mark James.
  • The website now uses the UTF-8 character set. That means, for example, that torrents titles can now contain Chinese characters. More interesting news is that pasting the contents of an NFO file in the torrent description works great now (example). Just paste the NFO characters from your favorite NFO viewer between [nfo] and [/nfo] tags in the description area on the Upload page.

Some sections, like the Advanced search, are not working (correctly) yet. These things will be fixed in the future. The beta page is more about showing the new design.

Before we update the main website, we want to hear your opinion about the new look. Please comment on this blog post to let us know what you think about it and what could be better. Please also report all bugs and errors you discover.