We're really excited about our latest improvement. It lets you drag the files from your computer to Edicy's files panel where they will then get uploaded. Just like that- the way it should have always been.
This new development works while in the file panel found on the bottom toolbar during edit mode and also in full files admin view. To upload a file, just drag it from the desktop to the files area. You will then see it's background turn to blue. The color transformation indicates that the dropped files are ready to be uploaded to your Edicy account.
Most people build their websites on Edicy by themselves
and that's how it's supposed to be. In some cases it's not enough – you
might want to have a unique design, a well-run webstore, an efficient and effective internet marketing plan or you just feel
some advice or tech help is needed to build a stunning website.
That's why we've started to build a list of those who can
help you fill that need. After looking around our customer base we've
tracked down the first batch of agencies and freelancers who have
already built beautiful and well working websites on Edicy. So here's the short but growing
list of Edicy partners.
As price levels and geography both matter when
looking for this kind of partner, we've also added info about location
and pricing to the listing.
As a bonus, here are the first partners laid out on the World map.
To all the companies who'd like to be added in the list of Edicy partners, you are very welcome.
Email us at partner@edicy.com
all the information and pictures that your colleagues' cards have and
you'll be good to go.
It's easy to create a cool site on Edicy if you have something to say. Here's an array of eye candy that shows how people care for the environment and the world with their website initiatives. The great thing about website making is that it's always a work in progress so we're looking forward to seeing how your ideas develop and grow. Thanks for all your effort and congratulations!
Growing number of new websites are built with simple cloud-based tools like Edicy and Weebly these days. Cloud means that everything is online and accessible through browser. No software is installed. Nothing needs to be set up, maintained or upgraded on the customer side.
Oldschool way
Still, a lot of the web agencies continue building their customer sites in the old way. Every website is set up separately, upgrades and maintenance is manual and IT guy needs to be around. There are occasions when this might be a rational way – for example with large webstores or if the customer is a software developer itself. But most of the time it's a waste of time and brain cells of the customer.
Some 5 years ago every agency created its own website builder in-house. It was sold to each customer along with the website for an average of $1000. Quality was poor, upgrades seldom occurred, maintenance was expensive, tools were very difficult to use. It was a disaster.
Situation has improved. Agencies are moving onto well-known tools like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Quality is much better and any developer knows how to work with them. But this way websites are still expensive to maintain and difficult to use. You still need schooling and the IT guy to be around for upgrades and occasional maintenance.
Why is cloud better?
Why stick to the old way? Cloud-based website tools are just so much more rational:
- It costs almost nothing
- Technical side is set up and invisible
- Upgrades are automatic
- Tools are easier to use
That's why non-tech-savvy people turn to cloud tools when they want to build websites on their own. But if you want to have a more sophisticated site (eg with unique design), then doing it all by yourself won't work. You turn to an agency, get a great service, a beautiful and well working website... and an oldschool system under it. Win some, loose some.
Why remain oldschool then?
Why do most of the agencies avoid cloud-based web editors?
- Inertia. Remaining on the same path as you've accustomed to for years is more comfortable
- No pressure. Customers feel lost in tech issues and rely on the agency
- False assumptions. Developers believe they need to modify the system for every custom site (actually in most of the cases all the customization can be done on the same system)
- Love for open source. Most of the widely used non-cloud web editors are open source software. For the developers, open source is a good way to get things done. For the end user, open source doesn't help – the system must still be installed somewhere and maintained by some expert. The hosting must still be paid for.
Cloudy future
Probably we see some bigger changes in this space in the next couple of years. Innovative agencies are already moving towards simple cloud-based solutions while these systems themselves develop further and allow more and more complex customization by the agencies.
Chances are that even Wordpress and Drupal will release some kind of developer-friendly cloud solution with user-friendly interface in coming years.
Let's spread innovation already now. Next week we'll publish a small but growing index of companies and freelancers who have experience building your site cost efficiently on Edicy. Agencies, join the movement!
Last week we took part at Innovate!100, an event to find the top 100 most promising startups in the world. All the presentations concentrated on the business model side. I thought it would be very interesting to view for many of you too.
The current method for saving content was a bit cumbersome until now. We replaced the confusing "publishing on/off" button with the normal "Save" button.
Edicy has grown to host more than 150 000 people. It's a large gathering considered the size of
our team -- 9 souls. What would happen if this crowd got stuck with Edicy concurrently? They'd turn to those 9 to ask for assistance.
We just released a big makeover to content area management. Until now, the content area buttons were hidden and you could only see them when you move mouse over a top-left or bottom-left part of the content area. Not as intuitive as we wanted and therefore many of our users did not even know the existence of these buttons.
In my previous post I covered
Google PageRank, as we started to feature it in our statistics. Now it's time to get Alexa Traffic Rank explained. That's
another metrics we added to the statistics section of all the Edicy Pro accounts.
We just started to show
Edicy Pro users their sites' PageRank. But what is PageRank? Why and how did we come to see it as such an important issue that everyone needs to know it? Here's Google PageRank explained for you, in a simple and understandable way.
Ever wondered how your site is doing? You've sweated over building its structure, gathering content and polishing it's look and feel. Maybe you've even analyzed its incoming traffic. But how is your site doing on a global scale? We've just launched a feature for Edicy Pro users that helps you understand.
The main idea behind Edicy has always been to simplify the process of website creation. Choose a beautiful design, write a few paragraphs about your company, upload some photos, publish and voila! - you're done. All that in just a few minutes. Today we made this process even simpler.
Edicy has been available
in French almost
from the beginning. But, to be honest, the translation was in need of a face-lift. Therefore, we are very happy to announce that thanks to our new volunteer, Marc F., our French localization gets a new spark.
This week we launched improved file manager and uploader with good-looking file icons and more understandable upload progress status. Well known file formats are now easily distinguishable by their respective icons that makes finding the wanted file easy. While uploading files, the status of uploads will be shown for each file with nice green status bar on file icon.
Anyone starting a new business discovers on day one that it's way too expensive to run one. All those costs you'll need to bear -- rent an office, staff the team, find a bookkeeper, design a logo, make a website. Or... do you, really?
Christmas is coming and we have a special
gift for the Polish people.
We're happy to announce that in addition to 15 other languages
Edicy is
now also available in Polish!
Surprisingly many of our users have already built multiple sites with Edicy. It gives us confidence that we are on the right track. But we also discovered that even though it's easy to attach all your sites to a single email account, it was difficult to navigate between them.
As part of the ongoing tweaks and improvements, we added some value to the
Edicy Pro feature list. Storage. From now on, Pro users have 5 GB of storage space for their files. It's a whopping 50 times more than free users.
The domains purchased from Edicy usually last a year or two, depending on the chosen period when purchasing it. If your domain is about to expire, it needs to be renewed or someone else will get the rights for your domain. We just made it easy for you to add extra years to domain's lifetime.
We have just released some small-but-nice refinements on Edicy. It's all about optimization, eye candy and usability.
For the last couple of months, we’ve been busy with refining Edicy internally -- moved to better servers, rewrote statistics engine, prepared domain renewal system, worked on business development. All the unsexy stuff that no one notices but one still has to deal with. If a service grows from 0 to 100 000 users quickly -- like Edicy did -- there’s a lot of fine tuning to do.
So we made it. As of today 100,000 websites have been created with Edicy. To accommodate the fact we had to add a digit to the counter on our front page - and in the process also ended up giving it a facelift. We decided to give the 100 000th user, our very own Märt Kelder a gift - a voucher for Edicy Pro for a whole year. We can't confirm this, but it might be the first time when the words: "Congratulations! You are the 100,000... user of our site! You have won..." actually are not a false promise.
Edicy is about to reveal it's next improvement and we're looking for some volunteers who would like to test the whole thing first from end-user point of view. Since this time our new feature does great amount of user interaction, we find it very important to test the current prototype thoroughly.
Over the weekend in an heroic working spree our developers moved all of Edicy's content into new servers. If you have an Edicy site go ahead and get yourself (or us, we won't mind) a little housewarming gift - you've moved without even knowing about it.
Great news to all Edicy users -- we received the grand prix at
Estonian Internet Awards competition! Why would you care? Because it states,
loud and clear, that Edicy is the right tool to build websites with.
Revolutionary, super simple and sporting a special coolness factor.
Edicy has had forms as one of our improvements for a long while, but so far there hasn't been a post telling you about all of their wonderful features. Well, this time is finally over, you can find out how to get the most out of your forms right here.
A few weeks ago I wrote about
choosing the right design and filling it up with good content. This time I will give you a few tips on how to customize your design with code.
One of the more popular bandwagons rolling around the net these days is "Kill Internet Explorer 6". It started with some cool tech companies like
Digg and
Youtube announcing that they will drop IE6 support. Now
everybody and their mother is trying to climb aboard. Well, count us out. Here are few reasons, why we won't be
begging our users to switch from IE6.
When we started working on Edicy we wanted it to be the simplest and most beautiful way to create a website. You don't have to be a code or design guru to have an exceptional online presence for yourself or your business. Although our designs usually look great with any content right out of the box, there are a few ways to make your site really shine. Here's how.
Edicy designer toolkit is a simple application that helps you with creating a custom design for your Edicy site. It is intended to simplify the
design-code-test cycle every designer does hundreds of times while building a design. If you're a web designer or developer and interested in creating designs that work in Edicy then head on to the
dedicated page at our developer site.
Today, Edicy turns one -- a year ago we
launched Edicy public beta into the wild. What a wonderful year it has been for us all. During this year, 85 000 people have created a site with us from
all around the world.
If you are growing tired of your old edicypages.com address and are looking to get your own, we have good news for you: Edicy just expanded the number of different domains that are available for purchase through our system.
We're happy to report that in addition to
Dutch and 13 other languages
Edicy is now also available in Finnish. The Finnish translation,
like most of the others, was done by a volunteer,
Toivo Talikka.
Traffic is about attention. Attention drives sales. Sales fill pockets.
Everyone wants to be popular. How to direct traffic to your site? In the
long run, it's all about adding value. Is the stuff on your site
interesting / valuable / useful enough for people to reach you? And more
importantly, do they want to come back and recommend it to their
friends?
We are happy to announce that today we released
Edicy in Dutch, which is now the 14th language Edicy is available in. The Dutch translation was done
by a volunteer, Anno de Vries-de Graaf. He writes about himself and his motivation as follows:
Every day someone contacts me to discuss starting their website project.
More often than not they have compiled a list of "I wanna"
functionality instead of having a realistic view on how it'll be
actually used. The more "I wannas" — the less likely you'll find a
single existing tool matching it.
Lately we've been getting quite a few questions from people who'd like to start selling Edicy websites. I'm happy to
announce that this is now possible. All you
have to do is sign up to our brand new affiliate program (beta) and
recommend Edicy to anybody. If they sign up to Edicy and tell us you referred them, you'll receive 25% of their first
subscription payment.
We released a new version of Edicy last night and if you've visited your site today you've probably seen the changes. Most noticeably we rejigged the structure of the bottom toolbar a little bit to make its structure more logical.
You just created a new website with
Edicy but what next? What's the website good for when nobody knows about it? You have to let the world know that there is a new and interesting site. The easiest way to do this is to submit your site to
Google because Google is the first source where your potential visitors start to look for information. This post teaches you how to do that.
If you want to see the first ever screencast of Edicy in action - complete with soothing music and accented voice-over - check out our brand new
tour page. The video is at the top on right hand side.
Widgets are a way to make your website a lot more interesting. Whether you want a clock, a counter on an RSS feed from another site on your page you can be pretty sure that someone somewhere has already built it and you don't need to start inventing a bicycle. But did you know you can use widgets with Edicy as well? Here's how.
This is the first in a series of post discussing how to better use EdicyAs we've written before, Edicy speaks more than 10 languages and is
looking to add more. But what if you want to create a website that would support as many languages or more? Edicy makes it easy, we have built in support for as many languages as you need.
This week's release is all about various bugfixes and stability improvements in text editor. This also includes changes in table-, photo- and map tools. File uploader and page loading time got some attention too.
Today I wrote a (hopefully) nice e-mail to many of our more active users, asking for testimonials about using Edicy. But in order to do that I had to dig myself pretty deep into our userbase and came up with some quite interesting things that I'd like to share with all of you.
Last week Edicy got a
speed boost, this week we are being
seedboosted. Confusing? It
really isn't. Edicy has been included into a freshly started
international business incubator by
Arengufond - Estonian Development
fund, which is basically a state-owned investment fund.
We've been doing some nice improvements recently in terms of page load times in Edicy to keep up with the growing demand of our service. First and foremost, we implemented page caching for public pageviews and therefore gained approximately 60x faster page load times. Your site visitors will appreciate that. Also, we made some tweaks in site admin area where pages load up to 2-3 times faster than they used to be.
If you aren't a designer then there's no need to bother yourself with
designing a website on your own. Stick to what you're good at and
what you enjoy doing. There are two wiser and more effective ways to get
the work done -- either hire a great designer or pick a ready-made
design template from a design stock. Be cautious and ask questions. A
good design doesn’t mean special effects, mind-blowing graphics and a
growing number of designer-wannabes visiting your site.
Creating a website is easy with Edicy and it should not require users to speak English to do that. Our goal is to make website
building experience pleasant for those who do not know English that well. But we can't do it
without your help - we are looking for people who would like to help us on translating Edicy into other languages.
Websites are created to provide content for it's visitors. Content is
king, they say. Everything else (design, system) is just the packaging.
Content is normally what your site visitors are looking for. So the key
for creating a great website is to provide accurate and interesting
content -- texts, pictures, audio or video.
Websites are built up from a number of different bricks. By the end of
the day you'll need design, content (texts and pictures), promotion and
some technical things like a website address, hosting and system for
managing content. Most of all you need to get it done. You need
decisions not discussions.
Building a great website takes passion. It also takes great copy, good
design and a lot of time. These are all luxury items, so it would be
wise to optimize the effort. We've put together a series of articles on
this very topic. During the next five weeks, we'll tell you the whole
story.
Today we're happy to announce form builder in Edicy. Now you can create forms with ease to gather user's feedback. And everything happens right where it should -- directly on page. Along with other minor improvements, this week's release also brings us fresh new design template called Daejeon.
We have redesigned the
design examples section of edicy.com. Designs, featured sites and custom designed sites are now all togeteher on the same page. Carousel browsing was so 2008, so we dropped it and chose something new for the spring season.
It is no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to build elegant web applications or even just a simple web-site that different browsers display pages differently. To work around these issues, developers have to use an exhausting amount of different cheats and "hacks" and sometimes even these don't work. To ensure that Edicy-experience is the same for everyone, we're pleased to announce that starting next week, Edicy will only work in Internet Explorer.
The most important improvement in this week's release is a feature to add multiple blocks of content into single content area on page. For example, a photo gallery and feedback form can now live happily next to each other. Alongside with this improvement, we also made it possible to drag these content blocks around on the page. And if you get bored with that, it is now much more easier to remove content from page.
In Edicy, all the changes will be automatically and continuously saved but to show these changes to public, they need to be published because sometimes you don't want to show the working drafts to the site visitors. Until now, publishing content was little bit confusing. We did our changes in Edicy, logged out and, boom, everything was gone. What!? Oh, you had to press publish button before logging out... It had to be changed.
Table editor, yet another long-awaited feature is now available for all Edicy users. Along with tables, this weeks release brings many other improvements to Edicy. For example, we've been working hard to improve usability, overall speed and performance. We fixed compatibility issues with Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and more.
A number of users have already so large amount of pictures and other files uploaded to their Edicy sites, that it became increasingly difficult to get quick overview of them while editing. Therefore we launched a feature that lets you group all your media into sets -- both photo albums and sets of PDF documents work well in Edicy.
Adding forms to site has been yet another feature that was asked too many times by our users. Today it is finally ready to hit the beta. Now you can set up feedback forms and site visitors can finally tell what they're thinking about you.
We just released the first piece of site traffic information inside Edicy. At the moment, this feature contains only one simple graph where each site owner can see the number of unique visits for the last 30 days. But this is only a beginning, expect more fine-tuning, graphs, trends and usage statistics to be released in next upcoming weekly releases.
So you have this "Edicy page", but really missing a feature or two? We know you have your page but always don't know what you find essential and it's just not there yet. Here are some clues how to send us your ideas, feature requests, bug reports and even season greetings.
A happy new year starts with more editing capabilities for everyone. From now on, you can edit your photos from there, where they belong -- right on page. Another great thing, adding Google Maps to site, has been requested too many by our users so we decided to push it in very last minute. And as usual, there's a number of bugfixes and improvements in this release.
For us, the follow-up buzz after LeWeb conference does not want to end. This time, the leading weblog about great nordic tech startups,
ArcticStartup, published
a video interview with Tõnu taken on LeWeb Paris. If you're still wondering what is this edicy-thingy all about, check out the video below the fold:
Happy holidays everyone! Just in time for christmas we present you a brand new design Buenos Aires and some local domains for purchase!
I have B.A in Law. There's no academic design education in my CV. It's
defintiely a missing piece and there is nothing to boast about. I love
design. I'm a graphic designer after all. I should get a wider view on
the subject. Read and discuss with the alike. I should go and study it.
If a website is created and noone finds it, does it exist? We believe that besides a beautiful design and editing ease a good site should also be easily found by anyone. That's why Edicy has been developed with search engines in mind: you can access a number of different SEO (search engine optimization) tools to improve your sites page-rank and today we added one more.
Edicy was invited to take part in this year's startup competition at
Le
Web -- one of the most important online business events in the world.
Le Web itself was success. It brought together European, American and
Asian cool startups, tech evangelists, investors. A lot of partnerships
will be born, a lot of ideas were exchanged and a lot of money will
change its owners soon.
Boy, do we have great news for you all! The most requested feature in Edicy - galleries, is now in public beta. You can arrange any number of photos in your media section into a neat gallery with an integrated lightbox viewing mode.
As you might
have noticed, we're giving a presentation on Edicy at
LeWeb'08 Startup Competition today. Since the internet connection is very occasional here, it is hard to keep you updated of all the interesting things happening around.
It's been baking in the oven for some time already. Today i'm happy to announce that our
Template API is finally ready to hit the public. This documentation will provide all reference material you need to customize everything of your site design. Template API is just a section of our new
developer mini-site, so you can expect more topics for developers to be relased in near future.
Edicy is all about letting your content shine through beautiful designs and today we
doubled the choice between different Edicy templates – every template has now a new stunning colour variation plus we introduce a whole new design: Astana. Hopefully you'll find something to spice up your existing site or get enough inspiration to
customize one of our templates to your own needs.
We're ready with refreshing the looks of the front page of our website.
In addition to adjusted design style, we've added a small Pro section
there, a map showing latest signups and a small pic to illustrate
latest news.
We are very exited to announce that Edicy has been selected for
Le Web 2008 Startup Competition. LeWeb is the biggest and most talked about startup event in Europe. Just a selected handful of startups around the world were offered this opportunity. It's a remarkable milestone for us and we truly appreciate the positive attention we've received in connection with that.
Today we are very proud to announce the release one of the most important new features in the last weeks: domain registration.
Although Edicy is an all-in-one package including both web editor and
hosting, we now also offer downloading your site to publish it anywhere
you want - it could be another hosting company, your own private server
or maybe you just want to have a personal back-up of your site.
Since all
our designs carry the names of cities around the world, it was a pretty logical step to place them all on a map. Just for fun. Feel free to find yours or come back anytime to find out whether your hometown has already made it on a Edicy's world map:
As of today, there are a total of three different payment methods
supported by Edicy. You can upgrade to Edicy Pro by paying with PayPal,
using money transfer or your credit card.
With the new release of Edicy you have advanced control over your publishing process — different pages on your site will still be autosaved but only you can decide when they will be published to the public to be seen and visited by everyone.
First, i'd like to thank you all for your patience who were waiting this sunday morning while we upgraded our server infrastructure. This is a major enhancement in terms of service quality and system response time. It is also a prerequisite for delivering new features to Edicy even more quickly than ever before.
Joonathan Mägi joins Edicy as the user interface development lead. He
has already started to improve Edicy's look and feel and we are very
excited to have him on board.
You might have noticed that every week our team releases another set of new features and bugfixes based largely on your requests, thoughts and feedback (so keep them coming!). Often new features go from sketch on the paper to finished products in just under a week or two.
Another week, another release! Now you can insert external media into any content field on your site. Be it video from Youtube or Vimeo, just insert the embed code and spice up your site with everything the internet has to offer.
Last week we surfed around in our clientbase, bookmarking the best sites our users have built. Since we launched our service a couple of months ago, quite many companies, societies and common people like you and me have done a remarkable job with it. Out of all those sites, we have picked a small selection for you to see: the
featured sites built on Edicy.
The latest update brought a long-requested feature to Edicy users - global sign in. Now you can easily sign in to your account at
www.edicy.com, which takes you to the last site you edited.
We are happy to introduce you three major improvements to Edicy. All of them are highly anticipated by our users as the feedback tells us. Most important update of these three is the reordering of pages in menu.
As the number of new Edicy users is growing rapidly, hour after hour, we get a lot of useful feedback from all of you. Thank you, we appreciate it!
This week we’ve added the ability to add specific keywords and tags to
each page so that search engines can find your content a little easier,
this is a feature that has been requested a number of times already.
I'm happy to introduce our new team member, Martti Ilves, who is
joining Edicy this week. Martti is taking the role of Quality Assurance
Lead. He'll be in charge of making sure our service is updated
smoothly. All new features are tested and tried out by his team before
releasing them into the wild.
In today’s print issue of Aripäev, Estonia’s largest business paper, there is a full-page article about Edicy.
This week the Edicy team grows a little bigger as Tanel Jakobsoo is
joining us. Tanel is going to be taking up the task of testing and
making sure that problem's with Edicy are found and fixed quickly.
After last weeks launch of Edicy Pro we are back, hard at work at
adding features and fixing a number of bugs that have popped up in the
past few days. We are also continually working to improve the
usability of Edicy and Edicy Pro.
Today we released Edicy in Icelandic, which is now the sixth language which Edicy is available in.
With Edicy Pro, you can publish your site built with Edicy to any web address. There are no limits, both international (www.myname.com) or local (www.myname.de or .fr / .cn / .co.uk etc) addresses are welcome. Free users remain on edicypages.com style addresses.
This week we’ve released a feature that is specifically designed for
small business and users that really want to customize their sites.
We’re launching Edicy Pro so that you can add a personal web address to
your site!
This was another exciting week for us at Edicy. We’ve added tools to
better help you customize your site, in particular the ability to add
your own custom design.
Edicy’s focus is on small businesses. Everything is ready and waiting to be launched. But you won't grow out of Edicy as your company grows since Edicy is suited perfectly for large and small companies alike. Today we helped
Starman, a telecom company listed on the Estonian stock exchange, launch it's website which is running on Edicy.
Along with launching
Chinese versions of Edicy and our website this week we also made some additional improvements.
Shortly after we launched into public beta we noticed that we were attracting a lot of new users from China. Having more internet users than any other country, this wasn't surprising at all.
One of the common questions we get is how you can point your own personal domain name which
you’ve previously registered to Edicy. This feature is now available
and I’ll explain the steps required to do this.
Having released Edicy to the wild last week, we took time to celebrate with a release party for our friends, families and everyone else involved in building the simplest web-editor. For those of you, who couldn't make it, here's a postcard from the party:
I’d like to take a few minutes to introduce Priit Haamer to those of
you who don’t yet know him. Priit is one of Fraktal’s co-founders and
chief developer of Edicy.
Finally we have really taken off, we are public, we are out in the wild. The last week has been a real rush. I'm writing these lines after a crazy long night of fixing and tweaking. Oh, we are satisfied, even though it's just the start and so much more is still to be developed.
Tõnu has been here since Day 1 but I still think it’s a good idea to
make a formal introduction. Tõnu is Fraktal’s co-founder, CEO and
chief design enthusiast. He’s responsible for making sure everything
runs smoothly around here and that life at Fraktal keeps going.
As you can see we’ve updated our website! Edicy.com was getting a
little outdated and in preparation for our eventual launch we decided
to freshen it up a bit. Naturally it was easy to do since the entire
site is running Edicy.
Along with our new Edicy.com website there are a lot of the changes
this week we hope will improve usability and make first time use a lot
easier.
Continuing with the introductions of the Edicy team members this week,
I’d like to take a few minutes and introduce Dmitri Smirnov or as he
likes to be known, Dima.
Last week we opened Edicy up to some new users in order to get feedback
and I can happily say that we got a lot of it. The feedback opened our
eyes a bit to some of the things that we can improve on and we’ve taken
it all in and are working hard to make Edicy even better.
Last week we emailed everyone who had requested an early look at
Edicy and sent them a invitation to create an account. The response we got was very positive and we’d like to expand on that preview therefore we’re inviting anyone to come and try it out.
Today our servers had a blackout for several hours. While switching between normal and generator power, power was lost in part of the server room. Now we're fully recovered and back online. We sincerely apologize and thank you for your patience!
As Tõnu
mentioned last week we want to introduce the Fraktal team to everyone so that we’re not an anonymous bunch of programmers behind a screen. The latest hire that
we’d like to welcome to the team is Markus Paks who joined us a couple of weeks back.
This week we’ve added a couple of important new features and a number of bug fixes,
Edicy gets a little closer each week to what we’ve envisioned.
Let me let you in on a big secret.
Fraktal is hiring. Ok, that's not a real secret. The secret is
how to get hired.
Some new faces have appeared in the Fraktal office recently and we
haven’t taken the time to formally introduced them. We should have a
Team page up and running shortly so you can get an idea of everyone
behind Edicy and we’ll post more detailed bios of everyone at Fraktal
here on our blog, but in the meantime please give a warm welcome to
Andres Sehr who recently joined Fraktal.
After having a few days off last week we're back to work at full speed. We're getting real close to public beta but we still have a couple of big changes we want to get done before we take off the wrapping and allow others to test it out.
This past Monday and Tuesday were public holidays in Estonia,
midsummer’ (Jaanipäev in Estonian) is the arguably the most important
holiday here and many people schedule vacations to coincide with it so
they can extend their merriment for the rest of the week.
If you're frequent reader at our blog, then you might have noticed that we're just a little bit
Apple fanboys. But this is not a case at the moment. We all should know by now, there is a next version of
OS X coming. Now new features you might say?
I'd say Great!
Very soon Edicy will be ready for the wider public, this means that we
have a lot of challenging new tasks and the need to expand our team. So
we’ve gone ahead and added many new open job positions this week. Place
of work can be either Tartu, Tallinn or the comfort of your own home.
As we continue to develop
Edicy and ready it for the public we thought we’d start sharing with you some of the changes we make each week.
This weeks release includes:
While the officials have yet to hand out the permit to test Edicy on
animals, we have to settle with designers. Therefore I put my mouse
away, blew dust off my keyboard and tested how easy it is to make a
simple site run on Edicy without any help from our developers team -
and boy were the results compelling!
Already June, where does the time go?
Since the web2.0 hype was born and since Apple was saved by Steve,
developers have started to acknowledge the presence of design. Web is full of nice user interfaces in front of thousands of
useful apps. The widget manufacturer with the most well designed toys
is the the cream of the crop on the consumer market. Design matters, it
seems. Developers are slowly understanding, that design is the other
part of their everyday work. "Okay, let it be," a developer thinks...
and works on to become an even better backend master.
This week there are a number of additions to our blogging platform.
Today, a major facelift to the Estonian largest newspaper,
SL Õhtuleht
was released. The whole process from start to finish took just a little
more than one month. We designed and coded it with the hands-on-method — instead of long months of analyzing and planning, we started at day one of the recieving of the assignment.
Earlier today, I was checking out a pretty neat application called
Web2 Delight. It's an app that brings best of the web 2.0 goodness right onto your desktop. But that's not the thing i wanted to share with you (no-no, you should still check out the app for sure). It's something else - it's when you open up a .dmg file for the app:
This week' changes and additions to Edicy.
After implementing the
missing piece of our blogging system, the
RSS-output, I didn't want to stop there and decided to have a bit of fun. I took an extra 15 minutes to create a simple proof of concept for audio-podcast from our otherwise so text-and-images based blog.
Surprisingly, the world is not only lacking of simple web-editors but also good furniture. After a long and fruitless search we finally hired young and talented Stella to make custom-sized bean bag chairs to fill up our conference lounge/room/pod. After days of searching for the right material, sewing the patches together and filling 'em up they're finally ready and boy are we happy and satisfied!
Actually, we didn't even think about integrating any popular blog engine with Edicy. It was clear enough — none of those we had tried so far, had fit into our concept of seamless editing. So, the long line of different approaches to blogging has grown by one unit again.
The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot, they say. Till today Fraktal's site was based on plain html even though we have already quite a load of test clients trying out our “shoes” — Edicy web-editor. The tide has turned and now Edicy's main functionality is stable and usable enough to be used as the engine behind most of the
SMB websites.
Today, we released an update of Edicy into the wild. It combines lot
of bugfixes and refinements with some more complicated and more
fundamental changes in backend system we’ve done during the last couple
of weeks. I’m glad to say that this release brings us a huge step
forward to public beta.
Most of you have probably never been to our office – the small hive in the historic city centre of Tartu . Chances are, that most of you never will (but if you can, feel free to drop by!). Priit already gave you a short overview of how we organize our work.
We continue to work on Edicy and we’re getting close to the point where
we’re willing to show some very close friends and family what we’ve
been working on.
Instead of creating a login screen as a big empty canvas with a handful of boxes in the center of it, we found
a more attractive way to authenticate users in
Edicy. Basically,
for logging in you only need those boxes
– one for your mail address and another for the password to identify
you. Then a checkbox to remember your face, a button for maintaining
friendship with the oldschool where’s-my-submit-button-users and, of
course the “i remember nothing” link for resetting one’s password.
We had a first minor production server crash this
morning which brought our service down for couple of hours. As we have
already a number of beta clients using Edicy, it’s quite a lot to worry
about and quite a good lesson to learn.
For those of you, who missed Edicy’s 90s remake yesterday, here is the
mirror (and don’t forget to turn up your speakers!). We hope everyone had a grand April Fool’s Day!
By now you might know the name for our main product. It’s
Edicy What you might not know are the
hours
days of brain crushing in the office to find exactly the right
combination of letters we would be happy with. We searched for
something unique enough to get a good domain name (as it turns out,
every single word in the ordinary English dictionary is already pretty
much taken) but still something with a familiar ring to it. Rather
“Webber” than “Woobzr”, rather “EditMe” than “EdMez”.
Our small team has worked almost constantly during the last month. And now we can finally relax for a second – Edicy has been launched! Yes, Edicy. It’s the brand new name for our core product – the unprecedentedly easy-to-use web-editor.
We are happy, satisfied and completely exhausted :) More info soon, we’ll
take a rest for a short while. Until that—browse around Edicy’s site,
take the tour and sign up in the public beta’s waiting row. All your
questions are welcome!
One great thing about start-ups is that you really can start over.
You can have latest technologies on programming, latest laptop models
on your desktop and you can be damn sure that milk in your fridge isn’t
more than three months old. Here is what we have come up while choosing
our equipment to do everyday’s work.
As the date of the Private Beta release is approaching, we have
prepared some first screens for you to look. Instead of the web editing
view, we are going to show you another candy—a view where you can
select and upload multiple files with “one click”.
As we started to build our web editor a few months ago, we went through a pile of existing CMSs. Yes, we verified that the old saying about millions of them being out there is true. Every decent web agency on the planet has developed at least one tiny content management system. And I guess every fifth person in the Western world owns at least one such agency. So “Why the hell did we have to build yet another CMS?” you ask.
Today we set up our first client server, located on US East Coast. Even though the service itself is still under heavy development, we are getting ready for the beta on the hardware side and can already tell that we are going to launch in mid-March.
We continue to add core-editing functions to Edicy and are pleased with how things are taking shape.
Hi folks! This is just a quick note to tell you that we have launched the
first ever site on our web-service-on-development. This historic event was, of course, the result of many long weeks of hard work. We built our product and this little site side-by-side with our good friends at the
Estonian Environmental Law Center. While we received valuable testing results and new ideas, they got to be the first brave pioneers to get to actually use our alpha. Not to mention the beautiful fresh website.
Today marks the first release of a version of Edicy.
