We’d like to extend a big Picnik welcome to all of the Photojojo users! Over the past day we’ve been visited by many (79+) thousands of Photojojo readers. Of all the groups that we’ve seen so far, the Photojojo users have been the best with giving feedback. Lots of good, thoughtful comments about feature suggestions, bugs and kudos.

There was so much feedback that we did struggle to get through it all, but I think we’re all caught up. We had to come up with a new system to deal with the flood o’ feedback. Now we have a feedback schedule. There are six of us at Picnik, and each person now has their very own “feedback” day when they are responsible for answering or forwarding each piece of incoming feedback. My day is Tuesday. One person is “lucky” enough to have both weekend days (Darrin).

Feature work is marching on. We didn’t get as many features out the door this month as I would have liked, but we’re well posititioned to have an really good March, feature-wise. Feburary has been great for us in terms of exposure. With all of the feedback we have a better idea about what works, what doesn’t , what’s clear and what’s confusing. Jon has spent a lot of time talking with potential partners. Nothing we can talk about now, but we are thrilled at some of the potentinal prospects. Lot’s of good behind-the-scenes progress.

One last thing. Even though we’re in ‘beta’ (whatever that means in internet speak), that doesn’t mean that you should see any serious problems using Picnik. At the very least, no crashing problems. PLEASE let us know when you run into any bugs. We really do want to know. We’ve been really happy with Picnik’s stability but I know from personal experience that programmers can easily find themselves living in happy, confined bubble of blissful ignorance. Just click on the feedback button or send mail to us at feedback at picnik.com.

Brian has finished his new upload code and it’s out on the server. Uploads, especially from your computer, are now faster and more reliable. Please email us if you experience any upload weirdness.

Ignite Seattle! was awesome. If you missed this one, be sure to check out the next one. I think the next one will be in a couple of months. Check www.igniteseattle.com for details. I don’t know how many people were there, but I would say that it was in the hundreds (300+?). Lots of good talks (no slide can take longer then 15 seconds, no talk longer than 5 minutes), and the egg-a-pult was a thing of beauty. Check out the pictures at Flickr and check back at Ignite Seattle’s site later this week for more pictures and video.

If you’re a local Seattle geek, check out Ignite Seattle! this Tuesday. I haven’t been to one yet, but I’ve heard they are a lot of fun. I’ll be there along with a fellow Picniker or two.

We’re going to put out a new release sometime this week. There won’t be a big mailing about this release since it’s mostly back-end bug fixing and enhancement. The last surge in traffic was a great opportunity to understand how our servers work with load. The short version is that things worked very well. We had a couple problems that led to a few errors, but those episodes were pretty short and generally affected a small number of users.

The feedback from y’all has been amazingly good. We really enjoy hearing about what works and what you think is missing for you guys. Bonus points for the use of the word “rawk”. The more artful postings tend to get read aloud in the office.  As of Friday, I think we’ve answered every piece of feedback. Thanks to Darrin for doing most of the heavy lifting.

Today was another big day for us. We had a  record amount (for us) of traffic and new users (~5000). Picnik was featured in a mini-review on Tech Crunch which was then picked up by Digg. The TC/Digg traffic was a nice bump, but it wasn’t the crushing flood that I had worried about (and hoped for!). Perhaps that was because it got posted in the post Super Bowl hang-over period. Still, it was more traffic than we had seen before today.

The day wasn’t without some issues. We had a hiccup from our render server and earlier this morning one of our secondary servers was compromised through a security hole in cacti. I was also a bit worried about getting Digg’d before we had our full server architecture in place, but things went smoothly. Actually, it went really well.

People have asked about which tools/languages we use. We use Flash 9/Flex on our client. Our server is Linux, Apache, MySQL and Python. Given our Microsoft systems backgrounds (Darrin and I worked on OS/2 and NT back in the day), this has been a fun and interesting experience.

 I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed my first serious foray into LAMP. There are the usual frustrations (I miss Visual Studio!) but these tools are very well adapted for the kind of work that we’re doing. Python has been a joy to use after I manged to de-program myself from using ;’s and {}’s. It seems like every time I come up with some new task, there is a Python lib or recipie that addresses the exact problem that I’m trying to solve.

As cool as LAMP is, the one language that makes Picnik possible is ActionScript 3/Flex. Adobe/Macromedia have done a awesome job at putting together a great set of tools and decent framework. Frankly, our entire company was founded around the idea that Flash/ActionScript was an important emerging technology and it would fun to ride that wave. We started in Flash 8/AS 2 and moved to Flash 9/AS 3 as soon as we saw the adoption rates spike up. Making that change to 9 increased our productivity by a huge amount. A big tip of the hat to the Adobe/Macromedia team.

A big welcome to Lifehacker readers!

The entire staff here at Picnik would like to thank Igor Siwanowicz for allowing us to use one of his amazing photos in our application. Igor has captured some incredible images of frogs and insects. See them for yourself at his photo.net page.

Thanks Igor!

There is a new release out on the server with some features/fixes that were requested in user feedback: darker text, resize(!) and sample images.

Enjoy!

Wow. It’s been a pretty exciting couple of days. After our latest release with the super easy login, traffic has grown by leaps and bounds! We’ve had thousands of users logging on each day. Naturally, as soon as blogs started writing about Picnik, all hell broke loose. First, our office dsl went down for almost 20 hours. Then our colo ISP had a router hiccup, causing us to race over to the datacenter. And on top of that, Jon came down with the flu. When it rains, it pours.

But things are great; we’re having a lot of fun and people seem to be really enjoying Picnik. We’ve had a lot of good coverage from blogs, starting with an amazing post on the Solutions Watch blog. They have a great write-up of our site, check it out.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from our users. The entire team reads every piece of feedback mail. I’d like to keep that practice in place for as long as we can. The feedback has been hugely positive, and there have been lots of feature requests

A lot of you have been asking about the missing resize feature. Frankly, I’m not sure why it never got done. It was just one of those things that slipped through the cracks. After the feedback started rolling in, it was pretty clear that people really wanted to see it - now! The good news is that it’s done and in testing and should be released tomorrow.

A few people have noticed that their passwords seem to expand in the edit control when they login. What is actually happening is that we’re encoding your password for privacy before sending it out and one of the side effects is that for a split-second you see the encoded password (which is larger than your password) expand into the edit control. We’re working on a better solution.

The other good news (especially for me) is that we have a new team member. Justin Huff has joined us. We’re a bunch of Windows guys and we’re still relatively new to wild and wonderful world of Linux. Now we have a great Linux resource on the team and someone who can help us design and build a server infrastructure that might have a chance of withstanding the onslaught of users and images that we’re likely to face. Welcome Justin!

Keep that feedback coming!