New Enhancements

Adult Filtering
In the past some found it difficult viewing myVidster from work because NSFW content would occasionally get past my filters and end up on the homepage. This will no longer happen, only approved video hosts like Youtube and Vimeo will be displayed on the homepage. It kinda sucks because users do collect a lot of video content from smaller video hosts, but its not worth the risk of seeing some 18 year old's rack on myVidster's homepage while I am in the office. Also if you browsing a user's collection that has adult content it will be block with NSFW warnings.
Reddit and Digg Stories
Digg stories that relate to the bookmarked video have been available for sometime on myVidster (viewable in the lower right column on the video display), but is now optional and must be enable. I added the same feature for Reddit stories. To enable these features go to the manage page and click edit next to the collection.

Enhance bookmarklet
For those who do not use the Firefox addon there is a new bookmarklet available. I would highly recommend you switch to the new bookmarklet. It is faster and it will be more successful at fetching the video. Also if you are using Internet Explorer, SWITCH TO ANOTHER BROWSER! IE (any version) does not work well with fetching the embedded video. This is not an issue with myVidster, but with IE's moving the flash variables outside of Javascript's innerhtml. There is also a Chrome extension I develop, but it is only for users who have Chrome Beta installed and I removed the video download and backup feature to comply with their TOS.

Where are my profile pages?
Yes, I know I still owe you guys profile pages. Life has been super busy and hopefully I can free up some time to push them out.

Over 129,000 visits a month, take that!

Reaching over 100k visits a month is a big milestone for myself. Keeping in mind that myVidster is myself and a server. You will notice that there was a drop in traffic. This was caused by server issues resulting in downtime, migration to a new (and faster) server and the holidays. It seems that I have rebounded and my stats are climbing again.

Additional stats
Users: 7,276
Collections: 7,195
Bookmarked Videos: 36,399

I still owe my user's profile pages, i get the last week of December off (my day job) and will finally have the time to do some development.

We are at 67,000 visit a month!

Here is a screen shot from Google Analytics for my recent traffic.

Additional stats
Users: 5,342
Collections: 5,309
Bookmarked Videos: 23,498

myVidster's is still growing! I know that I am behind on development (profile pages), if you include myVidster I currently have three jobs and it is taking its toll on me. If anyone wants to volunteer their programming or marketing skills, feel free to contact me.

Performance Issues Resolved

Recently i notice that page loading were getting slower and slower (up to 5 seconds for a page to load during peak hours). When checking the server logs I did not notice any high CPU usage. When coming back from lunch today, I realize that I have done zero optimization to my database. Database optimization is not a big deal when your are only dealing with a couple hundred rows of data, but when you get into the thousands you start to see a degrade in performance.

I have done some simple optimization to the myVidster's mySQL tables. Simple stuff like adding indexs and running the OPTIMIZE command on the tables. I also setup a nightly cron job to optimize my index files for video searching (Zend Lucene).

The final result was page load times and search gain a 2x to 3x boost! Hopefully the performance issues did not cause me to lose any users.

~40,000 visits a month, not too shabby

It has been a while sense I posted an update on this blog. This does not mean that myVidster is not growing. In fact myVidster's growth has been very positive in the last 6 months.

As of today here are some key stats of myVidster.

# of Users: 3,925
# of Collections: 3,923
# of Videos Collected: 16,724
Visits Per Month: ~40,000

I will admit that these stats are not stellar in comparison to successful startups like twitter, but for a self funded project I am very proud of site's growth.

Beta Testers Needed - myVidster's Video Backup

myVidster will be pushing out a new service call Video Backup. The goal of the new functionality is to give the users the option to create a backup of their bookmarked videos to the myVidster server so that they do not need to worry about their videos being taken down by the video host (ie Youtube)

Why would I want to use/test your Video Backup service?

Reason #1
Video Backup bypasses Youtube’s videos that are private or have disable embedded.
Youtube source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAT5ypTjKOI
myVidster backup: http://www.myvidster.com/video/9343

Reason #2
Video Backup bypasses video host who blocks hot linking, ie Facebook videos.
Facebook source: http://www.facebook.com/...video.php?v=80255293032
myVidster backup: http://www.myvidster.com/video/9381

Reason #3
Video Backup works for a variety of video host other then Youtube. Facebook videos, Vimeo, Myspace, Veoh, MetaCafe to name a few.
Vimeo Source: http://vimeo.com/2232226
myVidster backup: http://www.myvidster.com/video/9385

Reason #4
Never fearing that your online videos will get removed by the video host.

What I need to do to become a beta tester.

Download Video Bookmarks, myVidster Firefox addon
Contact me requesting for a beta access.

Beta invites are limited to 100, please limit to videos with at max file size of 250 megs till I get the system stable and only backup flash videos (I am still working on WMV and MOV support).

myVidster Bookmarks for Firefox (add-on)

myVidster now has a Firefox Add-on for bookmarking videos. This add-on behaves just like the bookmarklet, but is easier to install and use.

Currently the add-on is in the Sandbox and will need a few reviews before it can get approved for public use.

If you would like to beta test and review the add-on all you need to do is:

1. Go to Video Bookmarks Add-Ons page.
2. Sign up for an account (Mozilla requires login for addons that are in the sandbox, sorry)
3. Install!!!

Please post a quick review on the Video Bookmarks Add-Ons page. This will help in the approval process.

Thanks