Naavi

On Thursday June 4 we will be releasing a new way to create new pages in your newsletters. You can still create a new blank page, but we’re adding an option to clone a page from a previous newsletter.

This is useful for when you have an ‘Upcoming Events’ page and wish to copy across the whole page.

We hope you find this new feature useful, and as always, if you have any questions, send us an email at [email protected], or call us on our new phone number: 03 8352 9111

Working in education can spark some pretty interesting questions about how students should make decisions that will effect their future.  Selecting subjects, and deciding what they want to do with their life is really tough.  The careers department usually ask a questions like something like this: 

“Well, what do you enjoy?”

And what do you enjoy?  Is this stuff that you’re good at?  I can’t help but feel if you’re born abnormally tall you’re immediately identified as a great basketball player.  If you so much as indicate some interest towards basketball everyone will agree it makes sense so off you go to a potential professional basketball career.  

When I was at school I wasn’t particularly gifted at anything - but my brother was.  He is an extremely gifted mathematician who could program computers so effortlessly it made peoples jaws drop.  He now works with computers and has always been seen as someone who enjoys technology and mechanics.

This is Sophie, the Naavi Team dog. She is part of the Greyhound Adoption Program. She has a beautiful short black coat and loves belly rubs. She loves running free on a big oval, like she’s a sleek cougar running in the wild.

She loves helping our team while they work late at night. Sometimes when we’re busy working she’ll come in to the room and stick her head out for a pat. Great for a quick break when we’re furiously coding.

Or maybe we’re eating dinner before we get started. She’ll kindly offer to finish some of our pizza, as if it’s the least she could do. Great for maintaining our waistline.

She also needs to be walked often. Often before we start a night sesh we’ll take her for a walk so she can sniff every corner of the street. Great for keeping fit and healthy.

It’s hard.  And here’s why.

Understanding technology is extremely complex and nuanced.  There are multiple operating systems, applications, formats, brands - the list goes on.  Knowledge is built up in layers much like understanding Maths or English.  But in the case of technology, the fundamentals to build upon keep shifting.  The rise of internet services such as Google Apps is a perfect example.  It’s almost a total sidestep for someone used to storing everything they own on their hard drive to now be syncing information to the cloud and having access anywhere on any device.  It’s jarring and without the right support and assistance can lead to us seeing ourselves as “not technology people”.  I’m not sure I believe that anyone is incapable of learning new technology. Most people underestimate their ability to learn new things.  Ultimately it comes down to motivation and getting excited about the prospect of what technology could do for me.  Where there's a will there’s a way.

So fast forward into your average school where teachers come from all backgrounds of technology use.  Some very mobile centric, some PC or Mac biased and others happy to embrace and learn it all.  How can you deliver relevant and applicable training to these groups of teachers en-masse?  The good news is I have the answer: to coach each person individually.  This is how it’s done in other industries.  For instance, a tennis coach.  When you’re young and each student is at a similar developmental level it’s easy to group them up into classes.  But later in life, one-on-one personal coaching is the accepted method for adults, because a group session with a 10 year veteran player and someone brand new to the sport just won’t work.  One-on-one training helps build the specific deficits of each player far more quickly and effectively then a group session.

So, how can we afford one-on-one training for technology in schools?  The reality is, it’s not widely viable.  We need a way that personalises the content for each teacher and the level that they’re at.  A system that, when needed, will slow down and go back to basics for specific skill deficits and will accelerate and challenge the areas where there are power users.  It’s a familiar problem faced by classroom teachers but seems more amplified amongst a cohort of teacher’s differing technology skills.  

All iNewsletter users will be getting a redesign preview screen on Monday 4 May.

This redesigned preview screen allows newsletter creators to now preview how the newsletter will look on the mobile and as an email.

As always, if you have any questions email us at [email protected]

Should high school internet be open?  Entering Year 7 for the first time is an overwhelming period.  Lots of responsibility and accountability is thrust upon you.  It also comes with a healthy dose of freedom and anonymity in the (usually) larger secondary systems.  It stands to reason that with that freedom comes access to many learning tools and resources.  The internet is one big tool and resource.  If we’re to close some of the pipes, how does that affect a students experience?  

Students and staff in school should have the freedom to innovate and experiment where possible, without permission, gatekeepers or roadblocks.  High school is about learning, but it’s also about preparing yourself for the world.  A world where the unexpected can happen. Where you will fail, embarrass yourself and fall down.  But that’s ok! It’s precisely the role schools to help kids get back up, build their confidence and forge an identity for themselves.  It’s better that they stumble across things, waste time and make mistakes on the internet at school where there is support and guidance, rather than when they’re alone and making sense of the big world.

Today we are excited to announce a completely redesigned email digest coming to all new iNewsletter users on Monday 27 April 2015.

This new email digest features a more visually appealing layout that fits in with the visual aesthetic in the rest of the iNewsletter. We’ve made it easier and clearer for your community to get a snapshot of what’s in the newsletter, and get the information most relevant to them. We’ve also made the layout more photo driven, because content with photos increases engagement by 87%.

The email digest is also a bit ‘smarter’ and will only include pages with more engaging content. Many schools feature an ‘Upcoming Events’ page, and previously this page displayed poorly in the digest. Now, we jump straight to pages that will be of most interest to your readers.

If you have any feedback for the new look digest we’d love to hear it! As always you can email us at [email protected], or use the blue support bar at the bottom of the iNewsletter app.

A great online presence is one of the most important assets a school can hold in 2015. According to http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-marketing-strategy photos increased total interactions of the top 10% of posts on social media by a whopping 87%! Whilst this statistic relates to social media, the theory behind it can be applied to all forms of a school’s online presence.

Think about the last time you read a a great article. It most likely was not a huge slab of text, but probably included some photos that related to the article. It is human nature to feel daunted when we see a huge slab of text. The same applies for when your creating content for your school community. Your school community are far more likely to read an article if it is accompanied by a photo - even more so if it is accompanied by multiple photos.

Next time you’re creating some online content try this little trick to increase community engagement.

During the last week of the holidays I had the privilege to attend a unique masterclass experience that bought state, independent and private school IT leaders into the same room.  It was all encompassing from entire school systems to single schools being represented.  Some were struggling and others well down the path getting great results with technology.  A few common themes emerged throughout the day around success and change.

Firstly, it's hard.  There is no getting around it, working with small or large teams trying to move the needle with technology is difficult.  There are so many reasons to give up and say no, from privacy issues, to technology just not working.  The schools and systems that have managed to change all had two similar stories.

Firstly, communicate clearly and consistently.  Each leader was delivering their message of change consistently at every level of leadership in the organisation.  They were participative about the process giving all staff a time for input and to air their concerns and ultimately made a decision that had weathered all points of view.  

The second was about finding your own path through small steps.  All the organisations in the room had vastly different systems, utilised in very different ways.  For example, a college with a large vocational training program would not expect to utilise the same systems in the same way as a strictly academic college.  Each school knows its own culture, so it's important to let the culture guide the decision making - that's where small steps are very telling.  Many schools started by tackling the internet connection, followed by the wireless coverage, followed by some training around Google Apps.  No schools did it all at once, because it's damaging and risky to change everything overnight.  Having to time to assess and make course corrections is essential to making sure your school’s culture matches the technology solution.

The people who got it right didn't do so from luck.  It's hard work accommodating personalities, community needs, and grinding away with constant setbacks.  Most of them are not natural born leaders with the ability to inspire great change. They are, for the most part, supremely determined and don’t stop until they get the best results for their community.

Newsletter statistics are finally launching!  And they come with a fancy new Library and Dashboard view.

We've revamped the Library view to bring it into line with the rest of the iNewsletter product.  The Dashboard is now far easier to navigate and only shows you the things your care about.  Check out the screenshot:

The big new here is the stats!  This has been our most requested feature over the past 12 months and it's finally here!  You can now analyse and understand your readership like never before. Check out each newsletter's total readers, the average time parents are spending in the newsletter and a breakdown of device type.

All of this goodness is coming this Monday 20th of October, make sure you let us know how you find it!

Yesterday we launched a new version of our text editor for iNewsletter. This editor addresses a lot of the problems with the previous editor, and features a more sleek and unified design.

To begin with there are now two toolbars instead of one. The first toolbar appears when you click into any of the text areas, such as a heading or an article. This toolbar is context aware, meaning it will only show the buttons that are relevant to what you're currently editing.

On this toolbar you can add all the 'interactive' elements, such as photo galleries, videos, attachments and column breaks. You can also set the colour and family of font for the whole page.

Not sure what a particular button does? Just place your mouse over it to see a tooltip. Our previous toolbar just had icons, with no tooltip, and we received feedback that this was confusing, especially to new users. We fixed this by adding a tooltip when hovering over a toolbar button.

The other toolbar is for formatting text - bold, underline, italics, bullets and numbering, alignment and for inserting hyperlinks. This toolbar only appears when text has been selected, so it should stay out of the way most of the time.

The technology behind this new editor is both simple and advanced. We have not used any off-the-shelf editors and instead opted for writing our own. We researched a lot of commercial and open-source editors, but found most wouldn't be able to do what we wanted to do, or were filled with legacy and bloat. The new editor basically comprises of a plugin manager which supports single-inheritance of plugins, and then each of the plugins do the heavy lifting. It makes heavy use of the Javascript text selection APIs and HTML5 features such as drag and drop.

iNewsletter now features a Use Google Account button to allow new users to sign in using their Google account.

Any users with a Google account are highly recommended to sign up this way as it greatly simplifies the sign up process.

One click creates your account and then simply type in your school name to get started. Easy!

Over the past couple of days we've rolled out some big changes to make iNewsletter faster and more reliable. These changes take effect immediately so you can enjoy the improvements right away.

We've completely overhauled the publishing process to make it more reliable and faster. Previously when the Publish button was clicked an API call was made to the server which would run through a list of tasks: cache the newsletter, send out email notifications, post a Facebook update etc. If any of these tasks failed there would be no record of it failing. Also, if one of these tasks took a while to complete it would hold up the user, who was waiting for the newsletter to finish publishing.

We've implemented a task queue using Celery and Redis. This allows us to execute tasks asynchronously. Instead of waiting for one task to finish before executing the next task, they can all run at the same time. You'll notice when you publish a newsletter now it takes less than two seconds. Caching the newsletter, sending the emails, posting a Facebook update and posting a Twitter tweet are all done at the same time allowing the user to continue using iNewsletter. Also, if any of these tasks throw an error, we will be emailed of the details of the error straight away, so we can look into what the issue was.

Another improvement we've made is caching and minifying our Javascript. Previously, all the javascript for a particular page was concatenated into one file, and then served to the client. This required significant server time to generate the javascript (sometimes up to 1 second) before it could be sent to the client. And this happened on every single page requested!

We're now caching all the javascript in the database so that when a client requests javascript for a particular page, the app can just retrieve it from the database without having to go to disk. We're also minifying our javascript with Google's Closure Compiler so it will download even quicker.

Another change we've made is to the way a newsletter is cached. When you publish a newsletter, it is compiled into one HTML file and stored on Amazon S3. Then, when the newsletter is requested our server retrieves the file off S3 and serves it. The biggest problem with this method is that Amazon S3 is not designed for low latency. It is great for storing static files such as images and CSS, but it is not great a serving them fast - not as fast as a database. We now store the compiled newsletter in the database, so instead of our server retrieving it off Amazon S3, it retrieves it from our database.

One final change we've made is we've mirrored our Amazon S3 buckets with Amazon Cloudfront, so downloading images from any location in the world should be even faster.

We're really excited to introduce a brand new way to navigate pages.  

Now, instead of using the contents page to jump to a page, you can navigate to any page using a list of thumbnails underneath the page.  This change means quicker, more direct navigation for your newsletters.  Part of the change also means removing the contents page.  Any extra information listed in the contents page will need to be moved to another page within your design.

Some important info about this change:

Takes affect first thing on Friday 4th April.

Old newsletters won't be affected, those issues will still contain a contents page and new issues created beyond Friday 4th April will feature the new navigation.

Cloned issues won't include a contents page and will benefit from the new navigation under each page

Please get in touch if you have any concerns or questions, we're here to help!

Thanks,

Yep, we did it.  Michael Bates and me (Blake Seufert), built a social network in just 5 days.  Some said it couldn’t be done, and they may have been right.

Before we had this idea to write an app in 5 days we’d always wanted to explore the idea of creating a social network.  To us, it makes sense that the future of social media would be in “micro” social networks. Networks for fashion, networks for astronomy enthusiasts etc.  Similar to the various communities or pages that exist on Facebook or Google+, we believe that these networks will graduate into their own “micro social networks”.

Only after reading ‘Execute’ by Josh Long and Drew Wilson did we think seriously about building an app in 5 days. We both liked the idea of achieving something huge in a small amount of time.  Taking any longer than 5 days would be impractical for our busy schedules, so we carved out 5 days in our January holidays and put everything else aside.  We were going to build a micro social network for fashion: it sounded like a lot of fun that would be easy to implement, maintain and be some fun for the holidays.

Fun it was!

So we began - after organising an office, a film crew, a teaser website, Facebook page, and hosting we set off with high ambitions.  In true Australian style the weather baked us, and the enormity of the task shook us. The sheer stress of pulling it off start to show.  The days were filled with on the spot decision making and the glorious feeling of fast progress.  When an issue bogged us down, the pressure to overcome it was enormous. One or two issues that sucked up too much time would mean not finishing.  That said, we excelled, pushed our limits and had a great time doing it.

For how it all unfolded, you can read our daily updates over at our blog: http://www.quinella.co/

The Big Lessons

Time

In the 5 days we really managed our time well - we were mindful of getting stuck or spending too much time on one task.  We knew pulling late nights to stick to the plan was imperative.  We should have been more realistic about the time it was going to take to build all the mechanics of a social network (following, friending, commenting etc).  This stuff took up so much time and didn’t really add “value”, just feature parity to other products.  We should have backed ourselves to follow another idea path and not play it so safe.

Communication

We both knew when to throw each other work and we kept on the same page about the most difficult problems.  Without our cool heads and constant feedback we wouldn’t have made it through.  

Underestimation & Confidence

Whilst we were confident we could get it done, we should have had the confidence to rescope our idea, or picked a totally different idea that doesn’t have all the nuances of a social network.  We wanted to build a whole lot more features, like photo filters and fix some of the bigger bugs (like picking existing photos without them being “squashed”). The photo taking and storing side of things really took a lot more time than we anticipated.  Cost was another factor - running this project with its web service costs money and we decided early on we wanted the app to be free.  It was unclear how much the hosting would set us back, but as it’s turned out, it’s too much.

Design & Differentiation

We came up with a rather fresh take on a “feed” view where you swipe fullscreen left to right to view your feed.  You can tap to see the overlay of information: it works well, feels natural and overall we’re quite proud of it. But looking back, we feel we should have introduced something more fresh and radical to really separate us.

Think Big, Start Smaller

We were thinking too big - writing an entire social network in just 5 days is insane.  Where we went wrong was trying to do too much.  We have to start smaller, much much smaller.

Where to from here

Building something like this in 5 days is exhilarating, stressful but ultimately a lot of fun.  We loved the challenge, but we have to be realistic.  Because it was created so quickly the app has bugs, and fixing them doesn’t really seem like #Appin5days anymore.  It seems like we’re building a business around a social network.  The problem being, neither Michael nor myself have the understanding of how to market and launch a social network.  We’re not from the fashion industry or have any contacts to leverage in any way.  It doesn’t make business sense to continue and we have to focus on the projects where we impact the world in the biggest way possible.

So with a heavy heart we have to shut down Onme.  It’s been a crazy ride; thanks to EVERYONE who supported us, encouraged us or just liked our page!  We loved doing this and hope that the experiment can stand as a resource and an example of what can be achieved in any budget, in any timeline.