The Shyahi Blog

Having hard time to decide which movie to watch tonight. Get MovieTabs from chrome webstore; a perfect way to discover new movies and revisit the old ones. Each time you open a new tab, it will present you with wallpaper from a movie, giving you not just aesthetic pleasure but an idea for what to watch this evening.

Get the MovieTabs Chrome Extension—it’s free.

It also links the movies with their IMDB page and Amazon Instant Video.

Today, we’re introducing a completely new experience for enjoying 2048 game on your iPhone. With the 2nd version of our 2048 game, you will now see that there is an option to play against other players in a multiplayer match. We have put a lot of thought and time in trying to come up with a good gameplay experience for this multiplayer mode. 

You can choose to start a new multiplayer match with a randomly chosen opponent or invite your friends to play with. The game is played on a single board shared between both the players who take turns to play. The score of a player is computed by the number on the tiles that the player merges when playing his turn. The game ends when there are no moves remaining or someone reaches the 2048 tile. At this point, the player with the highest score wins the game. 

So what are you waiting for, get the app from the AppStore now and start competing with your friends. We promise, it will be fun! 

It gives us great pleasure to share with you that we will be releasing famous #2048game on iOS. We have been working hard on developing this game for iPhone since it released for the web. 

For those who don't know what 2048game is, it is an addictive puzzle game. with a very simple goal, reach 2048 by joining tiles. Our iPhone version is inspired from the game 2048 available here.

We will keep you posted about the iOS app on our blog. While you are waiting, why don't you sign up at http://2048.shyahi.com to be the first to know when it is on the AppStore. Here are some screenshots in case you are curious: 

Vizify is going away. Vizify transformed the way how information can be represented to something so beautiful and personal. The incredible team at Vizify set a great example on how the information from social media that we consume on a daily basis can be used to build something that stands out. We are sorry to see them go, but its been a great effort on their part and we would like to congratulate them on this success. 

For Vizify users, we would be glad to introduce you to Shyahi, a new way to build your single page profile that includes information from all your social media networks. Its free, easy to set up and pulls in your stats directly from Facebook, Linkedin, Dribbble, Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter and your blog feed which means that your Shyahi profile is always up to date. You can even add your skills and a more formal resume to your Shyahi profile. 

And, its super simple to set everything up. Create a new account for free, head over to settings to connect your social networks and you are ready.

Today, we are excited to introduce the new Facebook and LinkedIn widgets for your Shyahi profiles. 

Over the last few months, we have had several new users from different fields and we want to make Shyahi useful for everyone. Facebook and LinkedIn widgets are a step towards it. 

Help people learn more about you with our all new Facebook and LinkedIn widgets. Update your settings and connect your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles with Shyahi to get started. 

Here's a quick look at the new widgets. Hope you like them.

Don't have a Shyahi profile? Its easy to sign up. 

Most of us are at a point now where we have so many social media profiles all over the web that it’s hard to keep track. Shyahi acts as a central location for all your online activity. Setting up social accounts on Shyahi is easy and requires only the username/id for the respective social account.

Shyahi also guides you while you setup your account by showing an example for the different social accounts. Note that you only have to fill the field marked in bold in the example provided. 

Here's an image showing how your settings should look like.

Designing an optimized landing page isn't exactly a cakewalk. We made several mistakes with our initial version of the landing page. The first and the most important thing that we have learned with these mistakes is to put yourself as a third person while designing/evaluating the page. We know that we wouldn't be evaluating the page in the first place (it should be the users), but this wasn't a luxury that we had given that it was the first thing we ever launched and didn't have a big budget.

Based on the comments and feedback that we received on HackerNews and Reddit during our first ShowHN post, we have tried to fix many of the key points from our initial version of the landing page and are very excited to have the fresh new look with improved navigation. We wanted the page to better convey what we do for you and how it can be helpful.

Here's an annotated version of our original landing page if you don't feel like reading through all the text ahead. 

The first thing was to get rid of the big signup block and put the value proposition statement right up front on the landing page. We also had just two screenshots which were both very similar and didn't add much value to our product. This has now been replaced with targeted screenshots showing details about widgets that could be added on the Shyahi profile. 

The next mistake we made was to hide the supported services inside a big block of text. We have only a few seconds to get a user's attention and if he doesn't see something that he is already familiar with, he is not staying. Another mistake was that we pushed the most important informations below the first fold. Scrolling isn't bad, but the space that a visitor sees without scrolling is the most important part of a page and we didn't have much there.

And now, our new landing page. Take a look: 

You can also take a look at our new website here. We know that this is far from perfect. But we can only hope to get closer with each iteration. Let us know what you think of this in the comments. 

Join the discussion on HackerNews and Reddit (/r/web_design; /r/webdev).

A month ago, we launched Shyahi. Beyond learning the in’s and out’s of launching a startup, over the last few months while developing Shyahi we also learned that every small business needs a toolbox for efficiency. Below are some free tools that we used to put Shyahi together.

Heroku: The first on the list is Heroku, a cloud application platform. With Heroku, you don’t need to think about servers at all. Its been really easy to work with Heroku, they have excellent support and the free tier works great for the beginning with relatively low traffic. There are some quirks with Nodejs deployment on Heroku, but once you get around those, its very easy to push new updates and deploy new versions, specially if you are already using Git for version management.

BitBucket: We use BitBucket by Atlassian for source code management and revision control. There have been several comparisons between BitBucket and Github and while Github is still the leader for open source code storage, BitBucket isn't far behind specially in terms of the capabilities of the platform. And it provides free private repositories with limited number of users which is perfect for small startups like ours. 

MongoHQ: After taking care of revision control and application deployment, the next thing we looked at was hosting the database and the obvious choice here: MongoHQ. Its really quick to get an account, create production and development instances for database and its one of the fastest and most optimized install of MongoDB available. It provides a smooth path to grow the database and have a free plan available for relatively small databases. 

Ink File Picker: Handling file uploads for a web app is a mess. This is where File Picker comes in. It takes out all the pain from file uploads and provides a wonderful api for handling them. Even better, it comes with builtin support for files on Facebook, Instagram, Evernote, and many others. It also provides a very simple way to perform post-processing on the uploads, including image resizing, cropping, and converting. All this on a free plan (with limited number of uploads per month). Perfect!

Amazon S3: File Picker automatically stores files to their servers for upto a limit. But as the storage starts increasing, we need to move the files from their servers to a different storage service. It makes this really easy by integrating with S3 to allow storing the uploads to your Amazon S3 account. Again, there's a free tier available on Amazon S3 to get started for small companies.

Google Analytics: Does this need a description?

DNS services: All apps on Heroku are accessible via their herokuapp.com app subdomain. In order to allow custom domains, we have to create a DNS mapping from our domain to herokuapp. We first used Zerigo because it comes free for a limited number of queries per month and is easy to setup with Heroku. However, we randomly encountered weird Sinatra errors that prevented the user's from signing up. We now use Amazon Route 53 which isn't free but pretty cheap. Requires a slightly more involved process to set up with Heroku but it has been working without any bugs ever since we switched to it. 

Email: Google Apps isn't free anymore. The next best option that we could think of was windows live domains for hosting our email accounts. Its free too. Easy to setup and the UI for outlook.com isn't bad too.

Buffer: You want to keep your social media updated with great posts. This is where buffer fits in. You can queue posts up and connect multiple accounts on  Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, App.net and Google Plus and it will post them automatically at predefined times. 

Evernote: The more you add, the more useful Evernote becomes. We use it for organizing the tasks, managing lists for marketing, future features etc. Everything about Shyahi is in our notebook on Evernote. Sharing notebooks (with write permissions) isn't free, but you can use the same account on multiple systems and it works just fine (with occasional conflicts).

This is our Startup Toolbox at Shyahi — what do you use?

If you like what you see, we encourage you to sign up for the RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Social media is everywhere. In the job market, most of the focus has been on formal resumes that chronologically list experiences, projects and achievements. On an average a recruiter spends just over 6 seconds reading a resume. One of the most common problems with resume is even when your achievements are outstanding, it may still look and read like hundreds of others. 

In today's job market you need a resume that speaks about you, tells a story and shows what you are really capable of.

A resume is a career story that tells the who, what, when, where, why and how YOU (the career job seeker) do what you do, and then connects the value of all that to its target reader (the hiring decision-maker).

You can give your resume a social advantage and make it stand out from others using Shyahi. Its really easy to build and it pulls in our activity automatically which means that you never have to worry about updating it later. 

You don't have to believe what we say. The advantage of having a social resume has been discussed, analyzed and presented several times at several places. 1 billion names are Googled every day. 75% of HR departments are required to research candidates online. You have to face it - If Google doesn't know you, you can't expect recruiters to easily find what you have to offer. 

Forbes

We’re seeing more and more recruiters use the web as a place to search for talent and conduct employment background searches. This trend is set to increase year over year and I’ve been predicting that an “online presence search” will become as common as a drug test since 2007.

...

You can’t find jobs traditionally anymore. Your online presence communicates, or should communicate, what you’re truly and genuinely passionate about.

Mashable 

Your resume is boring. How do you expect to stand out in a crowd of job seekers when your black-and-white, list-formatted resume and formulaic cover letter blend with all the rest?

Glassdoor

It used to be that having a slick resume and some nice letterhead was all a job seeker needed to get an interview. Not anymore. The web has become more important in every facet of our lives, to the point that it can even affect a job search. In other words, if you’re a job seeker, you need to think about how your profile is appearing online, and what the search engines are saying about you to future employers.

The New York Times

“So setting up a Web site strictly for job hunting,” he says, “can be an especially good idea for consultants and people in creative fields like advertising who want to describe numerous projects they’ve worked on.”

It had been more six months of working occasionally on Shyahi and we were at a point where we were thinking of launching soon. But with the long list of todos, we were getting pushed on again and again. And then we read this:

“You know what, screw it, let’s launch.”

And so we launched with a post on HN. Made it to the front page for a few hour. Not a great launch that we expected but certainly not a bad one either. It was a start. The fact that it made it to the front page meant that we had something good.

On we went to reddit and cross posted it to /r/startups, /r/entrepreneur and /r/SideProject/. Got a moderately good launch on reddit as well and had some good feedback and comments.

For us, launching our first web app ever, this was one of the most exciting moments we've had. We were glued to our Google Analytics dashboard and Heroku logs pushing out bug fixes. And then something happened. We broke the Google Analytics script while pushing a bug fix. It was a while until we realized something was wrong. So, a few minutes of analytics gone, no big deal.

Then we noticed another thing. Our sign-ups were shockingly less for the number of visitors we were having. We got a report later in the night about a weird Sinatra error showing up while signing up. This was strange as we were using Nodejs and our implementation was nowhere near Sinatra. We immediately got on it, traced it back to Heroku and then to Zerigo. That's when we knew we were screwed. If it was with the DNS configuration, it isn't going to propagate quickly enough which means that users will keep on seeing this for the next 24 hours. We made a switch to Route53 and after a day, everything was back to normal.

Here's what we learned from our launch

Don't take forever to launch working on the never ending todo list. Launch, fix, launch again...

Expect to get more than a thousand visitors an hour when you launch. But if you don't, that's not the end of the road.

Always be prepared. Be ready to scale quickly. Heroku was a perfect fit for us.

Make sure nothing is wrong with your DNS configuration. We had a bug with sign up and had to wait for up to 24 hours for the fix to propagate everywhere which lost us a good number of potential users.

Fix the issues raised during the launch, do more marketing, reach out to more users.