WE HEART BLOG

New layout, new features

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:18:00 -0400

You may have noticed that a few days ago we’ve changed the layout a little bit, but that wasn’t all we’ve done. We’ve been working on many different things and I’d like to let you know about what’s already available.

New Layout

Let’s start with the most obvious one. We’ve improved the overall look and feel of the site, added more space between the images and the different elements are more consistent between pages.

What are my Friends hearting?

The Friends link used to be hidden inside Explore, so to see your friends updates you have to first click Explore and then Friends. Well, not anymore, it’s now right there on the main menu bar, and you can even see how many unseen images are there while on another page.

The menu bar has another new link, it’s called “More”. There you can see our about page, download the Heart Button for your browser, get some goodies for your site, go to our help pages, and view our blog.

More from the same source

On the image page you can see not only the page where the image was originaly found, but you can see more images hearted from that same site. So if you like an image and want to more from that same artist, brand or blog, you do that easily by clicking the source link.

Privacy

There’s a new option on your Account Settings, it’s called Privacy. There you can choose to hide your account from friends search. That means when people try to find their friends by email, Twitter or Facebook, your account won’t appear to them.

And you can also protect your profile. That way people will only be able to follow you and see your hearts if you allow them to.

Block user

If for some reason you don’t like a user, or don’t want them to be following you, you can block them. This will make the user unfollow you and won’t allow them to follow you again.

Animated Gifs

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:14:40 -0400

Before this week, when you hearted an animated gif from another site we converted it to a static image. Many of you wrote us asking that gifs remained animated, and we couldn’t agree more.

I’m happy to say that now We Heart It is a gif-friendly site! When you heart an animated gif it will now keep it’s animation.

We’ll display a play button over the image thumbnail, so you know that is not a simple static image. When you click the thumbnail and open the image page, you’ll the full size animated version of the gif.

Why display a play button on thumbnails?

Having animated thumbnails can be really distracting. Sure it’s ok when there’s one or two, but the whole page jumping up and down can get annoying after a while.

Why some gifs have animated thumnails then?

This was a small glitch we had for a while, and gifs hearted during that time remained animated. This is now fixed.

Badges! Promote your heart

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 09:27:00 -0400

We see many posts on Facebook and Twitter of people sharing the link to their We Heart It page, so their friends can see the latest images they’ve hearted, and follow them.

Thinking of that we came up with image badges. We’ll generate for you an image with your latest hearts or any set you have, and you can post it to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, or any other site you can post an image.

Promote your heart page, show your friends what you’ve been hearting, and get more followers!

Halloween costume ideas

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:53:53 -0300

I am really excited for Halloween, I’ve been searching for Halloween costume ideas on We Heart It like crazy and hearting my favorites.

So I created a set just for them, that way I can keep hearting everything I like and easily get back to my costume ideas set later as the day approaches.

Other users have done the same thing, and here are some of the best halloween and costumes sets for you to enjoy:

What is going to be your halloween costume? Leave a comment below :)

Log in with Facebook or Twitter

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:43:41 -0300

The internet today is social, and We Heart It is no different. It’s always better to share your new findings and inspiration with your friends, and see what they are up to.

If you are a We Heart It user already, you can easily find your friends from Facebook, Twitter and Gmail that are also on We Heart It and follow them.

Now we have something new. If your account is linked with Facebook or Twitter and you’re not logged in on We Heart It, you don’t have to type your username and password to login anymore, you can just click the “log in with…” button and we will log you in, like magic!

And if you love We Heart It but didn’t create your own account yet, what are you waiting for? Join with Facebook or Twitter with a single click, no need to create password and all that trouble. You can follow all your friends automatically and start with a more complete account.

Post new images to your heart

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:17:00 -0300

Every image on We Heart It has a little heart button over it that you can click to save the image to your heart. Now you can also add this special Heart Button to your browser and use it to heart images from any other website.

We’ve created browser extensions for the most used browsers among our visitors: Safari, Chrome and Firefox. If you use one of these you can download the extension for it on http://weheartit.com/heart-button.

When you install it, you’ll see our heart shaped button on your browser bar, it will be there for every site you visit. So when you’re on a site and see a beautiful image you want to add to your heart, just click this button.

The button will scan the current page for images and add a pink border around them. Move your mouse over the image, add some tags to describe it, and save it on your heart.

Search! Search! Search!

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:31:49 -0300

Do you like spending time on We Heart It, searching for things you like, finding amazing images to heart and share with your friends?

We do too and we have some great news for you! We’ve just improved our search and it’s amazing, you have to test it.

Improved search results

Let’s play a game, look to your right, then search for the first thing that you see. I hope it’s something interesting! Let’s say for example it’s a Magazine.

Our new search results page will show you the most recent images tagged with Magazine (in our example), just like the search used to be before. So you can search everyday for the things you like and always see new images.

And now there are two new options: Most popular and Best match.

Most Popular

The most hearted images tagged with what you’re searching for. This is great if you’re curious about what other users think is the best image of something.

Best match

See the results we think you’ll like more. Our own mix of the most recent and most popular images, it will give you what we think are the most interesting results for what you’re looking for.

So go crazy searching for everything.

Search multiple tags

Now you can also search for multiple words and tags, for example, if you search for glasses harry potter you’ll get plenty results of images tagged with harry potter and glasses, instead of only getting results for the exact tag “glasses Harry Potter” (that wouldn’t have any result).

This has been one of the top requests from users and we hope you enjoy it :)

Search images within a user’s profile

You’ve hearted an image some time ago, and since then you’ve hearted a lof of things so you have to go back page by page on your profile to find it…

Well, no more! On any user profile there’s a search field that says “search this heart”, type a few words about the image and hit enter. We’ll filter your hearts and show you only the images tagged with those words.

So what do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Auto-Tweet your hearts

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 19:25:00 -0300

You probably have already linked your Facebook account so when you heart something it appears on your Wall. Now you can do the same thing with Twitter!

Go to your settings page and on the right side you’ll see an option to link your Twitter account. After you do that you can choose to auto-post your hearts to Twitter.

How does it work? When you heart an image on the site it will post a tweet for you with a short link to the image page.

Find your Gmail friends

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:37:00 -0300

Now you have another way to find your friends: Searching your Gmail address book!

It’s pretty simple, we’ll compare your address book with the users on We Heart It and try to find which of your friends already have an account on WHI. Then you can choose who you want to follow.

And we do this in a neat way, where we don’t store any of your friends’ email addresses, and we don’t email them, so don’t worry about that.

Sets! Organize your hearts

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:29:00 -0300

Oh, long time since our last update. We’ve been working on quite a few big things lately, and today we’re launching the first of them: Sets.

Sets are groups of images you’ve hearted, organized by a theme. It’s almost like having different profiles for different things you love, but on the same place.

You can have sets for about anything: That new haircut you want to get, your fashion style, decoration ideas for your home, your favorite celebrity photos…

Be creative when you name your sets and invent new ways to organize your hearts. You can also visit your friends’ sets for inspiration.

You can find your sets listed on your Heart page, and you can also create new sets from there. To add images to a set just go to the image page and select the set you’d like to save it in. Also, on every new heart you’ll be asked to choose a set where to heart that image.

Your progress

Wed, 18 May 2011 15:27:27 -0300

When you log in you’ll notice something new. We found out that there are five things you can do to make your heart page more awesome. How many have you done already? I wonder if you can get to 100%… Let us know in the comments!

Complete your registration

When you create an account we only ask for four things: name, username, email and password. But you can complete your heart page with your country, your blog or website, a few words about yourself and your profile picture.

Heart an image on WHI

That’s what We Heart It all about, hearting images and sharing them with your friends. Whether you’re on the home page or on a tag page you can move your mouse over the images you like and click the “heart” icon to save it to your heart page.

Follow your friends

You can find your friends from Facebook and Twitter that are already on We Heart It and follow them to see their latest hearts on the Friends page.

Post a new image

If you found an image that inspires you and you want to save it on your heart, you can! You just need to download our special tool to do that and post the image.

Link up your Facebook account

You can link your We Heart It and Facebook accounts for extra awesomeness! We’ll auto-post your latest hearts once a day to your Facebook wall, making it super easy to share your hearts with your friends.

We Heart Facebook

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:37:00 -0300

Now you can link your We Heart It and Facebook accounts for extra awesomeness! We’ll auto-post your latest hearts once a day to your Facebook wall, making it super easy to share your hearts with your friends.

Ready to start? Click the button bellow:

Want to know more about it? Check you our help page

Find your friends

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:44:05 -0300

Looking for people to follow? What about your friends? It’s really easy to find your friends on WHI now.

You can connect your heart to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. We’ll try to find your friends and show you the ones that already have a WHI account.

When you follow your friends you can see their latests hearts on the Friends tab on the Explore page.

What are your friends hearting?

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:04:00 -0300

Do you know you can follow your friends on We Heart It? It’s the best way to keep track of what people you like are hearting, and discover new things to add to your own heart.

Ask your friends if they have We Heart it, tell them about it if they don’t. Get the whole gang there and follow everyone.

Similar entries

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 21:51:00 -0300

When you add tag to images, they become part of a family of photos. Images of animals, coffee, dresses, sunsets… And in order to help you better navigate these groups we created what we call similar entries.

When you click an image you can see different information on the sidebar. Right on the top you can see other images that share tags in common with the one you’re looking at.

It’s a quick and fun way to spend time on WHI, going from image to image and finding more images similar to what you like.

Related tags

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:03:00 -0300

Tags are awesome. You can search for anything, from “fashion” to “food”, and find amazing images tagged with that word. They describe the image, and translate pixels into information.

Images may have more than one tag, in fact, the more tags the better since you’ll be able to find it more easily. That creates connections between different tags and they start to group with each other.

So now when you’re on a tag page, you’ll see on the sidebar “related tags”. Those are tags that are often used together with the tag you’re looking at right now. It’s a nice way to help you navigate and find more images that may interest you.

Giving the blog another try

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:05:00 -0300

I’ve never considered myself the blogging type. I’m always doing too many things at the same time and it’s hard to take a break to write a post. I’m not that good with words.

That’s why I never had a personal blog, or kept the WHI blog updated. In fact that’s one of the reasons WHI was created, I didn’t want to use a blog to share and organize my favorite images. It just didn’t (still doesn’t) make sense, blogs are for words, and I needed a tool to help me get inspired and find images.

So I’ve used Twitter and Facebook to let you know about what’s new on the site, it’s faster, simpler, and I could go back to work on the site in a few minutes.

But now I feel like I should write a few more lines, explain a little more the new features and what’s going on… I feel the need to re-open this channel so we can communicate better and you have a place to catch up with what we’ve been doing.

So I’m giving the blog another try. I’ll be here more often writing about things related to we heart it.

PS: If you take a look at the older posts you’ll see the last time I posted here was in 2009 (except for the last post in 2010 about one day we had a really ugly outage and I had to explain myself).

Outage on Dec 1st 2010

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:32:00 -0400

We’ve been growing really fast, thanks to our amazing users that come to the site everyday to get their daily dose of inspiration, and share their favorite images from the web using the site.

For that reason we need to constantly upgrade our servers. Having better servers and more servers means that the site can run better and faster for everyone. Just so you get the idea: we have 8 million page views every day, that’s 93 access every second. Can you imagine 93 people passing through the same door at the same time?

So, yesterday (December 1st) we moved our main server to a new hosting company, one of the biggest in the world, in order to have a high level service. To move the data we had to freeze and backup everything, then copy it to the new server, that’s why we were out of service yesterday morning. Which is a great reason to be 2 hours offline. And that’s how long it took, we came back and everything was really fast, many people were happy.

But this morning (December 2nd), something happened. Something really bad. Some crazy inexplicable error affected the main server hard drives, both of them (we have two in case one stops working) and everything was lost.

It took some time to figure out the extent of the problem, we were talking to the hosting company all day trying to fix it. The solution was to reset the server, make it work, and then copy the backup again.

So we lost some data. Basically everything from yesterday. We’re really sorry about that. I mean really sorry. In theory this should never happen, we have backups, and mirror hard drives, and a few other things to prevent that. But it all failed at the same time, that was definitely a lesson for us, we’re never 100% secure.

These things happen, it’s awful. Just like having to print your homework and the printer doesn’t want to work even though everything is fine. We’re still trying to understand what exactly happened, so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again, ever.

Thank you for your patience.

Fabio Giolito & We Heart It Team

hey, do you digg us!?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:04:00 -0400

http://digg.com/design/We_Heart_It_Visual_bookmark_for_everyone

New York Times

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:58:00 -0400

Hey, Jenna Wortham wrote about us on New York Times!!

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/tag-that-image-visual-bookmarking-sites-worth-browsing/

This is really nice. We’re only there because of the amazing images and videos that YOU add!! So thanks a lot!