We’re celebrating our third birthday! Here’s a live video feed so that community members who aren’t in San Francisco can still be there.
Watch live video from slideshare on Justin.tv

Over the weekend, we’ve been getting reports of visitors to slideshare getting popups that say “your computer is unsecure”.  Naturally, we cancelled our weekend plans, rolled up our sleeves, and started looking for potential security issues with our servers, our javascript, our advertising .. everything.  At 5PM Sunday we figured out what the problem was (it was an advertisement, as we had suspected).

At this point we are 99.99% sure we have fixed the problem.  We apologize to anyone who was effected by this. We are rolling out processes to make sure that this never happens again.  If anyone sees anything suspicious please email me at jon AT slideshare DOT com.

Thanks to everyone who sent us feedback email! Realtime information from numerous SlideShare users was what helped us to identify the problem.

A great story about presentation design gone wild from the Onion:

CHARLOTTE, NC—Sources at Cobalt Media confirmed Tuesday that the wow factor—an intangible set of viscerally pleasing features that instill onlookers with a feeling of exhilaration and intense interest—was successfully added to this Thursday’s upcoming PowerPoint presentation, entitled “New Ideas For Integrating Social Media Into Product Marketing“.

Members of the group told reporters that, prior to the wow factor’s insertion, the presentation was lacking in both sizzle and pop. These necessary dynamics, along with punch, were integrated by adding more than 30 “flip left” slide transitions, replacing basic blue backgrounds with a more colorful aurora borealis template, and inserting an audio element featuring the Smash Mouth song “Walkin’ On The Sun.”

During an 11th-hour meeting about how to push the wow factor even further, the 12-person presentation team also made the breakthrough decision to replace normal bullet points with miniature Cobalt company logos.

We celebrated April Fools Day with a little prank:   views on your presentations have an extra two zeros on them. We hope you find this funny. Your views will be rolled back to normal in a few hours.

You can see tweets about this prank on twitter … we asked people to mark their tweets with #bestofslideshare in an email we sent out.

We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.

Update: We’ve always loved our users and will continue to do so in future, the joke notwithstanding. If our prank upset you, we’re sorry.

Update Again: Actual view counts have now been restored. Its all over and back to normal!

Please check out SlideShare CEO’s follow-up post : Lessons learned from an April Fool’s prank

On Sunday night we moved all the servers that run SlideShare to a new hosting location. It was something that we had been planning for a few months, but these kinds of operations are always high-stress and high-risk. We’re sorry about the downtime. Fortunately, the move seems to have gone pretty well (besides the planned 90 minutes of downtime). Please let us know if you notice anything wonky in the comment section below, and we’ll fix it.

The biggest glitch was that moving the hosting location from California to Texas changed the timezone that the servers operate in. Now why didn’t we think of that? Fortunately this didn’t cause any major problems though, just a few funny glitches in our code.

We’re also really happy with our new host. Softlayer has clearly invested a lot of money in automating all their processes, and in writing a high-quality web application to control the whole thing. As a result:
1) You can order a machine on the web and get access to it in under two hours
2) You can add a hardware firewall or load balancer to your setup on-the-fly with zero downtime and zero human intervention from SoftLayer.
3) You can have an OS reinstall without human intervention: it’s always ready in less than an hour, and it’s always flawless..
4) You have a clear view of all your servers (including their hardware profile) and their status (CPU and RAM use, termperature, etc)

Because getting, reimaging, and controlling machines is so fast and convenient, SoftLayer has a lot of the flexibility of a virtual solution (like Amazon EC2 or similar). But you’re not renting a virtual server, you’re renting a real one. That’s important if you need big, powerful database machines (which we did). Our new database machines have 32 Gigs of RAM each, and 8 15k RPM SCSI drives in a RAID-10 array. That’s serious power! We hope this will be enough to keep SlideShare running fast as we scale up. ;->

We’re lucky in that we already had automated the configuration of most of our servers using a tool called Puppet, so we had code for setting up copies of our existing servers. The fact that we knew we were going to move spurred us on to automate all the rest of our servers the same way. So now our operations crew will be able to spend less time doing maintenance and firefighting, and more time working on new ideas. We try to automate any maintenance and configuration tasks that we do, and we’re really happy that our new host shares this philosophy.

LinkedIn just launched a platform (see techcrunch post and linkedin blog post), and SlideShare is one of the first apps to go live! We have been working on this app for several months, and it is very exciting for us to see it working on the LinkedIn site. Here’s a video of our CEO Rashmi Sinha demoing the app:

SlideShare for LinkedIn lets you share slides with your network on LinkedIn, see slides from others on your network, and post comments on slides. It’s almost like a mini-SlideShare within LinkedIn. This is a powerful way to share expertise with your network on LinkedIn.

One really cool thing for existing SlideShare users is that linking your accounts is really easy, and if you do so all your SlideShare presentations will automatically appear in your LinkedIn profile.

Everyone at SlideShare pitched in, but special thanks to the core team (Gaurav, Kapil, Ashwan, Vineet,) who did an amazing job and pulled several all-nighters in the final stages of this project. They are monitoring the servers carefully right now. We’ll all be listening hard to feedback from our users over the next few days.

Special thanks to LinkedIn folk Jamie Templeton and Taylor Singletary for all the support they gave us on their awesome new app platform!

Go install the SlideShare app on LinkedIn!

Amazon S3, the service that we use to host slideshows, images, and PowerPoint files, is almost completely down this morning. This is causing sections of slideshare.net to not work. For example, uploaded files are not converting, and the slideshow player that you use to view slideshows isn’t loading.

This is effecting many many sites (here’s a nice blog post from SmugMug, for example). I’m confident that they’ll restore service soon … it’s been about two hours so far. You can keep track of Amazon Web Services status here. I’ll post here again when service has been successfully restored.

Uploads are not being lost: they will be converted once the S3 problem has been resolved.

Update 7.30 PM PST:: Amazon S3 outage is over. SlideShare conversion and other parts of the services are back up now.