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.

Ever heard of Chris Anderson’s long tail? Someone did the analysis and found that SlideShare presentations have a long tail. What this means in a nutshell is that “there is little chance to be a blockbuster on Slideshare, but that you can quite easily attract a significant audience.” Go here for the original post

When you invite someone to join an event or a group on SlideShare, an email goes out to them to confirm their acceptance.

Unfortunately, this simple act almost blew up in our faces thanks to an elementary mistake in interface design.

With the constructive feedback, we’ve now changed the content of the email to also include a link to the group or event too.

We are psyched to bring to you The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008, SlideShare’s attempt to uncover the Global Presentation Superheroes for 2008. This is a sequel to last year’s contest, and it is bigger and better this time.

There are loads on prizes on offer: First prize- MacBook Air, Second prize- Amazon Kindle and Third prize- iPod Nano. There are six categories and each category winner gets an iPod Touch. Then there are honorable mentions, each of which gets a copy of the book, Presentation Zen. And all winners receive certificates from SlideShare. Check out the contest announcer preso below.

Here are the contest rules and the contest entries.

You can enter your presentation in the contest and people around the world will vote on it. Your presentation could be about anything you love or care for. It will have to be put under one of these categories -  Business, Education, Technology, Picture slideshows, Creative/Offbeat & About me. The top voted entries will be nominated to our panel of judges, who will decide the winners. And our judges are the who’s who of the presentation world.

Guy Kawasaki- who does not know him ??  VC, marketing superbrain, presentation guru, entrepreneur, author and most important for us, on the SlideShare advisory board.

Garr Renyolds- presentation design rockstar, author of the blog & book Presentation Zen, popular speaker and consultant.

Nancy Duarte- she runs Duarte Design, a global leader in business presentations and best known for having worked with Nobel Laureate & Former US Presidential candidate Al Gore to develop the presentation that became the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Bert Decker- head of Decker Communications, author and ace business presentation coach, he has been on NBC’s Today Show many times as their communications expert, often commenting on the Presidential debates.

The contest ends on July 31 and the results will be announced one week later.

Screenshot of the details page below

So what are you waiting for? Rush to enter your preso… this could win you a shining MacBook Air, apart from building up your presentation credentials.

And let us know how you liked the contest, specially its stunning black theme, that Arun (our designer) has labored so hard to create.

Three beautiful ladies have joined the Slideshare server cluster.

Sushmita- Sushmita is a Dual Core, 1.8 GHZ machine with 3 Gigs of RAM. She was crowned Miss Universe in 1994 and started her career in modelling before moving on to Bollywood (thats where most Indian actresses come from these days). She is best known for her roles in Hindi blockbusters like ‘Biwi No1′ (1999) and ‘Main Hoon Na’ (2004). You can see her in action on Slideshare as Sushmita-ss.

Amisha- Amisha is also a Dual Core, 1.8 GHZ machine with 3 Gigs of RAM. She is best known for the super-hit movie that launched her in 2000, ‘Kaho Na Pyar Hai’. Her slideshare identity is Amisha-ss.

Vidya- Vidya’s vital stats are ditto- Dual Core, 1.8 GHZ machine with 3 Gigs of RAM. She is from Kerela (India’s southern-most state) and has two super hits to her credit- ‘Parineeta’ in 2005 & ‘Lagey Raho, Munna Bhai’ in 2006. She is currently one of Bollywood’s hottest stars. If you see Vidya-ss on the bottom of a slideshare page, you know its Vidya who is serving you.

For those who came in late, our movie crazy engineers have named the Slideshare servers after Bollywood (Indian movies) film actresses.

Please join me in welcoming Sushmita, Amisha & Vidya to the SlideShare family. They should add considerable firepower to our cluster.

We have been received a few emails about Slideshare full screen not working. Now, thanks to one of our users we learnt that the latest Firefox Alpha release (Firefox 3) is blocking Slideshare full screen. If you are having problems viewing full screen, please check your popup blockers. If there is any other browser/toolbar that is blocking Slideshare full screen, please add a comment here - this will help out other users.

Thanks and keep on sharing!

There’s a nice little writeup about slideshare in the amazon web services blog. We’ve been super-happy using Amazon S3 to host slideshows… it has saved us a ton of money AND time, which is a nice (and unusual) combination.

You might be aware from this earlier post, that our movie crazy engineers have named the Slideshare servers after Bollywood (Indian film industry) film actresses. I take this opportunity to welcome three more to the cluster. They are being added to our backend, as we open SlideShare to users from today. Meet them here -

Esha is a Pentium 4 machine with 2 Gigs of RAM. She is the daughter of the famous Bollywood actress Hema Malini and came into limelight with the release of the blockbuster Dhoom in 2004.

Katrina is a Celeron machine with 2 Gigs of RAM. She is a model turned actress and is more famous for being the girlfriend of Salman Khan– a famous Bollywood actor.

Udita is again a Celeron machine with 2 Gigs of RAM. She is also a model turned actress (as are most Indian actresses these days) and she burst on the scene with the movie Zeher.

Please join me in welcoming Esha, Katrina, and Udita to the SlideShare family. They should add considerable firepower to our cluster.