Lately people have been asking me, "What's up with Ringlight?" There hasn't been much visible activity lately since the beta started in November. However, in the background things are still very much active and you can expect a new release soon.All of my work since November has been in refactoring the Ringlight codebase (both client and server) to increase reliability and scalability. The beta test has been going great. Lots of bugs have been found and all of those bugfixes are going into the refactoring. The new Ringlight will be sleeker, faster, and generally more solid.As soon as I finish the new version of the client and server, I'll start a new beta for the new Ringlight 2.0. Then I'll be able to get back to the web design and marketing side. A lot of people have been asking about the awesome new site desing. Yes it's done and ready to go! That will be part of the new web design phase after Ringlight 2.0 is out.Thanks to all my beta users! I'll let you know when the new code is ready.

A lot has happened with Ringlight lately.I've resigned it to be more focused on private sharing of files and less on web publishing.There is now a premium subscription option which lets you mirror your files onlineEverything which is unfinished or broken has been taken out to prepare for the beta launchThe beta is launching in two days!If you're in Austin, I'd like you to invite you to the beta launch party, which will be this Wednesday, November 5th, from 6-9pm, at Conjunctured.There will be music, beer, food, and lots of nice people from the Austin startup community.If any of the features you love have been removed, send me some feedback and let me know. All of the great features from the past will be reappearing over time. They've just been taken out temporarily so that I can focus on the key elements for the launch. If you let me know that you want something back, I'll put it at the top of the list!Thanks to all my alpha users out there. I couldn't have done it without you, and I hope you enjoy the new beta release. Let's work together to make it awesome!

I've received a lot of feedback from people about the design of the website. I've taken all this feedback to heart and redesigned the website extensively.The most noticeable change is probably the new color scheme. Gone is the old orange website, replaced with a combination of shades of blue which users generally seem to find more appealing. There are also new icons, more text explaining what Ringlight is, more detailed privacy settings information, and some layout changes.What do you think of the new style?The goal is to get more visitors to the website to actually sign up for an account, download the client, and share some files.

The official launch of Ringlight is coming up and in preparation I've been doing some restructing of the site, focusing on core functionality and removing things that weren't working.Something that I here often is that the site is somewhat confusing, with too many options. In order to simplify things, I've removed advanced content management functionality that no one was really using, specifically groups and playlist management. These features might return in the future, but at the moment the focus is on getting all of your files online. Once we have a ton of files indexed, we can think again about organizing them into groups and playlists and such.In the spirit of getting more files online, there are now handy progress bars for the following functions:Upload files from your local web browser to any machine running a Ringlight client.Download files from any website by URL to any Ringlight client. Download files from any Ringlight users to any Ringlight client. If your client is offline, it will start the download whenever both clients are online.Check it out and let me know what you think!

I just added a fun new feature to Ringlight. You can now upload files from any web browser to any computer where you are running the Ringlight client.I often find myself in need of such a feature. I'll be on some computer at the lab or a friend's house and I'll think, "I really need a copy of this file. I guess I can e-mail it to myself..." Then, of course, you have to go check your e-mail and download the file at home. What a pain!Now I can just upload it directly to my home computer, into any folder which I have shared. Then, the file will automatically be shared as well! This is pretty neat, because it means that you don't even have to be at your computer to publish new files. You can publish them from anywhere!

Ringlight makes it easy to share files. Just put it in your folder and it's on the web. However, you still need to send a link to the file to all of your friends. Of course, if they've subscribed to your personal RSS feed then they'll get the link automatically in their reader. I use Google Reader to keep up-to-date on files shared publicly by everyone on Ringlight. It's pretty fun to see all the new files every day.I'm working on adding more ways to share links to your Ringlight files, and I stared with Twitter. You can now go to the File Info page for any file and click the Share on Twitter. Just type in your Twitter account name and password (I don't store these, just use them once to send the message) and a note to include, and it will be posted to your Twitter account.What's next for sharing links? E-mail? IM? Posting to del.icio.us? Let me know and I'll work on it.

It's been a great week to be a Ringlight developer. On the website, I've added the Queue for Download option to every file. This allows you to request that a file be downloaded onto one of the machines where you are running the Ringlight client. This has some cools uses. For instance, you can download files to your home computer while you're at work, or the other way around. Very cool! Also, what do you do if you see a file you want to download, but the computer with the file is offline? Just Queue for Download and when that computer comes back online, the download will start automatically. All downloaded files go into the Downloads folder in your Ringlight shares folder. Yes, this means that by default people can see what you're downloading. If you don't want that, just mark your Downloads folder as Restricted and it will be secret.This brings up an important point that I want everyone to understand. Go look at the File Info page for any file. I've edited this page to be more informative, and it will probably say some things like "Access to this file is public to all users." and "This file is visible to search engines." You see, be default any files you share can be downloaded by anyone, and may even show up on google. Don't be scared, because this is actually very cool! You can publish things on the web just by dropping them in a folder on your computer. This is a really awesome and powerful feature, but Ringlight is for you to use however you want. If you don't want google to see your files, just click the Hide Folder option, and the folder and all the files in it will disappear from search engines. If you don't want people to download your files, just click the Restrict Folder options and then no one but you can download the files. You can make your restricted files available to certain people by publishing them to a group. Ringlight works for sharing with just yourself, just your friends, all the way up to the whole Internet. Use it how you want to use it, and let's work together to make it awesome!Speaking of awesome, topaz has reported that the Ringlight client has not been being awesome on her machine. Despite all my efforts, it's still taking up too much CPU when it scans for new files! So, I have switched to using event-based filesystem monitoring, letting the operating system inform me when there are new files. This is kind of a pain since it has to be done differently on each operating system. For now, I'm starting with Windows, but I plan to add it to OS X and Linux as well. If you're on Windows, let me know how it's going. Is Ringlight eating too much CPU on your machine?

Ringlight now has search! It's on the top of every page. Right now it only searches files, as that seemed the most important. Let me know if the new search feature works for you.Also, the Ringlight Store now has hats, by request of djackson81. Do you want any other merchandise? Just let me know.

Happy Memorial Day, Ringlight community! I suppose it's not for several days yet, but my vacation starts tomorrow!I'll be back hacking on Tuesday, of course, but in the meantime you can check out all of the website improvements I've made to the Ringlight website. There's a new logo designed by aimy. I think it looks very cool! If you agree, you can get it on a t-shirt (women's t-shirts too!) at our new Ringlight merchandise store. Let me know how you like the t-shirt designs. They're pretty basic to start with, but you can customize them online to make your own unique version!There also a lot more information up now, on the About Us, Contact, and Site Stats pages. There is also a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service available.On the client side, I've been working mainly on stability improvements. A lot of various sorts of problems have been reported, particularly clients crashing, files added to the shares folder not showing up on website, and files deleted from the shares folder not being deleted from the website. Unfortunately, as with most debugging situations, everything works great on my machine! That's why I need everyone to continue to report bugs they find on their machines. Once we get enough users with enough different types and configurations of machines, we can't find all the bugs! If you find a problem, you can discussion it on the discussion group or e-mail me at brandon@ringlight.us.Please do consider buying a sweet t-shirt and wearing it to the next download party at Tech Night at MonkeyWrench books, which will be announced soon!

Today I released v1.2 of the Ringlight client on all platforms. This release has a number of small changes which polish existing features (such as a better icon on Mac) and bring the full feature set to all platforms (such as video thumbnail generation on Linux). There is also preliminary support for an exciting new feature which is currently in alpha on the site: mirroring.One of the first things most people say to me when I tell them about Ringlight is, "So I have to leave my computer on all the time in order to share files?" At first I thought what a silly question, that's how file-sharing software works. Then I realized, why should it work that way? If the users want it to work differently, we can just change the way file sharing works so that it is more awesome.The first step then is mirroring. If you have multiple computers, you can mirror any file on any number of those other computers. For instance, if you have a laptop and a server, mirror the files on your laptop on your server. Then they will be available when your laptop is asleep. This all happens with the check of a box. Check the box and the file is automatically mirrored. Uncheck the box and it's removed from the mirror. Check more boxes to add more mirrors. It couldn't be easier.However, what if you only have one computer and it's a laptop? No problem, because I've also added fan mirrors. Anyone that is a fan of your files can choose to mirror them as well. Then, when your computer is asleep, people can download the file from your fans.Okay, so what if you have no extra computers and no fans? Well, let's be reasonable, you have to store a copy of the file somewhere if you want it to be available when your computer is offline! And if you get a very cheap Ringlight Pro account then I will store your files on some high-availability servers for you.What do you think about this idea? I think it's very cool. It's still in alpha, so I can't show it to you just yet, but I'm working on it. You might notice that if you go to the file info page for a file that it lists how many mirrors the file has. Sometime soon I'll release the mirroring interface to beta and then you can set up mirrors!Another major change you might notice on the site is with groups. The group sharing and management interface has been redesigned based on feedback from the download party. It's still a work in progress, so let me know what you think about it and we can work together to make it awesome.

There will be a Ringlight Download Party occurring in conjunction with the first ever monthly Tech Night at Monkey Wrench Books. The event will be at 7:00pm next Wednesday, April 30th. Monkey Wrench Books is an all-volunteer book store on 110 E. North Loop (near Epoch coffee shop).There will be a lot going on at the event: Linux installs, 3D printers, all kinds of Open Source hacking. Most importantly, though, we will be engaging in local file-sharing using Ringlight! Bring your laptops and external hard drives and lots of files to share. We'll be streaming tracks from our shared music collection on the stereo and playing cool video clips people bring on the projector.Also note that you don't have to come to Monkey Wrench Books to participate in the download party! Just join the mwb group online and share your files. You won't have the super-fast local bandwidth, but you can still be a part of the party.Check out the event info on Facebook. Also, if you attend then please write a testimonial on the Ringlight group on Facebook.Also, thanks to the Ringlight community for the second ever donation: $20! It's so nice to see that people are getting excited about what Ringlight represents for the future of file-sharing. File-sharing 2.0!If you want to support Ringlight, it's never too late to donate.

I've been working hard on making the website more usable. Thanks a lot to feedback from aimy, ludwigvan968, and cherub on how to make the website less confusing and more awesome.Also, ludwigvan968 and topaz have reported instances of their clients using an excessive amount of CPU sometimes. Let me assure you, this is not the intention! Ringlight has always been designed to use minimal resources and to always get out of your way when you're using your computer. You should never even notice that it's running. I've done a lot of work to ensure that this is the case, but there are always edge cases to consider. For instance, if you have a slower computer or a lot more files than I've tested with, then the client might use more CPU on your machine than I'd expect it to. In order to deal with these untested situations, the Ringlight client for Windows will now set its process priority as low as possible. This means, hopefully, that even if it goes crazy trying to use all your CPU to index a million files it will still get out of the way if you're trying to do anything else at all on your computer. I have a lot of other clever ideas for reducing CPU usage, but this one should provide a good safety net in case my ideas don't work very well on your computer. I'm sure that we can work together to make things awesome!Also, I'd like to note that I just received the first ever donation to Ringlight. My mother donated $10. Thanks mom! You too can donate if you want to support further Ringlight development. Just click this button.

Hello ringlighters!It's been an exciting week for me. We're starting to gain members and more people are online and using the site than ever before. This means that more bugs than design flaws have been discovered this last week that ever before in the history of Ringlight!This is awesome for me, because I love to fix bugs. Here's the rundown of bug fixes and new requested features that have been implemented in the past week, along with the user that reported the problem:Fixed the "Download folder" option to work on root folders - aimyBreadcrumbs on the file info page now do the "Right Thing" - cherubYou can use quotes in notes - meErrors take you to a fun error page - aimyFlash version detection updated to require the right version - cherubMultiple behind-NAT downloads won't block each other - meChannel link in the RSS feeds for files has been corrected - aimyImages and videos have thumbnails included on the file info page - aimyThere's a tutorial on how to share files - marybasharaThe OS X client has a less bouncy dock icon, with right-click menus - tysonThere's a donation button in case you want to help support the project - meWhat a week! I've also received a lot of feedback about how people use and want to use ringlight, and this has inspired a bunch of cool new feature ideas. More soon, I hope!

Hello everyone! I want to tell you about some new site features that I think are cool.Profiles are now up. You can edit a profile for your user and you can also make a profile for each of your computers that are running ringlight. I really enjoyed writing little bios of all my computers. You can also attach notes to your user page, any machine pages, and any folders or files. Notes are a good way to tell your friends things about your files.You can also now set the license of any file to be a Creative Commons license. You can choose the base license which allows sharing of your files but requires that you be given attribution, or you can add on requirements to prohibit commercial use, prohibit derivative works, or require derivative works to be licensed under the Creative Commons as well. This is all accessible from the file info page.Speaking of the file info page, there is now a file info page. So when you click on a file it no longer downloads the file. Instead, it takes you to the file info page, which has a link to download the file. Let my know how you like this new setup. It might be kind of annoying to have to click twice when previously you could click once to download. However, this allows us to have this handy page where you can read notes and see the license information for the file.I think these new features are pretty cool, but let me know what you think on the Ringlight group on Facebook.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Ringlight news blog. I'll be posting about updates to the Ringlight website and client here.If you want to keep up with the latest news, subscribe to the RSS feed or join the Ringlight group on Facebook.