Update: we found a great developer, this vacancy is closed now.

Viewbook is looking for a freelance or part-time developer/sysadmin who takes the lead in scaling our platform to next levels. We have a small team of developers with three front-end programmers and two back-end (RoR) developers. We’re now looking for someone who has enough experience to take the lead and come up with solid solutions to design and scale our platform.

We think you must have experience in three fields: Architecture, Server and database management and development (in Ruby). Viewbook runs entirely on RESTful webservices built in Ruby on Rails and Merb. We’re also planning to make our API’s public.

Required skills

Architecture / Scaling
* Systems architecture
* Scaling, load balancing
* Optimizing, performance testing, caching
* Image uploads, resizing and storage
* Database design and optimization

Server and database management
* Configuring, maintenance and optimizing Linux servers(Linux, Apach/Ngnix, Mysql, Ruby)
* Monitoring and emergency maintenance
* Scaling databases
* Back-ups / redundancy
* Consultation with hosting parties

Programming
* Significant experience developing and deploying Ruby on Rails applications
* Programming webservices in Ruby on Rails and Merb
* Programming image resizing and storage

Location
We’re located in the Netherlands, it would be very nice if you’re in the area but it is not essential. Our team works from different locations and different countries.

Interested?
Please contact rien@viewbook.com.

Wow, we have quite a lot of new stuff for you. As you can see we’ve completely redesigned our website. The goal of the redesign was to communicate a more complete picture about Viewbook; to show it’s strengths, ways of usage and benefits. You should definitely check out the Tour and Examples of use sections to see what you can do with Viewbook and how people use it. We’ve also added a new support site on Getsatisfaction which we’ll tell you more about in a later post. We hope you like it. But there’s more…

More Viewbook for Less Money
Probably the biggest news is that we’ve changed the pricing and specifications of our accounts. You get more for lower prices! The Standard account is now $9,- a month with 1000 images. The new Pro account is $19 a month with 5000 images. For existing users: to benefit from the lower prices, login to Viewbook and choose to signup for one of the two new accounts. Your current subscription will be changed, and you will be billed less the coming month. See the new accounts and pricing.

A Lot of New Viewbook Features
We’ve developed a bunch of much requested new features over the last months. Beside some Image Manager optimizations we’ve created a crop function within the webpage editor. You can now frame your images in your portfolio- or project pages. We’ve also added more font types to choose from.

the new cropping tool

We completely tidied up the image galleries. We’ve added a transparent navigation bar, password protection for keeping your presentations private, google analytics for individual presentations, share options, and a range of enhanced embed options. Check out our post New Image Gallery Options for more details.

We hope you like all the new stuff. Let us know what you think in our new support & forum.

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So now that everyone had some time to get used to the new look of the web site, we think now is a good time to unveil the new image manager, image galleries and portfolio pages! We silently rolled out a completely new version of Viewbook.

Of course, there are a number of new features we want you to discover and try out. Overall, we wanted to keep the simplicity and practicality but still add more useful features to fulfill everyone’s needs. The post below contains more information on that topic, but the best way to find out what the new Viewbook has to offer, is to try it out yourself.

And, please let us know what you think, we’re always eager to hear.

We can announce that we’re working hard towards a new Viewbook launch with a completely new Viewbook. We can’t give you exact dates, however you can expect to see changes somewhere in the second half of April (we won’t send any new password mails again this time). Of course we will announce it on our weblog, once the new Viewbook is live.

So what can you expect? A brief overview of some major changes.

Refined galleries
Our galleries have several new options, including the option for a minimal navigation bar (see picture above), autoplay, full size scrolling, and downloadable images. Some other improvements are better scaling, faster loading and pre-loading. (The photo above is one of Denis Darzacq, great work, check it out).

Complete Image Manager overhaul
A much faster image manager, but also more intuitive. Everything can be done with drag & drop: the reordering of images, to add and delete images, to delete presentations, and even to add presentations to web pages. The newest section for all of you will be the web pages editor. You can add unlimited web pages, drag & drop to sort the presentations inside your web page, customize colors and fonts, and choose the size of the thumbnails inside the web page.

Better performance: fast & stable
Besides all the aforementioned features, the new Viewbook is above all faster and more stable. Also, in the new version you can choose where to store your images (US or EU) for faster downloading.

Note: All the above features, and also the features shown in the demo videos in the ‘overview’ section are available after the launch of the new Viewbook.

Ok, enough talk for now. Let’s get back to work and get this thing online soon.