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We are happy to announce that wifis.org is now also available in dutch: https:/wifis.org/nl

Right now the Netherlands and Belgium account each for less then 1% of the world wide userbase: https://wifis.org/en/faq

So please spread the word…

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the wifis.org team at Mathias’ birthday

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CEBIT 2013 was all about “Shareconomy”. It makes us very proud that wifis.org is part of the landscape together with big shots like airbnb and couchsurfing

https://www.friendsurance.de/blog/a/infografik-shareconomy-landschaft/

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wifis.org now has a pinterst.com profil. Please spread the word and happy pining.

… but I have to admit, I still don’t fully understand Pinterest. After joining I was wondering how to get in touch with other members - let’s say by writing a message. Of course after a while I started to enjoy finding and repining awesome images, but I kind of miss the people, blogs and topics I’m usually interested in. All in all the service seems to attract especially designer, fashion addicts and cooking girls in big numbers. Having said that, I hope they are also interested in wifis.org :) We will see…

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2012 was just amazing and very successful for wifis.org!

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We feel so proud about last years growth that we want to share some internals for the first time. Check the infographic above and the smaller teaser version here.

Thanks to all the positive media coverage many many thousand users from more then 100 countries on 6 continents joined wifis.org. The website now exists in 7 languages and can be found in all major social networks. Thanks to everybody who supported our little but strange idea to turn the worlds WiFi networks into social ones!

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After Facebook, Google+ and Twitter wifis.org now also has a LinkedIn company page. Via the little share button on our homepage already 75 people supported the project. Thanks!

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Merry Christmas to everybody!

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One thing I forgot to mention in the post about the tools I use is pingdom.com. This free service pings your site every minute from different locations and notifies via email in case of problems. As a nice side effect I can historically check the high service level Google Apps Engine promises.

Thanks to both!

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Mini Stones under wifis.org

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones.

Donald Knuth (Turing Award Winner ‘74)

Since wifis.org went live many people have asked me what tools I used to build the service. Today I want to provide a little insight and give a big THANKS to all the folks in the open source community who have made the project possible!

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wifis.org is a Java based Spring MVC application hosted on Google Apps Engine. Especially the latter was probably the best decision of the whole project. Not because GAE is easy to use or learn (sometimes it’s the exact opposite), but because without GAE I would not have been able to cope with the traffic coming in after wifis.org was mentioned in some of the worlds biggest tech blogs. Sometimes I was watching for hours how Google just added more instances hosting my little site, while the response time never increased by a ms.

In the development process I’m using Eclipse IDE, JUnitPowerMock/MokitoMaven build tool and Git on Bitbucket. Most of these tools are kind of No-Brainers in the Java world, but especially BitBucked is not as famous as it should be for offering private git repositories with public wiki and issue tracking for free!

Eclispe, Maven, Git on Bitbucket

On the front end site I’m using Gimp for graphic editing and Google Picasa to host images. Picasa helps to dramatically reduce requests to the app server and is quite handy due to the built-in image-resizing feature. Furthermore HTML5 BoilerplateTwitter Bootstrap and jQuery are enhancing my HTML, CSS and Javascript. The YUI compressor embedded into the maven build process minifies and combines the CSS and Javascript.

Other fancy things I use are: Face4j-lib to integrate with Facebook (login), Google Apps to cooperate with other project members, Google Feedburner, Google WebMasterToolsGoogle AnalyticsGoogle gsonGoogle loaderGoogle Chart Tool and Google reCaptcha.

So once again, thanks to the open source community and Google Inc. for their “mini stones” supporting this project.

Suggestions and further questions are very welcome!

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Happy Birthday Wifis.org !

The website itself is actually a few weeks older, but exactly 1 year ago, the first user I did not know personally joined after a little footnote in GoogleWatchBlog.de

This was a very exciting moment for me, because it proved that the idea behind the project was not completely stupid. This pioneer was followed by more than 100 others readers of the blog on the same day, and many thousands in the months ahead…. thanks to everybody who believed in this!