Public files live again, virus checking, other new features

In an effort to keep pushing changes at you, tonight I'm tiredly announcing the relaunch of our public files feature. (Finally, a change on the Openomy web site, rather than other sites!)

You'll remember our small fiasco with the last version of public files, so for this round we've made some improvements. From here on out, every file you make public must not contain a known virus.

Everytime you upload a file, it is now checked for viruses and recorded. You'll easily know if your files have viruses by simply checking the File Stats for that file. We think this ability, in itself, is a really nice feature.

However, if it does contain a virus, we simply won't allow it to be public.

Likewise, we're going to be much stricter on those who are attempting to circumvent the rules (read: you're probably going to lose your account without notice if you make a file public that holds a virus we don't know about). Same goes for copyright infringement (or the like).

The virus checker is a little bit of a test. It might not work all the time, but we hope it'll at least work most of the time. We'll improve it as we go. Also expect a library to be published as an open source package from it.

In other news, we've added some more functionality to our backend which will prepare us as we move forward with more plans in the works.

If you notice any trouble with the web site over the next couple days, blame me and these new features by flaming me and letting me know what happened. I'll fix it ASAP.

Openomy Pageflake

Today I'm proud to release a test version of the Openomy Pageflake.

For those who are unaware, Pageflakes is a web desktop site where you can read RSS feeds, aggregate data, check mail, use your calendar, etc. In short, it's the uber-portal with many different modules for your pleasure.

You can add our new module, the Openomy Flake, by clicking here.

The Flake is currently read-only (that is, you can only look at files you have already uploaded via the web site or other applications). This is because our JavaScript library is still just read-only. We're working on that. As soon as our JavaScript library is ready for release, we'll be updating this Flake -- you won't have to do anything to notice the changes.

We hope you thoroughly enjoy it, and Pageflakes, as much as we do. Let us know what we can improve and/or change. (Just remember, it's still a test and not fully functioning!)

Note: The links above include a referral. If you click on them and sign up for Pageflakes, we'll receive a small commission (it's really small). This is just a tiny way for us to recover the costs of running this site mostly for free. We hope you understand why it's there and although we'd love it if you'd support us, if you'd rather not, just go directly to http://www.pageflakes.com.