Photographic duo Nural Moser & Clemens Fantur share with us their series 'Behind Open Doors', an intimate look at a fleeting period of time. From their own description: "A gaze behind the doors of one stay at a hotel room. Just you and me. A photographic novel of the intimate situatons spending one day and night together at a hotel. Capturing the moments of the different daytimes..." They have used Salon.io to construct the narrative of their story beautifully, from morning through to the night.

We want to say a big thank you to all alpha users. Your feedback and playing with our system has really helped us develop Salon.io and let us add features you, the users, need! We've put together a short video of screenshots detailing our development over the past 6 month, showing both our input to the site but also, more importantly, the work the users have put into their pages! We hope you like it, show your friends and keep on using Salon.io!

Check out the video here: http://vimeo.com/salonio/salonio-goodbye-alpha-hello-world

The term "Salon Hanging" or the equivalent "Petersburg Hanging" describes a concept of hanging a group of artworks on a wall. The term dates to pre-revolutionary times, to "Salon de Paris", the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that was initiated in 1667 by a man known as the Sun King, Louis XIV, to propagate the official art taste at the court. The name was derived from where the exhibition was held, the Salon Carré which belongs to the Palace of the Louvre. The Salon eventually became the greatest regular art show during the 17th and 18th centuries.

In the beginning, Salon was a standard Ruby on Rails (Rails) application. All views were rendered on the server and a lot of JavaScript code was needed to make the UI as flexible as it is now. The frontend becoming more important quickly led to duplicated code that needed to get implemented in the backend language and in the frontend language. Salon.io has then been rewritten as a Single Page Web App (SPWA) a novel architectural style that lets developers write interactive websites in a more integrated and efficient way. Their approach is to assign more duties, which have been typically placed in the backend in traditional websites, to the frontend.

Like many great ideas do, Kerstin zu Pan's series SELFSERVICE started out as an elaborated joke: initially pointed at some Bavarian friends she portrayed herself dressed as the cliché Oktoberfest girl. The classical Dirndl dress soon became her most important companion wherever she travelled by profession or by wanderlust.The results not only met her penchant for nonsense humor but also nudged her to start a lifelong project: the ultimate travel diary.

When we first launched Salon at the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design, we were excited and surprised how students were using the new possibilites. Some students actually used it to create collages of animated GIF images, most of them being wild mashups of found footage. That was an employment we haven't ever thought of before. Furthermore we come to believe that Salon.io is the one and only web based tool that lets users do that so easily. Will it be the foundation of a new art form? Make it so! Throw in your homemade living pictures and crisp cinemagraphs!

Team member Mathias Bär used to keep a visual diary and eventually built a flash website to present it in an interactive fashion that grouped illustrations according the time of the day they were created. Well, the best times of flash based sites seem to be over and thank god, we are now able to look at this huge load of insane characters even on the iPad !