tweaks

While most of our efforts recently have been focused on back end improvements and the API, we did find time for a few enhancements and fixes that we think you will like. As always, this is how we prove that we really do read all of the stuff you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Your shouts on the dashboard

By popular request, we have added your shouts to the main dashboard of your home page. Several people asked for this feature as a way to show context between the timing of your shouts and others, and now you have it!

Moving people pages

We’ve moved the people page URLs from shizzow.com/geekygirldawn to shizzow.com/people/geekygirldawn to be consistent with other page formats. We do have redirects in place, of course, but it would be great if you could take a few minutes to update any bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.

Now with more altitude

Yes, it really does say altitude and not attitude (although we have plenty of that, too). We now have lat / long and altitude. We’re curious to see how people use it, but we’re thinking about how it would apply to skyscrapers, hiking, and more.  I can’t wait to see the first application using altitude!

Beta API

We’re continuing to make many changes to the API as a result of the feedback we’re getting from our beta testers. We might even be able to open it up to more people soon.

We also fixed a few random bugs along the way. Remember, we can’t change things that we don’t know you want, so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

We made some improvements and fixed a few bugs recently. As always, these enhancements are proof that we really do read all of the suggestions you send us through Get Satisfaction.

RSS Feeds

We added a bunch of RSS feeds, which makes me enormously happy (Hi, my name is Dawn, and I am an RSS junkie). You can get to these feeds from the customized search, and we have feeds for most searches. You can get feeds for people near a place, with certain tags, and more.

Search

We made a few improvements and fixed a few bugs in our search functionality. We’re assuming you didn’t notice those bugs, since they were never posted on Get Satisfaction. So forget I mentioned anything, and maybe search will just magically work better for you this week.

Invitations

Ryan was kind enough to add some admin functionality to give me better visibility into the people sending the most invites along with the number of used invitations and remaining invitations for each person. Some people haven’t been inviting their friends. Now, I know who you are …

As usual, we fixed a few other bugs and made some additional enhancements. We can only fix the issues that we know about (our telepathic abilities are severely limited), so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

We made a few enhancements and some bug fixes this week as proof that we really do read all of that stuff that you post for us on Get Satisfaction.

Sorting of Messages within Shouts

As Reid pointed out, we were sorting shouts from newest to oldest while messages (appearing within shouts) were sorted oldest to newest. While this might have provided extra brain stimulation for people trying to figure out which messages were the most recent, we agreed with Reid that this was probably not the most intuitive sorting method.

Aggressive Logout

We were being a tiny bit aggressive with our timeouts, which occasionally logged people out even if they had just been active a few seconds ago. We’ve done some work on the session information in the cookie to help prevent some of these logouts.

Working with Favorites

The favorites configuration page to add / update nicknames and delete favorites was buried under the preferences page and was not accessible from your favorites link on the sidebar. I was confused by this, and the developers were kind enough to change it after they got tired of me bugging them about it.

SMS? Not Quite

A few of you noticed that we briefly had support for SMS on Sunday morning. When we rolled it out, we quickly found some unintended side effects and usability issues that we didn’t notice when we tested on our staging server. We were very sad that we had to roll our changes back out of production. On the upside, most of the SMS functionality worked, so it won’t be much longer now. Our initial SMS implementation will make heavy use of favorites nicknames, so if you want to prepare, you can add places to your favorites and give them short nicknames. Bonus points for memorizing your nicknames.

We also fixed a few minor bugs and made a couple of additional enhancements. Keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction

We released a a few new features and bug fixes last week. This just shows that we do actually read all of those suggestions, comments, and bug fixes that you post for us on Get Satisfaction.

Better Process to Listen Back

Many of you were frustrated by our listen back process. Originally, you would look at the people listening to you, click the button to listen to someone new, and be redirected to that person’s profile page instead of staying on the listening page to listen to more people. You said that sucked, and we listened. Check it out again now; we think you’ll like it.

Avatars Cropped Instead of Resized

Some of you had stretched, weird looking avatars. As fun as it was for us to mangle your avatars, we are now both cropping and resizing them, instead of just resizing them.

Bug Fixes Galore

We fixed a bunch of random bugs this week. If you don’t believe me, check out all of those Solved and Implemented reports on Get Satisfaction.

What?!? Still No SMS?

Hold onto your britches, we’re almost there! Anyone attending the Portland Web Innovator’s Demolicious event on Wednesday saw the SMS demo on our testing environment. We have it working, but our free SMS provider requires a final review before we can roll it out to make sure that we’re complying with their terms of service. As soon as we have the final approval, we will roll it out on our production server for anyone to use.

Our next big project is the API. I can’t wait to see all of the cool applications from our users! We’ll have more on the API over the next month or so. As always, we love to see that steady stream of feedback on Get Satisfaction.

We released a couple of new things yesterday. As always, this our way of proving that we like you and actually listen to all of that feedback you post on Get Satisfaction.

Nearby People on the Place Page

Several people asked us to include a link to the nearby people right on the place page. You can already get a list of nearby people for your existing location or a list of people currently at a place, but now you can also see who else is near a place before you decide to go there.

Better Previous / Next Links

People with mouse coordination challenges were complaining about how our previous / next links on the search page were teeny, tiny links to ‘>>’. We’ve expanded it out so that the link also includes the Previous / Next text.

We also made a few minor changes to m.shizzow.com and a few bug fixes this week.

What?!? Only a couple of changes this week?

Yes, we are slackers. Or maybe, just maybe, we are working very hard to give you SMS support for shouting, and it is taking up most of our development time.

As always, keep your feedback coming at us on Get Satisfaction.