Had a few hours today to get things done on the site. Added a “tell a friend” feature in the new “getting started” area. Hopefully this area will make it easier for people to get going on the site once they register.

I also fixed the profile picture upload section, so now people can upload pictures again. I also fixed it so larger images (up to 2 megs) can be uploaded.

I’m still having some issues where the site is logging me out after 20 mins. I tried to put in a fix, but I don’t think it solved the problem.

StumbleUpon has been sending a few hundred visitors to the site each day this week. Because of that boost, registration has really risen. Flew past the 400 mark yesterday. This site is starting to get quite a few members. I’m hoping to improve some of the community aspects. Starting with creating events.

So I’ve taken a week or so off from the site, but now I’m back fixing things again.

The “verify” account link wasn’t showing up or functioning properely, so I was able to go in and fix that. I also patched up the password reset and delete account functionality.

There’s a lot of opportunities for improvement on the site, but I at least want get the core functionality stable. After that I’ll work on making things a little easier to use.

I noticed an issue with the “send time” display in the “manage your reminders” area. I’ll try to get that fixed up asap.

Ever since I built the site, I’ve been plagued by random logouts. Well no more!

Previously the members login area was controlled via cookies. These yummy cookies were supposed to allow a user to stay logged into the site for 3 hours. As mentioned previously, these cookies weren’t cooked properely, and for some reason randomly logged people out. Well, this weekend I spend some time changing over the login system to a session based system. No more bad cookies!

Overall I think the new system is working really well. I haven’t been inproperely logged out yet. However, there might still be some pages I’ve missed in updating. For example, my fiance just let me know that every time she tries updating her status, she’s taken to a login page. So I had to go in just now and fix that.

One nice thing about going through all the code this weekend was I had a chance to clean up some older, un-needed code. I’m not sure how many milliseconds it shaved off loading time, but I’m sure every little bit helps.

375 members. yay!

ok. I’ve been working at making threads on profile notes all day. What I mean by this is, currently when someone writes your a profile note, you click “reply to note” and you are taken to their profile page to leave a note for them. Now the problem is that there is no way to follow the conversation unless you go back and forth between pages. So I’m trying to make a conversation thread that will allow you to see all the replys without going back and forth. That’s what supposed to happen. But that’s not what I got working.

At this point I’ve gotten most of the functionality working, but it’s not showing up “who” wrote the note, once you get a few replys deep. It’s really, really annoying, and I’m probably going delete everything I’ve coded up to this point and start clean. grr.

Another post in my growing collection of timezone related updates to the site. This changes affects the “display time” when you mange your reminders. Previously the display time was always based off of -5(EST). Now reminders were still going out on time for all timezones, but the display was always in -5. This was annoying for anyone outside the timezone. Well now that’s fixed… partially. For anyone in timezones (0 through -12) the time displays correctly. For anyone outside these timezones, it’s still messed up. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but there are only 2 current members that fall into that category, so they’ll have to  deal until I can find a solution. But have no fear… I’m working on it.

Yesterday I added in the ability to manage your network and fans… not sure if I posted on that. haha

So today I work up to the textReminders site being down.

It was down from about 3am EST to 9am EST. I’m sure if I had alerted them to the issue earlier, it would have been revolved faster, but what can I say, I can’t monitor the site 24 hours a day. Well I could, but then I wouldn’t have a very high quality of life would I.

So the site gets back up, but I don’t have cpanel support for another 8 hours. (For those who don’t know, cpanel is an admin tool that allows me to manage the database & other things).

Long story short the site is back up and running on all cylenders. Text Messages are going out on time, and everything looks good atm.

I’m seriously considering getting a dedicated server so stuff like this doesn’t happen. It’s only $25/mo, so if I can get a site sponsor that’ll pays at least $25 a month I’ll do it. e-Marketing 101 will tell you that more traffic to your site means you can charge a higher price for advertising. So hopefully the site will grow to the point where I can have 1 or 2 sponsors cover the sites expenses without having to show annoying ads everywhere. I’m not going to say that ads will never appear on the site, but I truely despise how Myspace has whored itself out to advertisers like it has. Facebook has done a “slightly” better job of having ads, but keeping the annoyance level tolerable. TextReminders is going to find a way to monatize the site without hammer visitors with ads or charging for the server. Frankly, I use the site more then anyone else, and I can’t stand ads.

I’m not sure how the the discussion veered away from poor hosting to advertising, but it has - ah well.

Things are looking good for textReminders… and that’s because I completely redid the look and feel of it’s homepage. No longer is textReminders going to compete in the “send a free text message” arena filled with  one page, ad filled micro sites, rather textReminders is becoming a community, and is going to focus it’s social networking flare.

Here’s how we differ from the “send a free text” sites… Most of these types of sites have a simple form which allows you to send a friend a text message. This is all well and good, and in fact textReminders sported a very similar form on the old homepage. While 2,500+ visitors used the free form to texts their friends, afterwards most of them just left the site. They had no real idea what was behind the member login box. That all changed today, as we introduced the new homepage.

The new TR homepage makes great use of color, icons and whitespace to easily explain what the site is about. It’s not about “sending free texts”, it’s about “helping people remember things”, and not only that, but it’s also a way to connect with friends. There’s great power in the ability to share messages, updates and reminders with friends. It’s a huge help to setup a list of friends and blast a text to all of them at once, or even schedule a weekly reminder to the group.

Has this new look helped? Well, that would be an oustanding, YES! In a single day we’ve more than doubled our conversion rate. That means that twice as many people are registering than before. Which means that the community is growing faster, which means that more of your friends are joining the site!

Not only do we have that major improvement to be happy about, we’ve also seen some nice enhancement in the way we create, manage and send text reminders. It’s kind of hard to explain, but go ahead and create a new TR and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m also happy to report some big fixes… An issue with ACS Alaska customers has been fixed, and we’ve also fixed a server issue which temperely inturrupted the sending of reminders. Big issues that were discovered and resolve through great community feedback and testing.

Thanks to all!

so I got my new macbook! schweeet! It’s my first mac, so it took me about 24 hours to get used to the mac operating system, but now I <3 it.

As soon as I can get a hold of dreamweaver for macs I’m going to go to town on textReminders. The first thing I’m going to do is work on the text reminders management area. Specifically I’m going to add visibility to other peoples text reminders that you’re on their list to receive. I tell you what, last night I got a text reminder at 11:00 at night that said, “test” as the message. So I logged in to my account and didn’t see any “test” messages I had setup. Turns out my co-worker who was helping me test the night before setup a list with some test messages, however I had no idea who it was from, or how to turn it off. So that’s the problem i’m looking to address today.

Well… I had a 6 hour mini-marathon tonight on TR, and boy did I get stuff done.

First of all, people can now see the contact lists they’ve created. They can also delete the entire list, or just individuals within each list. As I have more time, I’d like to add in the ability to move people between lists a little easier.

Secondly, you can now add non-members to your contact lists. This is HUGE! It allows you to setup reminders for yourself, other members and now even non-members all within a single contact list.

Wow, in my head it really felt like more, but that was pretty much it. Now the reason it took me 6 hours was because the way the site is setup. I don’t know how many of you know about how databases work but basically you dedicated areas of the database for certain things. For example, there is an area for members, and an area for settings, etc. Now the problem is that all the reminder functionality assumes that everyone is a member. Now I can’t easily merge the new non-member portion of the database with the member portion, so I had to do a fair amount of restructuring so that the web site would send out reminders for non-members as well.

The next steps are to make the contact lists area easier to use. right now the functionality is there, but it’s not so friendly. I’ll go in and polish it up a bit. I also want to add the ability to remove yourself from someone elses list if you don’t want to receive reminders anymore.

Most will also notice the much improved color scheme on the site. I’ve done away with that ugly green scheme, and am now using a classic gray/orange one. I think it looks awesome. I’ll also be reorganizing the homepage quite a bit. It’ll like nice when I’m done.
Later all.

Designer Shawn Walsh has created a new logo for textReminders.net. The new color scheme is the forerunner of a brand new look and feel for the site. Thanks shawn! Looks great!