Today the case of the missing wall posts was solved and resolved. From now on  members will only be able to delete posts on their own wall. You can’t go to someone elses wall and start deleting posts (which probably should have been setup that way from the beginning).

Another improvement…

2 tabs now appear in the main members area. The default tab is “text reminders” and the second tab is “friends status”. The “friends status” tab will let you see the updates of anyone you’re following. Likewise, those following you will see your status updates appear there.

In the future you’ll begin to see some additional improvements to the members area. The left hand column will be cleaned up and better formatted. Navigation will make more sense as areas of the site are better defined. And users will soon be able to share reminders and updates with certain friends.

Much more to come, but that’s it for tonight.
Want a feature added? Feel free to suggest one.

Ok, so a very stange thing was happening on TR (that’s my new acronym for textReminders.net) recently. The problem was all the Wall Posts were gone. Disappeared. No trace. Not only were the posts not displaying on the page, but the posts themselves no longer existed in the database either.

So what happened to them?
At first I thought there must some bad code that was deleting all the entries, but in all my testing I couldn’t recreate it. Inconsistent errors and bugs are the hardest ones to fix.

Well, today I was running a sitemap creation tool, and I noticed that my wall posts had been deleted again. Then it hit me… I was logged into the site, and the spider from the sitemap program is following the delete links!!!

While it sucks that a few wall posts were lost, it’s actually a really good thing that this happened. Because now I can fix the issue. horray!

work up this morning and squished some bugs - programming bugs that is.

Finally figured out the whole “spaces in filenames” issue (when someone would upload a profile picture with a space in the filename, all they’d get is a white box). So hopefully people won’t wonder why their image isn’t showing up. Also took care of some other minor issues.

to do: seems there a duplicate user image in the “people your following” bar on the left side of the members area. Gonna look into that tonight.

Traffic slowed down a lot after our big spike over the weekend. I expected as much. Goes to show the difference between traffic that comes in via social media mentions and PR, as opposed to slow, sustainable search engine traffic.

I really want to be first for [text reminders], which I think will happen soon. Only problem is there isn’t much traffic associated with the term. That being said, the traffic that would come is highly targeted, and will convert (think registration) very well. I’ve already started setting my sights on the biggest prize [text messages]. woot!

Tonight I’m going to blast all my facebook contacts a message promoting the new site. I hope they’ll come over and check it out.

cause working on textReminders.net is wayy to exciting for sleep.

Seriously, Mug rootbeer says, “no caffinee”, but I think they lie.

Some improvements to the site…

1. no more duplicate verification codes being sent
2. bios, emails and search results now contain line breaks, instead of everything being smooshed together

This to fix…

1. spaces in profile picture file names
2. better error handling for uploading profile bigger then 5 megs
3. prompt for users to update their settings and profile info.

Today was an awesome day for textReminders.net. We received over 5,000 visitors from StumbleUpon.com and SmashingApps.com. Mostly because of the kind listing in the “17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Love To Use!“. So many thanks to these 2 web sites.

Thanks to the HUGE jump in traffic we got today, I’m happy to report that our member base jumped from our “first milestone” of 50 members  just 3 days ago, to around 150! We’re also reporting over 700 text messages that were sent from textReminders.net. That’s 700 more people who now know about the site.

All the excitement around the site calls for new features! So I’ve added 2 new things to the site.
1. A phone book - Anyone your following on the site is added to your phone book. Any time you want to send a free SMS text message, you can now just select a name from your address book, instead of having to type in their phone number and wireless carrier.
2. Better reminder management - Now the “Manage Your Reminders” section of the site is broken down into, “today’s reminders”, “future reminders” and “past reminders”. Hopefully this will make things easier to sort though when you have a lot of reminders setup. More to come in this area.

In other non-important, but slightly interesting news. Google has ‘granted’ the site a Page Rank of 2. Now a PR of two may not frighten many competitors, but you have to consider that I haven’t even BEGUN the marketing for this site yet. So when I compare this to the time I spent on dancristo.com submitting to all those directories, only to get a PR of two, I feel pretty happy about it.

For a quick SEO update. I really want to rank #1 for [text reminders] in Google. Now textmemos(dot)come has a strangle hold on most variations of these phrase, but make no mistake, I am going to try to hardest to de-thrown him by April of ‘09. That’s 6 months to secure top rankings for my target phrase - should be no problem, right?

I was having a chat with a co-worker, and the idea came up to create groups for people to join. Novel concept? I think not - I’ll probably just look at facebooks group structure and go from there, but whatever. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. right?

Hooray for textReminders.net. Today it reached it’s first semi-major milestone : 50 members!

To celebrate, I’m going to work on the site more. Today’s implementation will be… Ability to delete messages people post on the wall, analytics on the blog, and maybe I’ll look into giving members the options to turn off text they receive when someone their following updates their status. Everday is Christmas.

**Update** I was able to give users the ability to delete wall posts, and I installed analytics on the blog, but I didn’t get to the sms off option. I’ll try do that tomorrow.

The core functionality of textReminders.net is text message reminders - short and sweet. You pick the date and when the time comes, “Walla!” a text message. But there’s only so much you can do with that. Sure you can make a nice calender interface and all that, but it’s still a very basic service.

So tonight I spent most of my time improving the social networking aspects. You’ll notice that the profile pictures in the members area are much bigger then before. Friends images will now appear next to wall posts, direct messages and status updates. A new “Friends Area” was built to help you better manage who you’re following, and who’s following your updates. Checkout the screen shot.

One of the areas I’ve started focusing on lately with textReminders.net is its online marketing efforts. My first stop is the direct competition. So I searched Google for [free sms] and [text reminders], and I can honestly say I was impressed with how POOR the competition was - from both visual appear and accessibility standpoints.

Let’s look at: http://www.text4free.net/
The entire screen is filled with ads! Not only that, but if you scroll down to the actual SMS send form, it’s this ugly brownish red with white font. eww.

Now I totally understand the desire to get paid for the time and effort put into building a site, but plastering the site with ads is just not classy.

continuar…

Whenever you have a service like textReminders.net where people are allowed to contact others without express permission, you have to make sure certain measures are taken to protect people from spam. While I can’t imagine we can completely absolve text spamming on the site, I have implemeted a supression list for textReminders.net.

Anyone can add your number to that list, and textReminders.net will suppress any text messages going out from the site to that number.

Now this only works if people know where to go to block their number. Therefore we will shortly be adding a short URL to the beginning of each text message, letting receviers know where the text originated from.

We’ll continue to monitor the airwaves for instances of spam, and act accordingly to ensure this service is used only for good.