Today we released the new look for the text reminders site. It’s a gray color scheme with a number of navigational improvements. As with any change that affects the entire site, bugs are bound to occur because of it. My goal is to do a bit more testing to make sure things are up to par. Let me know if you find things that are working improperely.

I’m not sure what led me to poke around twitters site today (Nov 27th, at around 7pm EST), but as I wondered around the Twitter API page, I found an unusual looking banner had replaced the normal Twitter logo. Apparently a group called the “Heu Ris Ric” is responsible for penetrating twitter.com’s security system and uploading a self-promoting banner. The web address given in the banner seems to read, ” RealIrFaz.com” but doesn’t resolve to an actual domain.

While the the “Heu Ris Ric” hacking skills are impressive, their photoshop skills leave something to be desired.

At 5 hours late, Twitter replaced the hacked banner with their own logo. However the banner still exists on their server! http://apiwiki.twitter.com/f/twitterapi_logo.png?ts=1228008926

It’s too late to start tonight, but tomorrow I’m going to add an “end date” reminders. Sometimes you want to be reminded of a task every day, but not necessarily every day for the rest of your life.

I spent some time cleaning up a lot of the “add/manage contacts” functionality tonight. I want it to be easy for people to create and edit their contacts, lists and reminders without adding un-necessary steps, or complicating things. While I think the current design is workable, eventually I’ll need to completely redo the design.

While I’m talking about contact lists, I’m planning on the ability to “add” users to already created contact lists, and edit the name of lists. I know it sounds like something I should have gotten to already, but keep in mind that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a good deal of time to figure out how to add new features, test them out, fix what breaks, test them again, fix something else… it’s a viscous cycle - especially when your a novice programmer like myself. heh.

Well, I’m very excited because I just fixed an annoying issue which was causing some major performance problems. Let me explain… All day I’ve been wondering why the “create new reminders”, and “manage your reminders” pages were loading so slowly. Going through the code this evening, I noticed that those two page were calling some un-necessary files. By removing that call, I saw load time dramatically improve. It turns out that the page it was calling wasn’t even on the server, so that’s what all the hold up was!

Anyway, things are much more speedy now!

I just upgraded our server from a shared hosting platform to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). This will affect the site in two ways.
1) Improved uptime, and hopefully faster server performance
2) No limit as to how many text messages can be sent out from the site.

This removes some of the scalability issues the site has been facing. The downside however is that I’m now being charged $25 a month for hosting. While this isn’t a HUGE financial strain, it’s a burden none the less. Therefore I’ll be looking for a way to monetize the site at least to where I can break even.

I’m not sure what form this will take, but whatever it is, I’ll do my best to be as non-intrusive as possible.

As the site gets more and more stable, my attention turns to usability. These past few days have been focused on the list creation functionality, and today I finally brought that to the forefront by giving it it’s own right nav box on the members page.

I’ve also added a little text box on the left nav to make it easy for members to update their bio information.

Today I activated the journal update feature. So whenever you update your journal (the “what are you doing now” bar on the members page) your friends on the site will get a text message. Likewise, you’ll get a text message when your friends update their journal. To disable, click the “settings”, then click the “devices” tab, then uncheck the 3rd option.

Here’s what the screen looks like:

I was messing around on the site today when I once again was randomly logged out. Well enough is enough. I’ve been wrestling with this rediculous logging out for far too long. It started with a faulty cookie-based login system, then I though I fixed the problem a few weeks back by switching to a session-based system, but with no avail. I ignored it as long as I could, but when I would log in, and someone elses members area showed up, I knew it was time to address the issue.

So today I once again replaced the entire login system. This meant hours of painstankingly going through each page and editing the session information. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say it’s fixed.

I’m sure I missed a few pages here or there. If you find a missing or broken link, hit up our contact page and lemme know. Thx

textReminders.net currently allows members to create contact lists. These contact lists can consist of both TR members and TR non-members. As of yesterday, it was easy to schedule a future text reminder for the receipients of your contact iist. However there was nothing setup to instantly send out a message to your contact lists. I’ve been avoiding this functionality, because of the complexity of setting this up. Well, today I finally strapped myself in and wrote the code to allow this. This is the first step in creating “events”.

I could go on about the new feature, but I have to finish up the implementation. Later all.

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.