I’ve been working with the Google Maps API to add mapping functionality to the event location. So whenever a new event is created, a map will appear on the event page with a map to the location.

I never worked with an API before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but now that I’ve done it, I think they’re pretty easy to use. Expect more cool API features to come in the future.

Sorry for lack of recent posts to the development blog. Things have been kind of crazy with the holidays, and I’ve started blogging again on my personal blog as well. Actually, the true reason I haven’t blogged lately is because I’ve been programming less and marketing more. I’ve gotten to the point with TR where most of the core functionality is working well, so I want to spend a little time bringing some exposure to the site.

Anyway, because this is first and foremost a development blog, I’m still going to update it with changes I make to the site. So tonight’s change is a small one, but important none the less.

Previously, the “Send a Free Text Message” form on the homepage wasn’t checking the suppression list before sending out a message. Kind of defeats the purpose of a suppression list, don’t you think. Well a change has been made to make sure the list is checked. There may still be other areas of the site that doesn’t properly check the list, so I’ll be going through the code soon to make sure people who don’t want to receive text messages don’t.

so after 2 long days of programming, I’ve introduced some new functionality to the song in the form of “events”. In your navigational bar, you should now see a new icon of a little calendar.

Let me explain the functionality through an example…
Let’s say that I’m hosting a new years party at my house, and I want to get the word out to friends. Well, I can now manage the whole event through textReminders. First I’ll create a new event. I’ll choose the event details and upload a picture. Then I’ll choose which friends from my contacts I want to invite and “boom” a text & email invitation gets sent out.

Now that the invitations are out, people need to RSVP. Well, they can click the link in their email or text message to see the event’s page. Once they’re there they can get all the details, RSVP and leave a comment.

As the date rolls closer, I may want to remind some friends that the party is near. I can do so by either sending instant reminders to the invitees, or by scheduling a few reminders to be sent at a certain time.

Over time, this new functionality is going to be a key part of the site.

Tonight I believe that textReminders.net made a leap towards being one of the top web sites in it’s category. Thanks to a completely open night, I was able to spend a good 7 hours on the site. I focused on the usability and look of the reminders area, and I’m very pleased with the result.

I moved away from the in-line pop-up window towards a side-bar style management system. It’s hard to explain, but if you log in and click around you’ll soon see what I mean.

I labeled this post, “best of breed”, because I truely believe that this site is quickly becoming one of the finest sites of it’s kind. There aren’t a whole lot of sites who do what we do better, and out of those that are better, they don’t have any social functionaity.

Anyway, I’m very excited to be releasing these changes so quickly. I’m going to be pretty busy this weekend, but when I get back to the site, I’m going to focus on improving the deliverability rate of the text reminders.

G’night all.

This past weekend I spend some time improving the homepages look and feel. I moved the members login to the top of the page and added the registration form to the pages center. I’m hoping that this layout will improve the registration rate.

My next task is to redo “create reminders” layout. Then I’ll systematically approach the “manage reminders” and “contacts” areas of the web site. I want to make the site’s look and feel consistent across the board. Once the front-end is completed, I want to circle back around to the backend to clean up code, and make things more efficient/stable.

Well, I’ve noticed that since we’ve upgraded our server I haven’t received my texts on time. I figure this is because our new server is not located on the EST. I logged into my control panel tonight and noticed a setting for timezone. I set it to EST, and am about to reboot it. Wish me luck, and I’m sorry if I’m rebooting the server with someone on the site.

**update**
After a little trial and error, I finally got the timezone issue under control. Text Reminders should now be sent on time again.

On a side note, the site’s membership is doing well with 444 members as of today. A big thank you to StumbleUpon for all the exposure.

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.

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.