The Robot Co-op

We added a book image and message to the navigation bar up top today.  It’s a temporary thing to promote the release of our new book Dream It. List It. Do It! and the new 43 Things Personality Quiz. If you haven’t already, take the quiz … it’s quirky, fun(ny), informative and, at times, wildly insightful.

There’s a new 43 Things book and a fun 43 Things personality quiz to go along with it. Take the quiz, check out the book and let us know what you think. So far the most common results are “Newness-Seeking Self-Improving Tree Hugger” and “Romantic Traveling Reinventer”.  What are you?

Thanks for all the feedback on the new profile page! In response to the missing links to other 43 websites in the footer and missing tags we’re happy to announce 2 new widgets:

Your Tags & 43 Universe Widgets:

• Your Tags (displays the tags you’ve given to goals on 43T)
• 43 Universe (displays links to your activity on 43 Places, 43 People, All Consuming, Lists of Bests)

To adopt these widgets click the “customize” link in the top, right corner of the right widgets column on your profile page. Select the widget and save.

Tweaks:

• “I love 43 Things” is no longer the default language in the About Me widget
• remove your birthday - click edit on the About Me widget - zero out the day and month fields and save changes
• better pagination — allows you to easily jump to the end or middle of your completed goals, entries and other paginated stuff (we’ll push this out by day’s end)
• goals you’ve given up are now located under the “I’ve done x things” tab — click the “… & I’ve given up on x things” link up top
• added back the “read all 5 entries” link next to entries under recent entries

I’m probably missing some other tweaks we’ve pushed out the last 24 hours.

Disappearing Cheers:

Many people’s cheers given/received have gone down a notch in the last day. This was related to a bug fix that we’ve had sitting ready to get pushed out — this fix coincidentally went out with the new profile page.

Okay, so here’s where I lay it down for you, and there’s no sugar coating that will make this cheer-drop go down any smoother. The higher cheers counts many of us had (me too) were artificially inflated for a few months. Now that the cheers count bug is fixed everyone is seeing their true, for reals, honest to goodness cheers count. So, on the one hand you probably feel deflated (damn the Cheer Goblin!). On the other hand you may be experiencing the uphoria of absolution (”These cheers are the real deal and I’m an honest cheer giver and getter!”). I choose to see the cheers glass as half full. Join me?

Tips (for fun):

• add the Tags and 43 Universe widgets … because they’re cool
• reorder your widgets by dragging them up and down to a desired location
• reorder your goals by dragging them up and down
• click on the “x cheers” link under any goal and see the fancy recent cheer pop-up
• click on a picture and watch it get big!

Okay, that’s a mouthful. Help me spread the word about the fixes, widgets and enhancements. More to report soon …

If you’re experiencing a time stamp in the future … specifically “in the future ago”, you are not alone. One of the web servers is out of sync at the moment and we’re working on bringing it back to the present day. As it’s only one server that’s out of sync, some folks will experience normal time stamps on their entries, comments and cheers such as “43 minutes ago”. Others looking at the same content (but on a different server) will see the peculiar “in the future ago” time stamp. We distribute traffic to 43 Things across multiple web servers to handle the load efficiently.

It’s an interesting concept and I personally love the wording so enjoy it while it lasts. Ivan tells me that in about 2 hours the server should be synced back up and your entries, comments and cheers will be back in the present tense.

We’ll be bringing all the sites down for about an hour (hopefully less) on Saturday at 6pm Seattle time (aka PST). Ivan and Laurel are putting a new load balancer into place that will do all sorts of great things for performance. The sites will go dark. Completely dark … as in nothing will show up. But don’t fret, we’ll bring everything back online with a quickness.

In the meantime you may want to check this out.

We’ve been talking a lot in recent months about the 43 Things homepage. The current homepage has taken us a long way with the early adopter crowd but can be cryptic for new users. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked ‘what is 43 Things?’. I usually tell people it’s a site where people create a list of their goals and give advice and support to each other. It would be nice to have a homepage that communicated that for me.

Enter new robot Michelle who is now helping us out with all things design. Here’s where we’re headed with the unrecognized homepage (that means when you’re not logged into the site). If you’re signed in, the homepage will look as it does today for now. We should have this live in a few days:

p.s. the “need inspiration” section is a fancy tool that reveals popular goals by category and allows you to quickly add them to your list.