January 24, 2008
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.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
December 18, 2007
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.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
December 6, 2007
Ivan is tuning the database to improve performance. We should be back up in less than an hour.
update: began maintenance at 10:10am PST (expect to be back up at 11:10am PST)
latest update: sites are coming back up now — it’s 11:15am PST (65 minutes total)
If you’re still seeing the “Scheduled Maintenance” page, try refreshing your browser a couple times. That’ll normally do the trick.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
December 4, 2007
A while back we added Groups to 43 Places as a way for people to commune around a topic within their geography. The idea worked for a while — a stitch ‘n bitch group here and there and a great group called The Finer Things. However, it’s one of our least used features … and a primary target of spammers. In the interest of keeping 43 Places all about places and reducing nooks and crannies for spamholes we’ll be removing the Group feature in about a week.
Groups will work this week, but will be gone next week. Farewell.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
October 18, 2007
Hello folks. We released a new feature last night called SuperCheer. After you cheer a goal, entry, comment or photo on 43 Things you now have the option of upgrading to a SuperCheer. Your first SuperCheer is free with future SuperCheers going for $1/each. Cheers remains the same. The mythical cheers algorithm (aka Cheer Goblin) keeps on keepin’ on. There’s no limit to how many SuperCheers you can give (and you even get your cheer back).
SuperCheers were created to allow 43T users a way of showing support for the site while showing support for a user. We’ve been considering a few ways to help users electively contribute to the bottom line while keeping 43T feeling friendly and supportive. We’ve got a few more ideas in mind and we’re working on tweaking the SuperCheer experience — so let us know what you think.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
August 9, 2007
We’ve been at work for a while now on a new project called Should Do This. Today we’re welcoming some of the people who have volunteered to help test out the new site.
Should Do This is a site all about suggestions. It is a way to go public with your good idea and see if you can get some support from the rest of the internet. Anyone can create a suggestion box on Should Do This for any company, product, government agency, non-profit, sports team, neighborhood association … pretty much anything or anyone.
The idea for Should Do This grew out of a site we used to run called “ideas.43things.com”. The Ideas site was for giving feedback about 43 Things and worked great for a while, but we also learned it was confusing to a lot of people. Many people just got on ideas.43things.com and listed their goals like they were on 43 Things. Can’t really blame them as it looked the same (silly robots!).
Enter Should Do This. What we discovered from the Ideas site was that creating an easy-to-use suggestion box that was visible to the whole community of users allowed people to rally around and support a good idea. So we’ll be bringing back “ideas.43things.com” but it will link to our suggestion box on Should Do This. The same is true for the other sites we run.
But that’s not all. We thought if a suggestion box is good for 43 Things, it would probably work well for other people’s websites too. So we’ve made it easy for a company or individual to set up and manage their own suggestion box. You can even map it to your domain and customize the appearance to make it part of your site.
Please give us your feedback via Should Do This (enter the wonderfully named suggestion statement: Should Do This should do …). We’ll invite around 100 people today and continue to let others in as we get things more better. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for the beta and we’ll get you on in there soon!
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Posted by Daniel Spils
