New invitations are out (and some stats)
Okay, sorry that we’re a little late, but we just sent out another 100 invitations. Hooray! Welcome aboard if you just got yours, and we hope that you enjoy the site.
We’ve made a bunch of updates in the past few days: mostly little things. We improved the album page by paginating it (you can now select how many to show, based on your interest level and how fast your internet connection is). We want to make this page a bit more fun to browse, so we’re going to work on making some sorting filters so that you can browse random albums a little easier.
Some interesting statistics: as of right now, we have 176 users (75 of whom have already connected and are “friends” with other users), 23 groups, 158 albums (containing 868 images), and 217 posts on 55 message boards. Not bad for a month’s work, I think.
Oh, and one more thing… we’re going to get our first bit of press coverage! The editor of the online quilting magazine Cotton Spice heard about us and contacted us, and we just did an interview. I’ll post you the link when it’s published!
Invites this Friday (promise)
We’ve been getting a bunch of emails from people about how much you love QuiltGroup. That makes us really happy 
We know that things aren’t moving as quickly as if we had some huge staff of developers, but we’re going as fast as we can.
In the past few days, we’ve added more to the album information page, made it so you can zoom a profile picture (this is still kind of buggy), did some more work on notifications, and tweaked some things visually.
We really want to make the general albums page a go-to for everyone. I think it’s a lot of fun just to browse the albums that random other people put up, and this sort of connecting should be one of the most fun things about coming to QuiltGroup. To this end, we’re going to work on making the Albums page (the page you get to by clicking “see all albums” on the Community Page) a bit more fun: we’ll paginate it to make it load faster, and offer sorting and viewing options.
Finally, sorry about the no invites Friday night. But it’s a good thing we didn’t, because we ended up doing some most stuff to the albums pages and the fewer people that confuses the better. We promise that we’ll send more out this Friday. We’ll do 100, and I think we have about 16 spots left… so tell your friends to sign up now!
no invites tonight (sorry)
Alas, we didn’t get everything done that we wanted to, so we’re going to hold off the next batch of invites for a few days. Sorry, guys. Soon, I promise.
The good news is that we’ve already done a ton of stuff! There are fields for the albums, we’ve created some new notifications, fixed a few bugs in editing profiles, and did a bunch of back-end stuff. We’re also working on improving the search functions (we’ve found an okay $200 solution and a really great $2000 solution… anyone know any fairy godmothers?)
New features and a major change
Well, this batch of new members seems to have had a largely problem-free introduction to QuiltGroup. Out of the 100 invites that we sent out, 70 are now members. Since all of these people signed up for an invite in the past two weeks, it’s not surprising that we had a high rate of return… I guess the people who didn’t sign up either changed their mind or their invite went into their spam folder (though new members are still trickling in). There were a bunch of people who didn’t get an invite this round, but we’ll get you yours on Friday, hopefully (see the last paragraph about “major changes” for more info).
Ever notice how I keep saying things like “hopefully” or “probably” or should”? If there’s one thing that working on this site has taught me, it’s not to make promises. Some things go quicker than expected, others take unexpected twists or have completely out of the blue problems and take twice as long as we think they will.
For example, we’ve promised many people two particular features: a private message system and more fields for albums. Now, common sense would tell you that sticking a few more fields into a database is really no big deal, then we spend a day making it look pretty, and voila. Meanwhile, building a private message system sounds pretty complicated: you have to not only make the fields, but make them somewhat secure (not sure I’d send credit card info over it, but basically what you write only the recipient can see), be able to edit, delete, and reply to it. And this is certainly what we thought. Then the album fields turned out to be pretty complicated (never fear, we’re still working on them), and we found a fairly easy way to put up the message system. The result? The message system took a day to write (a full weekend day, it’s true), and we’ve been fiddling with the album fields for a week now.
So when I make vague promises, what I mean is “this is our schedule, and it’s how long we think it should take, and we’ll try our hardest to keep to it… but we can’t in good conscience make any real promises.” It’s worth looking forward to, but not holding your breath for.
And enjoy the message function It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it works. We’ll make it prettier and more usable, promise (check out the to do list to see our plans).
The message system is part of the notification system that maybe you’ve seen slowly growing over on the right side of the community page. We’ve slowly been adding the new notifications as we write them up, and then we’ll make it all a bit more user friendly. Really important, as far as I’m concerned, is also having a way to tell when you have new notifications. For example, right now the notification box just says how many comments you have… it needs to also say how many are new.
We love how much feedback we’ve gotten. And though obviously we revel in the positive feedback, don’t be worried about offending us or being rude if there’s something that you really dislike or if something isn’t working the way it should be. If you feel this way, there are probably other users and potential users who feel this way, so we really want to know about it.
And now for the major change mentioned in the blog post title: we agree, the username and name system is really confusing. I’m not 100% sure what we were thinking. Right now, your username is different from your profile name (unless, of course, you made them match), but it’s your profile name that shows up around the site. This is kind of weird, since many people don’t want to post their full name, but want to put their first name… yet want it to be clear exactly who they are in posts. We’re going to roll out a slightly new naming system this week, which we think makes more sense. We won’t send out any new invites until we get this done, so as to confuse as few people as possible. It’s possible that you’ll log in at some point this week and will have to make some changes to your profile: check back here and we’ll give you specific instructions if need be.
New members!
We’re sending out a new batch of invitations tonight! We’re only doing 100, which means that some people on the list won’t get them… which makes me sad (trust me, I want to up our number of users more than anyone!) but we have to make a limit somewhere, and 100 is as good as any. We’ll do another batch later in the week, once the traffic from this 100 dies down a bit. As we expand, we’ll also up our server space (someday in the not-to-distant future we’ll probably have to outsource it… eep! Unfortunately, you’re going to have to expect some ads when that happens, but we hate ads and promise to make them as non-annoying as possible) so we’ll be able to open the site up to everyone, and not just invited users.
To our new users, welcome! It might be worth your while to read through this blog a bit, to see what we’re doing and why and it might answer your questions.
Here’s a quick tour: When you sign on, you come on to the community page. Here you can see a sampling of who is already on the site. Click around and see what other people have been up to: there’s some really amazing stuff. You can make “friends” and join groups based on interests and locations, too.
At the top of the page, to the right, are a few tabs. My Profile will, oddly enough, take you to your profile. You can edit it, with your information and a photo (only “newest quilters” with photos will show up on the community page, by the way… we thought it was boring to just have blank squares). Next is Community: the main page that you already saw, and some other pages on the dropdown list on the right. Then is Talk, which will take you to our message boards. Groups also have their own message boards, and the message boards of the groups you’re a member of show up along the left. Finally is Resources, which has a whole lotta nothing at the moment, but we have actually now officially started implementing some plans for it.
To the left of the tabs are some other links. Suggestions is in bright orange, because we really want to hear your suggestions. Early adopters get a lot of influence over the site! The To-Do link will bring you to our To-Do list. You can see what we have planned and what we’re working on. We’d also kind of appreciate it if you’d take a look at it before submitting suggestions. Then comes a little Help page, which is fairly lame right now but will be expanded in the near future. Finally is Logout, which is pretty self-explanatory.
So, to our new members: a big thank you for joining! We hope you like the site. For our old members, we also hope that you like the site, and are enjoying using it. And for people who didn’t make our 100 cut but have already signed up, I’m honestly sorry and you’ll get your invite soon enough.
Happy quiltgrouping!
What we’re working on
We’ve been very busy working on several items, most notably notifications and album features.
You might notice that on the community page, in the right hand column, there are now a few notifications. It’s not the prettiest thing at the moment, and it’s certainly not complete, but so far it tells you about any comments you’ve recieved, any signatures that other users have printed on your profile, and any email addresses that you’ve referred. We’re also going to add a notification when someone makes you their friend (any day now, I hope). In the future, we’ll have a private message option, and there will be a link to your messages. We also want to put in a system where you can tag favorite albums, and you’ll be able to access all your favorites up there (that was a user suggestion, and we love it). Someday, we’ll also pretty it up into a nice little box: however, we need to figure out exactly what other features we may want up there first! If you have suggestions, definitely pass them along.
For albums, we’re still working on adding more fields and more functionalities. There’s a pretty long writeup of what we want to do in the immediate future on our To Do List (see the link to the right, or at the top on QuiltGroup.com). We’re working pretty much on the whole list at once, and it will probably be implemented in trickles.
On the member front, we’re almost ready to invite a new rash of users. We’re probably going to limit it to 100 new invites this time around, so that we don’t have the server overload problem of everyone signing up and uploading their huge files at once again. (I’m sorry to say that the Flickr upload function got pushed to the back burner while we do the album improvements, but it is still definitely a priority: it will make life easier for you AND for us once it’s up.) We’re already over that number on the invitation list, but we’ll probably do another hundred fairly soon after, so tell your friends to get on the list ASAP.
One week in…
Well, it’s been a week, and what a week it’s been! We did make it to 100 members, which I think is pretty awesome. People are signing up like mad for invitations, and we feel bad about making you wait. We just want to finish a few more things before we open the floodgates again.
If you’ve been checking the little “updates” box at the top of the community page, you can see that we’ve been adding new features every single day. Our to do list is still growing, but things are getting crossed off every day. Right now we’re working on adding a way for you to add more information about each album and about each image in an album. Sounds easy enough, right? If only.
It’s one of those problems that gets more complicated the more you think about it. If the fields are too specific and too many, there are too many gaps and it’s a PITA to enter things. If the fields are too vague and broad, what’s the point? What person A thinks is the most important thing to note about their project, person B thinks is totally irrelevant. And then there’s the fact that some albums are just many photos of one quilt, some albums are photos of many quilts… so do we make the same fields available for the whole album as for the individual photos? If we do that, are users going to have to reenter the info for every single image? (short answer: no, that sounds really annoying and we’d never make you do that. But long answer is: how to we work around that?) Will you be able to enter the information as you upload the photos, or will you have to go back and edit each photo? And to complicate matters, we want all the fields to be searchable, so that you’ll be able to find other people’s projects.
If you actually made it through the above paragraph, congratulations. It’s pretty incomprehensible to me, and I wrote it! But, as you can see, it’s a more complicated issue than it might first appear. But it’s the most common request we’ve had so far, and we absolutely agree that it’s a priority. I think the plan is to send out the next batch of invitations just as soon as we’ve figured this issue out. That way, as few users as possible (ie just the first round of beta users) will have to go back and retroactively figure out this function. (Sorry guys… it’s hard to be members of the elite)
All in all, though, things seem great! It was a good week. Everyone seems pretty happy with the site, and when you’re happy, we’re happy.
1/8 Update
We’re still getting new members trickling in, but we’ve probably more or less maxed out our initial user base at 98 profiles. Server wise, we’re pretty much ready for a new invitation to go out, but we want to add some more functionality first.
The top priority right now: comments. Isn’t it annoying that there’s no way to tell how many comments you have, and if you have any new ones? I think this is one of those things that didn’t even really occur to us until we had a bunch of users commenting on eachother’s photos. And it’s really bugging me. I feel a little pathetic constantly clicking through all my photos waiting to see if anyone has heaped me with praise. And, of course, I’m having lots of fun commenting on other people’s photos… but I have no idea if they’ve noticed. So this is what we’re working on right now. Also a few other little things from our to do list: if there’s anything that’s REALLY bugging you, make sure you tell us that you think it should be a top priority. Of course, we can’t make any promises, but we need to keep y’all happy!
We’re been collecting a bunch of email addresses for the next batch of invitations. I don’t know how many invites we’ll do yet, but we want to get people on here as quickly as we can. Due to a user request, we added a little link where you can type in your friend’s email address if you’d like them to recieve an invitation. We’re storing those names in a different list, and they’ll get an invitation saying that someone referred them: we really don’t want to get a reputation for sending unsolicited spam before we even get out of beta! So make sure you tell your friends that you signed them up If you don’t want to use the referral tool, just tell people to visit our main page and add themselves to the list, as you once did.
We don’t really like sending emails, but we’ll probably send an email to our current users when the next batch of invitations go out, to remind you to check back often and see what and who are new.
Happy quilting!
New server, and a few updates
We’re slowly attacking the to do list. Which, oddly enough, still manages to be growing, but that’s a mystery for another day. We migrated to a new server (hence the problems you may have had if you tried to sign on during a certain 1/2 hour or so last night), which is sitting behind me right now and is REALLY LOUD. Hopefully that is making things load faster for everyone. It’s not a final solution, but it will have to do for now… we’d really like your feedback as to how fast or slow the site is for you (also what kind of connection you have). Remember that the first time a picture is enlarged it will take longer to load… this is due to a snazzy little thing we wrote that helps to keep file sizes shorter (and thus download times down).
We’re going to put a little box on the community page that has news and updates, so you don’t have to keep checking the blog. Though I do like seeing how many people are reading it on my little WordPress dashboard function, so if you want to make my day a little brighter you should continue to check the blog out I’m crossing things off the to-do list instead of deleting them for right now, so you can see what the recent changes we’ve made are.
We now have 95 members! You seem to be telling others about us, because the signup list for future invitations has exploded… I hope that’s a good sign that you like what you see. We have a bit more tweaking to do before we send out more invites, but we would like to do that sooner rather than later… the more users, the more fun it will be to waste valuable quilting time here. I’m still loving looking at everyone’s images… one of the things on our to do list is to make it easier to tell when your images have comments.
Thanks for sticking with us, and keep those suggestions coming!
happy 1 day birthday to us
I made a 12 hour update, so I figured I should make a 24 hour update too.
We’re pretty astounded by your response so far. Of the 160 invitations that went out, we had 71 new members sign up. Since we had a few bouncebacks, and undoubtedly some of our emails went into spam folders, we think that this is a pretty impressive return rate. You guys have made 45 albums, with 254 images. 44 comments have been made on these images, and there have been 27 posts in the various different forums. There are 8 groups, and 26 members have joined at least one of these groups. Maybe people already knew eachother, or maybe you’re just inspired by eachother’s work, because 14 friendships have already been made, and 14 signatures written on other people’s profile pages. Not bad for a first day, when everyone (including us) is still trying to get the hang of things!
Not to get all gushy and mushy, but I want to say that I’m so stunned and impressed by the work that people have posted so far. I guess you have to be a dedicated quilter to put your name down for an invitation to a site like this and then to become a test user… but WOW. There is some truly amazing stuff on here, ranging from elegant to quirky (if you haven’t seen the Obamalka, you really must). I’m so thrilled that everyone gets a chance to show off. We’re going to make albums a bit more searchable and make it so that you can enter more information about your albums and your individual photographs… that way you’ll be able to search by whatever keywords the maker decided to describe their quilt with: pattern name, color, fabric type, theme, etcetera.
I don’t know if you’ve checked our to-do list, but it’s growing longer by the hour as we get suggestions and notice specific things that we’d like to do. Keep the suggestions (and the bug issues, of course) coming, and we’ll get to them as we can. I’m enjoying crossing things off of it, but it seems like every time I go in to cross something off, I add three more things.
And, more importantly, keep the photographs, the comments, the groups, and the profile information coming! Especially the photographs, that’s my favorite part. (And have I mentioned that we’re really sorry for how slow things are right now? There was an eensy issue that we hadn’t thought of before going live. But we’re right at this very moment literally building another server to take some of the load off, and we have been working on the Flickr upload function.) We know that our search functions are not exactly the most sophisticated right now, but we’re working on it… and when our searching ability improves, it will be so much easier to find other users that you have things in common with and to make new friends.
Again, thanks from the admins for making our first day a huge success!
