A new type of album
When we started planning this site, figuring out how we wanted albums to work was the trickiest part.
My original plan was that you had to select which type of album you wanted to do. The idea would be that an album about your road trip to different quilting stores would have different fields from an album about a quilt you made. This got very complicated very quickly, and had to be dropped.
When we first made albums, we kind of accidentally went the opposite way: NO details, instead of too many. But this didn’t work either. Users wanted to have some information.
We’ve decided to introduce sort of a happy medium: the project album. When you go to make a new album, you’ll soon have two choices: a project album, or you can click to switch to a plain album. The plain album will have some general fields, but the project album will have a series of fields that are really specifically meant to describe a quilt.
But there’s more, and I think that this is really the coolest part. One of our users, evitalace, actually gave us the idea in our suggestions page: a project diary. Think of it as a little blog about your album. You can write little entries about how your project is going, your thought processes, comments. You can think of it as notes for yourself, or a story to tell the world. You can link certain photos to certain entries, or just have a stand-alone entry. I hope that this is a really helpful tool.
And speaking of tools, we love the new Flickr upload ability. We’re going to add the ability to upload directly from some other sites, too. So far we plan on doing Picassa and Photo Bucket. Any others that you want?
And yes, a note about the Resources section. I’ve been putting some random things into the Wiki, and boy am I completely incoherent when I’m trying to explain something. I think I’ve been out of school far too long. We really have to open this up to everyone soon… right now it isn’t because we’re trying to figure out how to make your QuiltGroup login the same as the Wiki login.
What I really, really want to get to is information about patterns into the site. I’m going to push for that soon. There are just so many patterns, from so many sources! This is definitely gonna take some serious thought.
Flickr!
We’ve added Flickr functionality! You can now upload your photos directly from Flickr. That was one of the first requests we got, and we’re sorry it took so long: other things kept coming up, y’know? But we’ve put it up, and it’s a pretty snappy little feature, I think.
We lied
See, the problem is that y’all seem to keep telling your friends about us, so we’ve had a ton of signups for invites in the past few days. So we had a schedule to get an invite to everyone on the list by, well, right now… but then the list grew. Exponentially. (Seriously, by a lot: did we hit some popular blog or something?)
So, we’re still sending out invites in batches of 50, but it looks like we need another day to get everyone on the list.
We hope everyone’s enjoying the site, and that it’s not too slow. The new recruits seem to be lurkers more than posters: when we’ve let groups of new people in in the past, they’ve immediately started putting up tons of albums, comments, groups, etc. The past few days, new users have been clicking around a lot, but not necessarily putting stuff up. We’re finding this pretty interesting, actually. But we do want to say: get to work! We want to see what you’ve done 
Where we’ve been recently (and new users!)
They say the most stressful things on marriage are a new baby and moving house, but maybe they should add launching an internet social networking website. Then we’d definitely have 2 of the 3.
Okay, maybe that’s kind of an exageration: we’re not actually headed to counseling over this, but oy can launching a small business be stressful! Especially on the lack of sleep that comes with a newborn. We’ve been heatedly debating all sorts of features and ideas that we have, and in the end I think it’s making a stronger site.
I do feel we owe you an explanation as to why there hasn’t been much in the way of updates. Believe it or not, Barnaby has been working on this site more intensively that he ever has! He’s taking his paternity leave at the library, you see, so that he can actually get some work done (home being rather noisy and chaotic at the moment), and has been working intently on making the site faster. Which is all well and good, but I keep saying “the users want FEATURES” (and by “users” I mean “me” and then I extrapolate my wishes to all you people). So I said that he could have 1 week to work on the speed issue, and whatever he gets done is great, but then he MUST spend the following 3 weeks working on the to-do list, particularly the resources section.
Well, at the end of one week, he spent a whole day putting up the Wiki (which is lovely, by the way, and we all should get to work filling it up with information!) and then said he had a few more speed things to resolve and he was just going to take a few more days. Well, now he’s halfway through his time off, and he wanted another week to do speed, and I put my foot down: FEATURES. I then went to the to-do list and bolded everything I want done in the next 2 weeks.
So I think he now sees my side of the story, and at this very moment he’s talking to a rep from a hosting company (don’t forget: everything is still being hosted from our living room!) and it looks like we can’t actually afford to outsource right now (“starting” at $300 a month… and I think we can all guess that the “starting” services involve a server built of twigs and powered by hamsters on a wheel) but we’re going to try to see what we can do to speed things up for slightly less money than that. I don’t want to have ads quite yet (I’d like to have some features first… feels kind of tacky to be asking for money when we don’t have all that much on offer!) but we’re going to have to start thinking about it.
And then he’s going to get to work on features. Promise! Everyone has been so patient, and it’s so cool that new albums are still being uploaded every day. We haven’t even had any new users in months… another thing which is being rectified tonight. We feel so bad that we haven’t sent out any invites in ages, while the speed thing gets worked out, that we’re going to invite everyone on the waiting list in small batches over the weekend. So if you’re still waiting for an invite, check your inbox by Sunday night. (We’ll update here if things don’t go according to plan).
As always, we really hope that you’re enjoying the site, and we want to hear any feedback from you. And we’re really sorry it seems like we haven’t done anything, but I swear we’ve been working our little butts off: just on all back end stuff. But we’re going to start ignoring that for a while, and do some more features.
