congratulations to lnshih!
It was a very close race up until the last week when lnshih ran away with the prize. lnshih, we've already been in touch so look for a check in the mail. I want to also just take a moment and thank kentuckyfried and waki who I know was also aggressively trying to spread the word throughout the past month.
At the end of the first month and through only referrals, the site has grown to just over 130 people. During this time, Amit, Yim, and myself collectively made over 80 "check-ins" - which in programmer speak is a revision to the site. The gross majority of these changes were due to user feedback and we feel that the site has become much stronger since we debuted last month.
For this last week, we added a popular user request by the community: the ability to give high fives on a match's public profile page. The feature works a bit oddly in the sense that if you've not high fived a buddy yet, the high five section looks like the shout outs section. If you have high fived the buddy already, the display is the way it was before. Unfortunately, during this process I noticed that the headshots aren't centered in the high fives area anymore. Luckily, Yim comes back to the states tonight! CSS hacking is not my forte.
Before we let the site out into the wild we want to make at least 4 more changes to the site:
Hopefully, we can begin debuting the site next week. We'll begin advertising where our user base is (mostly on the east and west coasts) and go from there.
In addition, we'll be starting a new contest! This time, the contest won't be predicated on invitations but something else entirely different so stay tuned!
Thanks for the support and happy stumbling!
At the end of the first month and through only referrals, the site has grown to just over 130 people. During this time, Amit, Yim, and myself collectively made over 80 "check-ins" - which in programmer speak is a revision to the site. The gross majority of these changes were due to user feedback and we feel that the site has become much stronger since we debuted last month.
For this last week, we added a popular user request by the community: the ability to give high fives on a match's public profile page. The feature works a bit oddly in the sense that if you've not high fived a buddy yet, the high five section looks like the shout outs section. If you have high fived the buddy already, the display is the way it was before. Unfortunately, during this process I noticed that the headshots aren't centered in the high fives area anymore. Luckily, Yim comes back to the states tonight! CSS hacking is not my forte.
Before we let the site out into the wild we want to make at least 4 more changes to the site:
- Revisit how we construct queries within the system to reduce load on garbage collection. buddystumbler literally runs on a host that charges $5 a month and so the server doesn't have a whole lot of resources. Sadly, the server crashes periodically - but we're hoping these core changes will stabilize things.
- Update the index page to inform users how many buddies have requested them in the last 7 days. Currently, this isn't consistent with the default view when the user clicks on that page.
- Add a notification to inform the user when a buddy request is made. When we launched the site, we thought it would be neat if users went around blindly asking for matches (without being told who is interested in them). We've since gone away from that; though we have this functional hole in the software because we didn't originally plan on this.
- In the activation email, provide explicit instructions on how to complete a profile. Some users were struggling with this.
Hopefully, we can begin debuting the site next week. We'll begin advertising where our user base is (mostly on the east and west coasts) and go from there.
In addition, we'll be starting a new contest! This time, the contest won't be predicated on invitations but something else entirely different so stay tuned!
Thanks for the support and happy stumbling!
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