recent changes on buddystumbler's home page

hi folks,

i know i have been keeping a low profile for a while. i keep telling people that i would chat with them sometimes but never get around to do so. i am really REALLY sorry about that...

so, i hope you notice the recent changes we've made to buddystumbler's home page. like what? you might ask. well, first of all, we show thumbnails of people's profile pictures on either sides of the keyword cloud now. these are pictures of the most recently logged in users. hence if you want a spot in the hall of fame and drive more traffic to your profile (since the thumbnails are clickable links. yes, LINKS!), you should

1. log in frequently
2. upload a profile picture!!!

i can't stress enough how important a profile picture is. we are NOT going to put thumbnails of the same footprint on the front page! besides, ask yourself whether you would prefer to meet someone who has a profile picture in comparison to someone without. (i hope the light bulb goes on at this point and you realize the importance if you haven't already) if you are shy or don't feel comfortable posting a real picture of yourself, just post an image of something you like. example? recently i uploaded a picture of my grandma's dog. :) but then of course, my profile views became a flat line and i posted a new picture of me sitting on a giant crayon instead. ;) profile views sky-rocketed since then. ha.ha.ha. :D

second of all, the sign-in/sign-up and tour buttons have been MAGNIFIED and a little information box has been added to the front page. these are measures to help newcomers get started (and hopefully makes the lives of our existing users a bit easier too...). a feedback that we receive is that the sign-in/sign-up links are hard to find, or it's not clear what buddystumbler offers. with the giant buttons, i hope people wouldn't have a hard time finding what they need anymore (please say this is true~).

also, this is nothing new, but do you know that the keywords behind the search box are clickable links? the blinking words? and you don't have to wait until they light up to click on them. gray or yellow, they are ALWAYS clickable.

finally, please be aware that we've updated our FAQ and privacy policy.

working on the UI has always been a challenge for me. there are times when i would just bang my head on the floor or smash my laptop. i ain't an artist folks. (in fact, i used to fail my art classes...) buddystumbler might not be the best-designed site you've been to, but i just wish that all of you would appreciate its simplicity. :)

happy stumbling!

down but not out

Wow, what a long day.

Occasionally, I am asked what I do for a living. As it turns out, I do have a full time job - managing a great team of enterprise developers working in the financial software space. However, there are certainly those times when I wished I didn't have a day job - days like today when buddystumbler had to be brought down.

One of the perils of being a small site is that you're likely pinching pennies using a shared host - which is the boat we're in right now. For some odd reason, our host site5, changed their configuration of ImageMagick today. After spending all day going back and forth with them making no headway (at times, the e-mail exchange got extremely heated), I was finally relieved of my duties at work so that I could return back to my pad to pound out a solution.

After a couple of hours, I've been able to come up with something that I think will keep the application's existing functionality - mostly. So, now that I'm here talking about site changes, I wanted to go ahead and speak to a couple that we've made and some that we're planning.

First, let's talk about what's been changed.

• Photos are now optional. In order to encourage folks to publish their profile, we've made photos optional. We all know a picture speaks a thousand words, and we still want to encourage folks to post a picture, but for now we also want to generate interest in the site so we decided that photos should be optional.
  
• Reduced description limit. Several users have complained about having to fill out a description, both directly to us and indirectly through their profiles - so we decided to lower the limit on one's description. Truth be told, if you really do only add three keywords and a five word description, you're likely not going to meet anyone that way. However, we've decided to let the community decide this and as such we're loosening up this requirement as well.
  
• Removed captcha. We removed the captcha (the squiggly code thing) from the sign-up process in part because we need a server library to render this (the aforementioned ImageMagick) and said library was misbehaving. The captcha deters 'bots' (or automated computer programs) from signing up on the site and wreaking havoc. It's a bit of a risk to not have a captcha, but in the interest of stability we've decided to remove it.
  
• Added PlotKit graphs. For the same reasons we had to remove the captcha, we ended up having to discontinue our usage of Gruff. Plotkit is a completely browser-based graphing library that leverages heavy Javascript, SVG, and HTML Canvas. It not only looks great, but should keep the server lean and mean.
  

As for future enhancements, we plan on the following:

• International support. In the next few weeks, we're planning to roll out international support. The site itself will not be translated in the near term - instead, we'll keep the site an English site. Till we upgrade to the latest build of Rails, we won't have full Unicode support. That said, providing location based searches in other countries besides the United States should keep the site lively and encourage more interactions - especially for those insomniacs in our user community!
  
• Tweaked front page. Yim is cooking up a new front page and I won't steal her thunder except to ask you folks to watch for the new goodies!
  

We plan to make another Craigslist blast tonight. So, we hope to get a new influx of users. Happy stumbling!

sunday morning im

A conversation this Sunday morning:

10:07:30 AM me: sometimes
10:07:34 AM me: you can't change the world all at once
10:07:41 AM me: but I look at what the users are doing
10:07:41 AM friend: i think i told you that before.
10:07:50 AM me: how people are requesting each other
10:07:55 AM me: and sometimes the requests are obliged
10:08:00 AM me: I can't help but think that somewhere
10:08:04 AM me: somehow connections are being made
10:08:11 AM me: and friendships being developed
10:08:16 AM me: and that makes me happy
10:08:20 AM friend: i'm positive they are
10:08:21 AM me: even if this does not make us rich billionaires
10:08:44 AM me: and if I can't change the world in a cataclysmic fashion
10:08:48 AM me: I am content doing so
10:08:48 AM friend: because everything is not measured in billions?
10:08:51 AM me: 1 person at a time.

welcome new users!

Since we started going public with buddystumbler two weeks ago, our user base has grown steadily - and we're really pleased to see this! We haven't been advertising in earnest in part because Yim and I maintain a fulltime job and things are definitely heating up (we work in the same office). Nonetheless, we've focused most of our PR efforts on luminaries in the blogosphere and on Craigslist. We believe that these folks are our core audiences... so far, we've posted in four cities on Craigslist: Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and New York.

There's also been some nice chatter out in cyberspace which we're very thankful for:

• Windows Fanatics
  
• Rooster's Rail
  
• Mashable
  
• WangTam
  
• Show Web 2.0
  

For those folks, who are using buddystumbler as a way to find address your romantic void, we're actively working on increasing the diversity of the website. We understand that as of right now, it is overwhelmingly heterosexual and male. If you have any ideas, please let us know!

Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks - we're planning to unveil something very interesting on the site that we know ALL of the users will enjoy. We're still also planning on another user contest once we're convinced that site5's servers can take it. Unfortunately, buddystumbler.com still becomes inaccessible periodically and we're working with site5's staff to determine the cause.

For those users who have stuck by us since the very early days when we had just a couple of people on the site, thank you and keep believing... we'll get the users in time, as long as folks believe the concept buddystumbler is predicated on is worthwhile. Please help us spread the word and happy stumbling!