Hey everyone, I’m excited to introduce a couple of new features we’ve released this week for you all:
Public sheet list views & custom usernames
Collapsible sheet sidebars
Redesigned sheet list home
New sheet administration options: copy & clear
Sleeker cell header editing
Public sheet list views & custom usernames
Many sheet creators have requested a way to get people to view a grand, big list of their sheets, all in one place. For example, we’ve had requests from professors who want their students to see all of their office hour signup sheets in one place. We’ve responded by giving you public sheet lists and custom usernames in your URLs.
How does this work? First, every user receives an autogenerated custom URL You can see what it is by logging in and checking the URL location bar in your browser.
A close-up of my location bar:
Tell all your users to go to this URL, and they’ll see a special publicly-visible view of all your sheets:
Of course, if you don’t want users to see this list of sheets, you’re under no obligation to give out your link. (And yes, we’re thinking about building in privacy features so you can choose not to display certain sheets in this view!).
If you want to change your username, you can visit the “Account” tab and change it:
It’s Voter Registration Week at UC Berkeley, and the nonpartisan UC Berkeley Vote Coalition is calling all of you who go to school there to help register other students to vote!
Lately, Hsiu-Fan, Jason and I have been getting lots of emails from our users telling us things from “I think your site is awesome!” to “Something totally broke!” We love it!
While it’s no secret that fixing broken things is nothing to cheer about, I’ve been surprised in the past couple of months at just how much I love having interactions with you all. I love that what we do makes a difference in your lives. I love that you care enough to tell us why something isn’t working. Many of you even offer us suggestions to make Wejoinin a little friendlier, and we certainly do take everything into serious consideration.
Hsiu-Fan and I get the warm fuzzies when we get small compliments from “this is really useful” to big ones like “thanks, you guys seriously saved my life!” Well, shucks.
This is also to encourage you to email us ( / ) should you find something really wonky or if you’re discovering weird behavior on your sheet or if our sheets are being terribly confusing to you (we’ll do our best to make them behave).
Once again, a warm and hearty “thanks!” from your friends here at Wejoinin,
-Andrew
Andrew always promises cool new things (sometimes soon), but today I want to tell you about cool things that are no longer broken.
For awhile now, editing sheets has been finicky to downright broken in IE. I updated the site a few days ago, after fixing it a week ago and waiting awhile to make sure it really didn’t break anything else that was important. There were two things that were broken: deleting headers (that is, rows and columns), and changing the number of signups allowed on a slot.Warning: tech nerdery ahead. Read on for the gritty details.
All’s been quiet here among us at Wejoinin for the past couple months or so. Hsiu-Fan and I have been cranking away in our respective classes and haven’t quite gotten the time to get in some work on this application.
However, we’re really thankful to those of you who use this site and continue to inform us of broken things and give us suggestions and even tell your friends!
In class, we’ve had industry big shots come in and talk a lot about ideation, marketing, distribution strategies, acquiring funding and the like. It’s been an eye-opening whirlwind of learning for me.
And even though all this talk about starting a business is dandy, I can’t help but feel this greater desire to build something really sweet. Today we had PBWiki founder David Weekly in class talking about his experience starting the project on his own. And if you’ve heard it once, you need to hear it again: It doesn’t matter how cool your technology is. All that matters is that you can solve somebody’s problem, really really well.
So let’s do that. After staying dormant for a while, we think it’s time to keep Wejoinin moving forward. Last month, we added a friend and developer Jason Ting (of iPhoneSender fame) to the team. We think he’s got a lot of programming and design experience to contribute to the project. We’ll have him in here in a little bit to say hi.
Hsiu-Fan and I will drop in here when we have some breathing room to get the rest of this site up and running. Until then, you could do us a great favor by making yourself a sheet and tell us how it’s working for you.
We have a bunch of cool features (alright, I agree, why didn’t we think of them earlier?) and we wanted to showcase them. Lots of pretty screenshots lie after the more link, so take a look, but in summary the new features are: adding multiple rows and columns at a time, tweaked UI for signup cells (open/close and changing signup limits), sheet templates, and more.
We will be switching servers shortly after we ring in the New Year on the West Coast. We’re going to pull the plug for just a couple of hours at 3AM PST or so on Jan. 1 2008 and make our move from Dreamhost over to Slicehost.
When we come back online that morning, you’ll see a couple of extra features that’ll help you get your sheets up and started as quickly and easily as possible! I’ll discuss these new features on New Years’ Day.
Here’s to new years and new server homes,
-Andrew
(PS: this move is not, contrary to popular belief, because Andrew and I are living the good life with too much cash to spend. Simply, Dreamhost runs Ruby on Rails applications inconsistently at best.)
(PPS: the switch has been flipped. Hopefully things settle down out there in internet land soon. If the site is blindingly fast, its on the new server, otherwise its not!)
We were notified this morning to an error on our site preventing people from signing up. We checked our logs and realized–uh oh!–we’ve let a software mistake crawl onto our server for over three weeks now. This is completely unacceptable on our part, and we do sincerely apologize to those of you who assumed that we’d be jumping all over it the minute that error message popped up on your browsers. We’ve fixed the error and all sheets are now processing signups.
We understand you gave us a try with the highest faith and expectations. We’ve certainly dropped the ball, and as disappointing as it is for us, we understand more importantly that we’ve disappointed you.
If you’ve had any data loss or critical sheets that have been disabled due to this error, please contact me () to work through any resolution options.
—
This winter, we’re revamping our development and deployment processes so as to be far more rigorous before we release any changes. This means that incidences like these should not happen anymore. We thank you for the good faith many of you have been extending to us.
You’ll also start seeing some good things on the horizon: we’ll be taking your feedback from these past few months and rolling out some new interface enhancements and feature releases that will give you even more control over your data. We’re even moving to a new server that’ll make for a zippier experience.
Once again, we apologize and we sincerely hope to have you riding with us in the months ahead.
There’s been a lot of noise in the blogosphere lately with concern over the Facebook Beacon. Most folks are worried about Facebook becoming the new Big Brother, recklessly lording over your personal and private data and broadcasting it to your social network.
Today I logged on to see what all the hubbub was all about, and at the top of my profile page there was a small notice notifying me that the terms of use have been updated.
An aside: who actually reads terms of service agreements?
So I clicked on over to browse the TOS and realized, wow, this thing is pretty comprehensive. Can somebody get me a translator? Where’s the part where we talk about data that comes in via the Beacon?
I actually couldn’t find anything. But something has changed. Can anybody help? Perhaps Facebook should have given us a summary of what’s new about the Terms of Service. It seems like the right thing to do, yeah?
Oh yeah, which brings me back to us: We’ve got a rather plain Terms of Service. We’re not about lording over your information, we’re more about telling you in straight talk what our aims and objectives are and how we do our best to help you along. And if we change it, we’ll do the right thing and tell you in plain, simple talk.
Wejoinin is a way to build and share online signup sheets without having to cry. It’s a pet project of some of us here at the porkbuns initiative, a group of friends here at UC Berkeley who like to build shiny, friendly things!
If you encounter any problems, please let or know and they promise to help you out lickety-split!
Wejoinin is a way to build and share online signup sheets without having to cry. It’s a pet project of some of us here at the porkbuns initiative, a group of friends here at UC Berkeley who like to build shiny, friendly things!
If you encounter any problems, please let or know and they promise to help you out lickety-split!
