-Andrew

-Andrew

–Update: We’ve postponed the server transfer until we can resolve some deployment issues on our end. We’ll keep you notified with any happenings!

Team Wejoinin wrestled long and hard over how best to allow you guys  to provide some extra info on the signup sheet while keeping it simple enough that even my mom could use it. (Hi Mom!) After some thought, we ended up going with a free-form comment box, and sheet authors can just use the sheet description if there are any specific needs for the comment box. (So now you lovely pot-luckers, ask people to describe what they’re bringing in the signup comment and all should be well!)

And finally, thanks for all the feedback guys! We can’t read minds all to well, so we love hearing your raves and gripes!

• 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:

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Sign up to volunteer at the:

• College & Bancroft table: http://www.wejoinin.com/sheets/jridb
• Sproul table: http://www.wejoinin.com/sheets/mvhvt

CalTV has put together a quick “Voices for the Vote” video:

PS: for those of you who are not Berkeley students… check out http://maps.google.com/vote

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

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.

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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!

I’ve written a little bit about how I’m taking an entrepreneurship class here at UC Berkeley in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. I’ve definitely been thinking in the past few weeks about how we can take this idea to the rest of the world, one signup at a time.

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.

Until next time,

-Andrew

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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!)

-Hsiu-Fan “code-crusher” Wang