NearCircle Stories

Some planned maintenance

2008-02-28T01:42:00.002-05:00

We are relocating our servers to a different coast (they craved the sunny environs of California!), and while they are on the big UPS truck we have moved the service to a temporary home.

Should have everything back to normal by morning, with another planned hiccup when the servers arrive and are ready for their tan.

Dave

New circle owner controls

2007-11-18T02:17:00.000-05:00

By popular request I just pushed a new feature that allows owners to change the type of their circles from the edit page.

You can freely switch back and forth between "open", "normal" and "private" now at any time.

I'm gonna take a break on new development for thanksgiving week to hang out with my family but once I get back to work, expect some long needed changes to the widget to start to appear, like the ability to limit the number of posts to the X most recent, and new support for merging all of your circles into one place.

Have a nice holiday!

Yikes!

2007-11-12T01:41:00.001-05:00

A recent change to fix a bug caused a much more annoying bug, that actually caused us to crash a few times in the last 2 evenings...I think I have it squished and things ought to be back to normal.

Email invites

2007-11-07T01:05:00.000-05:00

By popular request we now have the ability to send invites to join your circles right to the email inbox of your friends.

When they sign up following the link in your invite email they will automatically be added to your circle, so you can see when they've joined.

Also I fixed a race condition that causes some circles to stop refreshing feeds after a while. Props to the unschooling circle for discovering this :)

Changes (more options and styles) are coming soon to the widgets, so keep an eye out on this blog for details!

Back to work!

2007-11-04T01:15:00.000-05:00

I'm back to work now after a short break to deal with some family issues.

Expect more posts, and more features coming soon!

Thanks for your patience and support during my absence.

Off for a few

2007-10-18T15:06:00.001-04:00

We've had a death in the family, and I won't be working for a little while as we attend to our family needs.

Nearcircle will still be up and running, and there should be no interruptions of service, but personal responses to mail will be slow till next week.

Thanks

Dave

Exisiting Circles And The New Directory

2007-10-08T18:00:00.000-04:00

When I created the new directory, all the existing circles were left uncategorized.

I wanted to give all the circle owners an opportunity to pick where they'd like to see their circle show up in the directory.

But I also know that you all have better things to do with your time then play around on nearcircle, so in a few more days I'm going to help you all out and assign a category that I think fits to any circles that have yet to be categorized.

I'll do my best to pick one that fits, and you can always change it later if you disagree. (In fact the category for a circle can be changed at any time, instantly, from the edit circle page. So if you change your mind after you categorize it, its no biggie.)

I hope you all continue to enjoy nearcircle... as soon as I get over this flu... I'll be back to work on more of your requests!

The Directory Has Arrived

2007-10-06T22:50:00.000-04:00

The next big feature for nearcircle will be landing this evening.

We now have a categorized directory of circles to make finding new circles much easier.

Some interesting notes about the new feature:

All existing circles will not appear in the directory until the owner of them sets a category for the circle via the edit circle page.
All new circles will be created with their category already assigned.
The directory can be browsed without logging in and should be crawl-able by search engines so this should help get the word out about your site even more.
Private circles will not appear in the directory.
The circles are listed in the directory in a way that the most active circles will appear at the top of the category lists. Right now activity is judged by the number of members. Later on I'll change the measure of activity to be more tamper proof, but since we are small-ish now I thought this would do. :)

I took a stab at what the categories should be, but if you'd like to see others please let me know.

UPDATE: Since I have the flu, I did the install a little earlier than usual tonight. It's live now ... enjoy!

Circle page cleanup

2007-10-03T00:45:00.000-04:00

A new build is going live tonight with improvements to the circle home pages.

The list of recent posts has been changed to much smaller, cleaner and indexable so your circles will get visibility in search engines.

The way it works now is we show only posts less than 5 days old unless the only post from that site is older than 5 days, then we show it anyway to make sure that every site in the circle shows at least one post.

This means for active bloggers the last 5 days of your posts will show up, and if you don't post that often then at least you still are included.

I've tested this out with some of the more busy circles and it should dramatically cut down on the load time of the pages and the clutter.

Additionally there was a "hidden" feature that was there before, where if you held your mouse still over a link you would get your browser's "tooltip" showing the summary of the post behind that link. This was cool and all, but hard to discover, so I made a fancy new version that pops up immediatley.

My wife tells it's better...so who am I to argue? :)

The build should be up around 2:30 AM Eastern time, when I usually do my late night installs.

UPDATE: build is now live.. please tell me what you think of the visual changes to the page, good or bad? :)

Anonymous surfing now available

2007-09-30T00:12:00.000-04:00

You can now browse other sites without showing up as a visitor in the widget or the stats for those sites, if you'd like to keep your surfing habits completely anonymous.

The new setting is under "Edit Profile" in the account settings section. It's called "Allow people to see when I've visited a blog".

By default it is on, which is the current behavior.

With this setting off (anonymous browsing), you can still chat on web pages, but you will not show up as "online" or in the recent list.

You will still show up as visiting any circle homepages off of the nearcircle site itself so if you want to hang out and chat, you can go there and still advertise your availability.

Remember though that keeping your self visible on others pages has some really nice effects.

I've found that people clicking on profiles they see on webpages is one of the strongest traffic generators for your websites, so consider it a tradeoff of your anonymity for new referrals to your sites.

I'd like to thank the member who requested this change, I really act on all your feedback.
I'd tell you who it is, but I think they would want to stay anonymous :)

In other news....

I've put the multi circle widget work on hold for a bit to make a category based directory of circles, since that it is the #1 requested feature.

Thanks for circlin !

Changes to the circle home pages

2007-09-22T13:12:00.000-04:00

We are starting to have circles with a huge amount of posts in them.

In order to make the circle page load faster, I'm thinking of only showing posts that are less than 2 weeks old.

Only the recent stuff will be there and the clutter will be gone.

I'd like to hear from you (you can leave comment on this post or send me a message) with your thoughts on this change before I make it.

How do you use the circle page? Do you often go back in time beyond two weeks?

Thanks!

Sheep have been sheared

2007-09-21T20:45:00.000-04:00

Watching you all use nearcircle these last two weeks it's become clear that anonymous users are just clutter...the point if nearcircle isn't the stats but the community of members...so:

Tonight I will push a build that eliminates all anonymous users (the sheep icon) completely.

Plus all those anon users were making the pages and widgets slower, bigger and uglier...

To all my sheep-ish friends I wish you a fond "good-BAAAA"!! :)

You will need to refresh or revisit any pages you are on to notice the change, but all your current widget embedding code will still work just fine. This is just a change in the back end.

I'll update this post after the change goes live....sometime in the WEEE hours of tonight :)

UPDATE: (about 2 AM EST) The push is now live and all seems well in nearcircle land.

What's cookin

2007-09-20T22:42:00.000-04:00

Many tasty new dishes are being prepared in our test kitchens.
Some highlights:

Multi circle widgets -- Add one widget to your blog that will show posts from multiple circles, making sure not to show the same post twice even if a feed is in one than one circle.
An option to show only the X most recent posts in the widget to save space.
The flock of sheep will be herded into a single icon.
Multiple widgets on a blog won't mess with your stats.
The view circle page is being made purtier :)

I've made a ton of changes already based on your feedback, like getting rid of the public stats displayed on the circle home page.

I REALLY appreciate and value all of your feedback, it drives my todo list :)

So keep those suggestions coming!

Oh, and at the current rate we should have our 100th registered user by morning.

A hearty welcome to all of our new members!

Pardon out dust....

2007-09-20T11:56:00.000-04:00

After gathering feedback from everyone, I'm in process of rebuilding the widget to support multiple circles much better.

The changes are BIG, so I'm rolling them out in stages to make sure that each part works before I move on to the next.

Last night the first part of the task was pushed live---a compete rewrite of the insides of the widget!

I try to test as much as I can before I push changes out, but the nature of embedding on the web is highly unpredictable, each site/browser seems to pose new challenges.

So...

Please let men know if you see any strange behavior in the widget.

You can send a message to my nearcircle account, and I'll hop right on it :)

Thanks for your support and patience... cool new stuff is on the way!

Dave

UPDATE: I found some nasty buggies this morning with the changes I made last night.... (I love embedding!) I think I've squished em all and the fix is now live... please let me know if your widgets are still acting odd :)

Multiple Circles on a Blog

2007-09-15T11:44:00.000-04:00

The best part of making a product is seeing how people actually use it.

No matter how you think your product will be used customers always surprise you in interesting ways.

Did you know that flickr started out life as a massively multiplayer online game?

Or that YouTube was originally video dating?

Or that PayPal started as a palm pilot application?

Well following in that great tradition, nearcircle's users have suprised me!

I didn't expect folks to want to put more than one circle on their blogs, so the current nearcircle widget is a little clumsy for that.

Coming soon are improvements to the widget that should make multiple circles look and work much nicer.

As usual...feedback is always appreciated!

Feel free and drop me a note with any suggestions in nearcircle. My user name is bez.

Of course you can also always chat with me when you see me on your blog :)

Typepad now one click

2007-09-14T01:41:00.000-04:00

Another code push this evening, and now we support adding of our widget to typepad blogs with one click.

The typepad folks did a really nice job with the developer workflow, it only took me 10 minutes to add it to our site!

Please keep all of your feedback coming, positive and negative. Most of your ideas and suggestions have already made their way into nearcircle.

One week...

2007-09-07T01:52:00.000-04:00

And I can finally get some good sleep. Thanks to all of our users for helping get us thru the beta period!
I really appreciate all of the feedback we been getting.

Now finally off to bed :)

I love me some Google.

2007-08-31T13:47:00.000-04:00

One of the least known and surprisingly coolest features in Google is the calculator.

I had a quick question while looking through a log, and rather than crack open my calculator..I just typed this into my browsers search box: 10 megabits per second in megabytes per minute.

I love software that just works. Click the link for the answer :)

We finally launched!

2007-08-31T11:39:00.000-04:00

After a year or so if planning, thinking and coding we finally launched our site in the wee hours of last night..

www.nearcircle.com

It's currently still getting it's feet wet...and we have lots of things on the todo list to add...rich text profiles...heLLLOOO?!?!

But stop by and let me know what you think!