the Traxtuff official blog

ajaxified to the teeth

yonatan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:48:05 +0000

well, we got tired of moving between the dashboard and the lend/borrow/add item pages, so we made these actions happen in the dashboard. (using the futuristic AJAX technology ;) )
check it out, it's pretty posh:

a shy version

yonatan — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:26:50 +0000

... this time, most work was done under the surface, deep inside traxtuff's guts - where it's nice and warm. but still there's some improvements our faithful users might notice - some shiny effects, and an overall (hopefully) more robust experience.
let us know if you disagree, and don't hesitate to praise us if otherwise.
for those of you who may be members of the club - happy new jewish year and hoidays. and (a late, sorry) Ramadan Kareem to others.

a spike is a spike is a spike

yonatan — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 14:43:23 +0000

A pleasant surprise -
we were mentioned in ynet, a major israeli portal/news site.
While this is not an exclusive review, the results are pretty impressive -
we received ~530 (unique) visits.
thanks ynet for driving traffic our way!

On the last post I promised to talk some more about Kampyle.
I've handled a few posts with it, and so far I'm pleased. I think they make feedback gathering and analysis a much more streamlined process.

another batch of goodness

yonatan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:00:39 +0000

Despite the moisture and the heat, we've managed to get some work done.

feedback collection using Kampyle

Kampyle is a simple-as-apple-pie platform to collect user feedback, and it's a pretty clever idea - allows developers to focus on more important stuff, and at the same time enabling a much more structured feedback collection.

sort and group items on the dashboard

yonatan — Sat, 17 May 2008 20:44:46 +0000

Now that we have many items on the dashboard, it was getting harder to find who has what...

So we've added a select box with the type of layout you want for the items - sorted alphabetically, grouped by owner/borrower, or by category (books, CDs etc).

more layouts will be added as necessary - we've already got some ideas.

have fun!

Hasta la victoria siempre / vote Traxtuff for president

yonatan — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:55:35 +0000

we just submitted Traxtuff to the above European web 2.0 sites competition:

StartUp2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups (either created or willing to do so in the future) that work in the field of 2.0 technologies.

close your eyes and make a wish

yonatan — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:30:10 +0000

did you happen to wish Traxtuff had wishlists?
well, lucky you, because wishlists have just been released to the wild.

the wishlists feature attempts to tackle two things:
1) let you mark stuff you want to borrow in the future, by adding it to your wishlist - just click on the "add to wishlist" button on any item.
2) let your friends know that you are looking for something -
just click on the "add item" on your wishlist, and make a good plea. for instance "scanner - I'm looking to borrow a scanner for a couple of days for a one time need. thanks!".

new! Traxtuff vintage clothing line!

yonatan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:16:59 +0000

I'm proud to present the new Traxtuff clothing line.
this summer's going to be all about 70's cuts with bright orange all over,
as demonstrated in this shirt:

finally, the new design is here.

yonatan — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:39:11 +0000

you thought the old design was pretty, but too baby-ish. we listened.

after days of testing on different browsers, swearing at IE6, sweating when changing to right-to-left languages (aka Hebrew and Arabic),
and generally obsessing with the new design, I'm happy to announce the new design is here.

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Dana (danalonama, d3="Dana the Design Diva"), for her excellent work. I'm sure we'll make some small changes in the next days, upon receiving more user feedback.

how to tell your site is bound for glory

yonatan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:10:33 +0000

I'm proud to announce that someone bought the domain name www [dot] traxstuff [dot] com!
notice the extra S?
trax--S--tuff
apparently it's not just anybody - but an evil organization.
I can tell they are evil for two reasons:
1) they bought this domain name and put a silly mock site with commercials there instead of my site.
2) their domain name is evlservers.net, which CLEARLY stands for "evil servers".

Respect!
keep on traxing!

more visible contact lists

yonatan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:42:23 +0000

as part of my pre-declared attempts to make the site more social (after all, lending and borrowing are social activities :) ), I've added more visible contact lists. that means you can see your contacts on your dashboard, and see other users' contacts too. (although you won't see their items if they are not your approved contacts).
should've done that a while ago,
alas, deciding on the next feature is an art.

danger! warm social bits!

yonatan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:57:07 +0000

I've decided to take a risk and release some code fresh from the oven, it didn't even cool down yet. I hope this will help get some feedback.
as I've promised, I've got some changes planned, and a part of this is making the site more social - so I've added general messaging between users, and quick browsing your contacts / finding friends that aren't in your contacts yet.

as usual, the best way for you to get an impression is by going to the site and trying it out.
I hope this will help me understand the users' needs and plan the next steps...
enjoy!

avatars - a small (but nice) feature

yonatan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:50:15 +0000

while planning some major changes, I took the time to do this one for fun. I mean, what's a social network without user pictures? :)
hope you like it.
just click on your gray picture (in your home page, when logged in) to replace it with a picture to your liking.
enjoy!

a presentation for casual visitors

yonatan — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:51:30 +0000

our site is work in progress, and while it's constantly improving,
I think new visitors still might not understand the concept.
for those who don't want to register and try it out,
I have made a short presentation explaining about the concept a bit.
I hope to add this to the site soon, and translate it to our other supported languages.

introducing notifications

yonatan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:43:44 +0000

As promised on the previous post - making the site more useful ;)
Today's feature: notifications.
(the Traxtuff users among you may have received them already...).
from now on Traxtuff will notify you (once a day, week, month or never, to your liking) when new items are added to your network by one or more of your contacts.

don't worry, you can change the notifications frequency and even cancel it all together from the settings page.
enjoy,
Yonatan

Categories and (stuff-net) exploration

yonatan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:16:49 +0000

I'm exhilarated to anounce yet more features:
categories, and an "explore" page to let you find items in your network more easily - I won't ellaborate, just try it out.
these features are a part of a package of changes aimed at making our users make better use of the site:
first we got some users,
and we got some items in the site.
now we want the users to borrow and ;end/add more stuff,
so prepare for more news related with this soon.
cheers,
Yonatan

a very cool flickr group I ran into, and an idea for you

yonatan — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:25:14 +0000

first of all - a quote:
"There are two kinds of fools, those who lend books, and those who return them".

and now to the subject:
I occasionally search for forum threads about lending and borrowing, to suggest that people try Traxtuff out - I hope most people don't see this as spamming, I never do it in a commercial manner - and I only leave comments where I think it's directly related to the subject.
while running around I ran across a very cool Flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/72759907@N00/

I got there via this discussion about lending and borrowing books:

another small update

yonatan — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:48:53 +0000

some more small things for your pleasure:
* added preview to invitations
* added invitation language selection (in case you want to send an invitation to a person that speaks a different language)
* added the long anticipated feature - delete items.
* fixed some bugs (mostly small and one bigger)
* probably added new bugs - let's see if you can find them.
enjoy!
Yonatan

keeping you updated and quote-wise

yonatan — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:14:57 +0000

Even when there's not too much to tell! :)
we've just upgraded the site, this is a small upgrade - fixed some bugs and made a small change to the home page (when logged out) to make it more friendly to people arriving for the first time.
and if you really insist - we've also added the long awaited personal messages to invitations.

however, I've decided to upgrade this post by adding some borrowing and lending quotes:

first, my favorite:

لقد حان الوقت لتقديم Traxtuff بالعربية !

yonatan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:40:40 +0000

It's time to introduce Traxtuff in arabic:

Traxtuff هو مكان يمكنك من خلاله متابعة أغراضك التي قمت باعارتها لأصدقائك أو باستعارتها منهم، فبإمكانك من خلال هذا الموقع أن تبحث عن الأغراض التي تحتاجها لاستعارتها، وتجد من يمتلكها من أصدقائك وبامكانه اعارتك اياها.

Our new Facebook App

wishcow — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:53:53 +0000

Traxtuff now has it's own facebook app!
You can install it by going to
this link.

The new app has the following exciting features:
1. Inviting your facebook friends to join Traxtuff.
2. Viewing your Traxtuff items inside your facebook profile.
3. Add/Lend/Borrow links opening the relevant pages in facebook.
4. After you add the app, your traxtuff friends who also add the app will automatically become your contacts in Traxtuff.

הגיע הזמן להציג את טראקסטף בעברית

yonatan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:54:14 +0000

Finally - introducing Traxtuff in Hebrew:

כן, באמת הגיע הזמן להציג את טראקסטף בעברית.
מה זה טראקסטף?
טראקסטף הוא אתר לעידוד שאילה והשאלת חפצים בין חברים.
איך?
קודם כל רושמים מה השאלנו ושאלנו מחברים -
כשמוסיפים משהו ששאלנו מחברה אפשר גם לשלוח לה הזמנה.
אם אתם לא יודעים את כתובת הדוא"ל, אפשר להוסיף משתמשים לא רשומים.

two new languages and some more candies

yonatan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:06:40 +0000

hi y'all! I'm very proud to present two new languages for Traxtuff - German (aka Deutsch, translated by lisalotta.p), and Arabic (aka عَرَبيْ, translated by SnowWhite and DarkAngel).
hope to publish blog posts in arabic and german soon. and perhaps in hebrew as well, since I haven't actually done that yet...

the new version brings some more improvements:

* better lend and borrow forms - we made it much shorter and smarter.

new version - quicker and more informative

yonatan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:04:26 +0000

Team Traxtuff keeps blasting you with new versions!

this one brings a few changes:
1) better over all performance. mostly thanks to our hosting provider - which solved a problem in it's infrastructure that hurt performance. YAY!
2) better page load time - thanks to Wishcows efforts, applying some magic tech folks call "cache".

hebrew galore

yonatan — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:37:04 +0000

we are proud to present the new shiny multilingual traxtuff version!
two new flavours: hebrew boys and hebrew girls. since hebrew is a very gender aware language, we've made an effort to empower the girls a bit. it was also fun to write :)

to check it out go to the home page at www.traxtuff.com (the blog and forum stay in english, sorry), and on the top bar, opposite of the "Home Blog Forum" you'll see the language select box.

The much anticipated feature - confirmations

yonatan — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:04:21 +0000

I hope the new version we updated yesterday solves the problem most of out users complained about - the capability to mark stuff as borrowed/lent/returned without confirmation from the owner/borrower.

we've been working on this feature for the last couple of weeks - writing it was pretty quick but watching users struggle with it made us go back and revise it a few times.

at the moment we introduce two familiar scenarios - "I lent an item" and "I borrowed an item".
in the future we hope to release more scenarios - "Request to borrow", "Give item", "Request to get it back" etc.

Unique display/login names - catch the best ones while you can!

yonatan — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:15:49 +0000

thanks to wishcow, you can now login both with your email + password or with your user name + password. for instance you can use either "moshe1978@gmail.com" or just "moshe" (if that's your user name).

the user names were made unique (before they were just display names), so use the fact that you are on the QT and grab the best ones before it's too late and another Dan, Ruthie or Mike join us.

(to do that, click on the "settings" link on the top links and change your user name)

good luck!

Two exciting new features

wishcow — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:44:52 +0000

Import GMail contacts

this is something a lot of people have been requesting:
go to the "contacts" page and then click on "import contacts from gmail".
the log in is secured by encrypting the password, and we don't save it, so you don't need to worry about privacy so much.

we hope to make this a part of new users registration/invitation acceptance, so you can set up your borrowing and lending community quickly.

we will also look into doing the same with Yahoo and Hotmail.

RSS feeds

So what is traxtuff, and why?

yonatan — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:49:44 +0000

Traxtuff is a place where you can keep track of stuff you lend to friends, and also search for stuff to borrow when you need it.

The Need

Traxtuff was created because I desperately needed a way to track the stuff I lend to people.

half of my books, CDs, DVD's etc are lent, and I can't remember to whom.
and I still have the electric saw I borrowed from Maor's dad, two years after I borrowed it. I will return it though - I just didn't remember I borrowed until I found it recently.

I could use a piece of paper, but I want something I can access from anywhere.

Traxtuff Has A New Blog!

yonatan — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:58:00 +0000

Thanks Wischow for the great work, setting up the blog and forum!
in the next days we'll make sure the same same login applies for traxtuff, the blog and the forum, so you only have to login at www.traxtuff.com and you can access the blog and forum and comment.

Yonatan