yonatan's blog

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.

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

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

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:

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