EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

I love the garden analogy, many activities have a double life as a living metaphor. For me gardening is a perfect fit. Managing a garden is a huge task, one that shares lots of qualities also found in starting a business. Regardless of how and where you grow, there are lots of things to take into account, changing terrains, unexpected blunders, losses, pests, bad weather, learning experiences, and so forth.
In many ways I've approached the development of Ekaweeka just like I have my garden. Right now in the Eka-Garden we've turned the soil, the growing season is around the corner, we've fertilized, our seeds have just been planted and some of them are already poking out for their first glance of exposure to the harsh world they'll endure. We have to continue planting, we have to watch the seedlings, anticipate potential fates, and keep focus with adaptation by our side.

We've just installed the first email notification function. Now, when users receive a comment, message, or a friend request they will get an email!

We have a bunch of updates we will be rolling out shortly. You can expect the following in the next two weeks or sooner:
- Item Selling: Users will be able sell any of their items by specifying them as so in the item manager.
- Item Photo Uploading and Price Issues: Unlimited photo uploading for each item and a less restrictive pricing field.
- Small session id issues: friend count, username display in the top, and more.
- Items multiple sizes/types w/multiple prices. With this feature a single item post will now be able to list multiple options for that item with corresponding prices associated with each different version.
- Featured items and items page in main site: A "Featured Items" window will display various items on the index page and a page specifically for items will display all the items under Ekaweeka's roof.
- Invitation system: You've seen it one before, users will be able to send out a group invite, or invite people individually. We're hoping to bring our invite system to you with a special twist, keep your eyes peeled for this bad boy!
- Profile customization: Insert your own styles sheet, change your fonts, colors, background etc. We plan to take this a step further but our heavier updates are still deep in the labs the R&D department.
- Profile Types: This one is down the list for a reason. We would like to see some more profiles, and types of users before creating any categorization methods, we wouldn't want to limit how anyone labels them self (it’s hard enough as it is!). This update could be as simple as an optional tag, and an organization system in the browsing and searching areas. You can help though, go to "edit profile info" show us what kind of users are out there and enter your own profile type.
- Networking and Sharing Tools: Look out for extra tools in the contact area of your profile. We'll be adding such features as "Email Profile" and "Suggest to a Friend".
- Insert Media: We know you are going to do it your way, but for those who aren't so inclined this feature will make it easy to add music movies and more to your page!

This weekend was an interesting one, we got the email notifications in. However, (of course) after a number of bug checks and deciding to roll out the feature to the rest of the world we noticed the email bound messages couldn't be formatted the same way the internal message system messages were. This effected the comments and add-friends messages.

I noticed this when I was at my good friend Joey's house in West Hollywood. He signed up and we we're adding each other to our friend lists when we discovered the link in the internal message was no longer active. In an attempt to prevent this from ruining our evening I decided to tackle it later (but only after obsessing over the issue a bit too much). I got home an hour later and was able to determine where and how to separate each message with unique html tags for each message.

This trial and error feature roll out left me slightly unsatisfied and so I decided to continue plugging away at other unfixed bugs. The most notable to me was the friend list (if you have more then 4 friends - instead of starting a new row in the friend box the friends were pushing out to the right). It was an ugly error that was soon to plague the format of anyone's profile/account pages once they had more then 4 friends.

Jeff and I have been talking about the friends per row manager and taking small stabs at it but without luck thus far. It helped that there is already a working version of this functionality in the photos box but since the friends array script requires friends and their profile photo it wasn't going to be as easy as duplicating the images script.

I should interject this story with the fact that Briana and I went out to Manhattan Beach and body surfed Sunday afternoon. Surfing like many sports and focus demanding activities clears your head, washes out distractions, and unites your mind and body. The state of mind produced by surfing has been compared neurologically to that produced by Buddhist Monks practicing zazen. Before we had left for the beach it was very difficult to walk away from my new born baby website. But it helped dramatically. Ironically, sometimes the best way to get the job done, is to take a break and return with a clear and ready outlook.

Late Sunday night I made what seemed like the 30th try to have the friend images start a new row after the fourth friend. Thanks to our chilly but wonderful afternoon of riding the waves (only in Southern California could one surf in December!), a moment of clarity was with me and as though the answer was obvious from the start, I fixed the friend's per row issue. As an added bonus in a related but separate problem, I immediately saw why the number of friends count in the title bar of the friend box wasn't displaying the right number. Bam! Two problems fixed in one swing.

This pretty much accounts for my weekend, two problems fixed, one feature added! As I am typing our items system is getting an overhaul. Hopefully, by tomorrow users will be able to add as many photos to their items as they would like. And they will be able to list the item price in any format (Briana's request).

More to come folks don't go away.

In the last 24 hours we've had a few developments. By request of Jeff we've added a "website" feature that users can now add. With your basic hyper link code anyone can list other websites besides their Eka Site.

And coming from Briana of Love Briana we now have interests. People can describe what they love, their current books, where they like to travel. Or for businesses specialties, direction of future operations, or perhaps just some background on the businesses original inspiration can all be listed from profile settings.

Last but not least, users can now send messages to other users. This feature was temporarily disabled by... well me. Now with some help and careful code editing I've brought this life line of the Eka-system back to exisitence. I'll try not to break anything else from now on.
:-(

Last night a group of Ekaweeka's leading users met up for a night of wine, cheese, tacos and fun. It wasn't an official event in any capacity but while catching up on our lives and filling our bellies there was discussion about our wonderful new project.

We chatted about some great experiences we had already had while using the site, and we discussed the new features like profile customization, and possible feature developments like the Eka pages.

Lots of great feedback there, possibly interesting direction for the Eka pages. As they are now, you start with a blank page, and add widgets to customize the page content. One suggestion was that they fit the format of the other pages, and have a customizable body, so one could give the page its own title, and enter whatever content/text/photos/html etc.

On styles, we found everyone was very excited about customizing their page. Yet the whole Social Network - Profile Customization phenomenon is largely supported by other people supplying users with style-sheets (CSS) to use. I've taken a slightly different approach. Considering that we don't have avid CSS designer's under our member's list yet I just gave a little direction and hoped people would figure it out.
CSS is by no means an easy editing method for non-web savvy users to pick up overnight, but I do think half providing help and half leaving it up to them to figure it out will only open up more doors and start a little Eka-styling buzz.

So let it be that last night was the first kind of sort of Eka - party. You better bet there many more where that came from.

Progress has been very comfortable so far. We've cultivated a modest practice where we invite a few people, a couple of them actually sign up, and one of them lists some items and/or invites other people to join. After inviting some of the more pertinent people (those who were likely to list items) and some close friends, we dipped into a slightly more distant ring of potential users and posted some messages on MySpace.

In this first wave of marketing we left a couple messages about checking out Ekaweeka in our friends comments. Thats when we were reminded to keep any marketing permission based. Something so insubstantial as a website can't be pushed. People have to want to learn more. By tickling their thoughts and interests we don't come off as spammers or obnoxious it becomes something that is out there for the taking and those that care to take a look will do so at their discretion knowing no one has pressured them to make that choice. So we purposefully went back and re-posted but with a "tell me what you think" kind of angle. This worked, and in a couple of hours several people had signed up, some in response to the posts, others as a follow up from a recommendation.

Keep the growth line of users coming in steadily, we hope to have over 100 users after New Years. At some point after the first 100 we expect there to be a steady base of activity. By then, with a whole new level of stuff for users to do including sell their items, add custom pages, send out invites, share their items, and *GASP* post a widget for their items on other sites, we expect to have a small self-sustaining and growing community.

There is a very fine balance right now, too much traffic however nice it could be would make it difficult to focus on any one area we are developing. None and we would have no feedback to give our developments direction. Steady but controlled user growth gives us manageable increments of new and different user suggestions to work from.

The new users we did get over the weekend have added a great new area of small business. Its so exciting to see the variety develop. Thanks for reading and please check back again soon!

We've just added the invite system. Not much to it, enter email addresses and a personal message, click send and away it goes. But soon we'll add a special invite system. The whole spam all your friends in a click thing just doesn't seem very effective. I know for a fact some Eka users have already sent out a mass mailing about us and I can say confidently none of the recipients signed up. That isn't to say they wont eventually, but seriously its not rocket science spamming doesn't work.

Spamming might work for a site like YouTube because all you have to do is say "I love this" in the subject line, drop in a url to your YouTube movie of the day and some people will actually take a peek. Its easy they know all they are doing is watching a 30 second clip - no commitment, no signing up. Easy.
Ekaweeka intends to create functionality for a similar content sharing method. For now though there is the basic invite. And those who genuinely recommend the site to others - others who will take that persons advice seriously are likely to come see what all the fuss is about.

I made road trip up to the Bay Area on Tuesday for a couple of events. One being an entrepreneurs' session at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto. The other being the SF New Tech Meetup where I and about 80 other people watched 4 companies demo their website and field questions. Ekaweeka will be presenting at some of these meetups soon, but for now its a great way to stay in touch with our peers and see if there is anything we can do in collaboration with the other companies. Many new ideas are discussed and my favorite off all - many questions are asked. Lots of these questions are exactly the stuff we at Ekaweeka need to keep in our forethought.

I asked a question to the presenter of Neigboroo - a map mashup of geo-centric data, I asked "how are you getting to market?"

The presenter said they had achieved a successful turn out via viral marketing with blogs alone. Perhaps this will be our primary marketing device as well.

Back in Ekaweeka land we're in a good place. The search engine, categoriation system, featured items control, and shopping cart functionalities are going in sometime this week. I personally will be leaving rainy San Mateo for Hollywood this morning. As soon as I get in I'll be overseeing the testing debugging and installation of the above mentioned functionalities.

After the short and sweet (and cold and rainy) trip to San Francisco I left the Bay Area at 12:00pm and got back to Hollywood around 4:45pm without hitting traffic (many would argue this feat is impossible).

A glass of wine or two and some quick recuperation later and I was back. We are deep in the process of tackling the myriad of new features and systems that will need to be debugged on isolated servers until they are ready for testing in the live site (behind closed doors of course). It is times like these where I am very clear on the advantages we're giving to small businesses by simplifying and enhancing their abilities to create custom content on a website for their needs.

Developing a website is not for the light hearted. The steps involved in creating functions, customizing the appearance and format via graphics, styles, and html, and then debugging it all is an ongoing job onto itself. Even with a team of programmers, stylesheet specialists, and graphical designers - bringing an idea for a content management system, or implementing a shopping cart, or even achieving the right look for a website can be daunting.

Designers have needs, Programmers have needs, HTML coders have needs, and each one of them doesn't entirely understand what the other is doing and / or what they need. Small details and intentions get lost in translation constantly. Regardless of skill-set and effectiveness for the less web savvy (who have a limited understanding of and vocabulary for web design and coding ) getting from idea to finished product is arduous problem laden and a treacherous road to say the least.

Users can now add YouTube videos and other embedded media easily by copying and pasting their favorite media into their profiles! The customization just gets easier, the and the options only get better.

A word to all you designers, crafters, services and other independant businesses - incase you haven't already heard - relaxation is as powerful as hard work. The two go hand in hand. As a part of this, I have set aside the books and emails and we're taking a walk on the beach.

Bri and I stopped in Topanga Canyon at Hidden Treasures. And just so we didn't feel totally guilty about this short drive to paradise, we're collecting drift wood for her sea shell mobiles - now hows that for mixing business with pleasure?

So what did you do to take the load off? Tell us - send an email to info (at) ekaweeka.com we'll post your stories up here.

Ciao

Finally figured out a simple way to change the text color of the header bar fonts. Now users can easily change those by placing just one color code or color name in their edit style page.

With all the holiday shopping coming to a close I'm hearing from more and more people that they are running out of ideas for what to give to their loved ones. Well there's all ready over two dozen different things on Ekaweeka. If you are into making stuff to give - there's a number of very inspiring items to consider.

For Gifts To Buy You Should Check Out:

Reputation Apparel Hats in the $20-$40 USD area you can find an assortment of awesome hats.

For a little more - check out Love Briana's Crystal and Stone Necklaces.

For people looking to get something intimate or just have fun, check out Zombii Lou's Pink Heart Pasties (with tassels).

And some Musicians/Music Engineer's may want to get them-self a special gift if so Greg Taieb's AKAI 20MPC sampler/sequencer.

Whatever you are thinking of doing, Ekaweeka's list grows daily if you can't find something here, maybe you should start telling other folks to list it here! (only a suggestion).

We were up until 3am last night putting in the shopping cart. The overall process was nearly seamless but there is one issue that was a bit too much to release the system without fixing. That bug should be straightened out in the next 3 hours and then we can open up the system to the rest of the world.

In related news the search engine and category management systems are also done, however they'll need to wait until the shopping cart is taken care of.

In the works now that those are ready to put on display; we're moving on to a photo gallery, event invite system, and blogging wooo hoooo.

Got suggestions? Well share em' with us then! Send suggestions to info (at) ekaweeka.com.

With the shopping cart nearly in, and the search engine also completed - only waiting for final touches, we've moved on to a new list of things to be updated.

We're adding an event system, users will be able to host events through their Ekaweeka account. We're adding a photo gallery system, to improve photo navigation. And we're fixing a number of small things that you would never guess - yet need the fixing.

The holidays definitely make it more difficult to move forward. But fortunately many of our engineers are more concerned with getting these upgrades in place. Lucky us!

Last night we tackled one of our first on the spot challenges.

We demoed Ekaweeka for a key supporter. While browsing the site, he pointed out that he wanted to see a blown up version of each user's profile picture. At the time this was not possible.
It wasn't necessarily wise to try to fix such a feature after drinking a couple glasses of champagne but I knew it would be a valuable demonstration of our speed and ability to rise to such challenges.

So I whipped out my laptop, punched in the aircard and took a look at the code. In about two minutes I had isolated where the links and source paths needed to be and WHAM! It was done.

One small fix for Ekaweeka one big medal of bravery for the Eka-Team!

After much waiting, testing, debugging, and all. The search engine is in. I know we'll find many things to change and fix, but as always, when something like this leaves you scratching your head for this long - it is just better to put it up and see what happens.

Enjoy!

We installed an error page re-direct today. It isn't totally functional yet, but it sends us an email every time an error is encountered. This was great in an ironic way because there is a silent bug in the mix right now. This one particular bug happens on nearly every page, although no one ever sees the consequence we get an email when each page is loaded. And well, we have been getting hundreds of emails.

This was quite a pleasant surprise. Needless to say we are trying to fix the dormant bug, but in the meantime we know we're getting plenty of hits. We could have seen this traffic in many other devices but for some reason the bug emails were charming.

Charming, and also indicative of the fact that people are exploring Ekaweeka yet not signing up. We are getting new accounts but not nearly as many as there are people jumping from page to page. This can be fixed in a few ways, unfortunately the most likely and obvious of ways would be a tactic which I personally consider very annoying. The tactic I am referring to is of course the function that allows site browsers to look at a certain number of pages which require the user to be logged in before requesting they log in. I have always hated this tool, it is obvious and seemling counter productive, but it may just be the only way to tell people to stay for a price or leave if they don't want to participate. Afterall they are enjoying the content provided by others who chose to contribute.

I've imagined Ekaweeka to be a place where anyone could come in and buy something without being a member, but this may just be a naive perspective. We shall see, we'll do our best, but if you people don't start giving us a reason not to, we may just have to follow the heard.

This is picture taken the day I sold Dog Walker NYC for real. Leya (the buyer and dear friend) and I walked into the county clerks office and made it official. It was a fabulous day ( I Love NYC) on a cold March morning, from this moment on it was all about Ekaweeka.