EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

Our recent collaboration with Box Eight and several other issues regarding user development have resulted in a rush order to add a grouping module to Ekaweeka. This means if you have a bunch of friends who are all part of one organization, you can start a group on Ekaweeka for that organization. You can also start an interest group on Ekaweeka for anyone to join that shares that interest. We haven't straightened out all the ideas and actual practicalities, but this should be a fun nice piece of the big Ekaweeka pie!

Check out the recently listed painting titled "California Landscape" by Laura Iverson. I love landscapes I love California!

We managed to hack out a good chunk of the groups section, you can set one up from your account page, but there is some work left to be done. You can create the group, give it a title, group type, description, photos, and you can add Ekaweeka users to the group members.

There is a comments section underway but much is left to be hashed out. And while you can add members or approve users who've requested to be a member, if you add someone they are added automatically without any approval so make sure to give people a heads up if you've added them. We'll add some security, permissions for group leaders, and group members, as well as create a few more pages for the groups like a photo page, group events etc.

The Groups section has come even further, now anyone who has started a group or is in a group has a group section on their profile. The account page has a group manager for group leaders and group members. Group leaders can search for Ekaweeka users and invite them to their group. General users can look at another users group and join the group if they would like. Invitations to groups and requests to join groups both need approval from the recipricating party (ex: someone who is invited to a group needs to approve the invite before becoming a member). A Fine Arts group has already been started. Check it out, or start your own group.

A recent inquiry into the potential of adding text messaging to Ekaweeka sent me on a hunt to see how difficult it would be to put text messaging on the website. Turns out it isn't very expensive (around $.09 per text) and with a little bit of testing and communication with tech support at a SMS gateway I was able to get it up and working (sort of). So here's the suggestion box issue for the day - would Ekaweeka users find a good use for text messaging? Some have suggested yes, it would provide a fun way to communicate with some users who don't have the opportunity to log into Ekaweeka as frequently as they might like to. Some other social networks have used similar features to the point where they (the site's users) can communicate with their friends without even logging into their account -ever. What do you think? Let us know... the technology is there all we have to do is open the door :-)

Many people have complained to me recently about the message in their account page that says they have a comment or message and yet when they went to look at em, they weren't there.

So today I got down to the bottom of this problem and created to bug fixes, for the comments, there is now a pending comments this without getting into the details fixes the comments notice problem.

As for the messages, another bug fix was put in place there, again I'm not going into the details after all a discussion about PHP (unless you do some programming yourself) has got to be some of the driest-most boring gobble-di-gook speak known to us humans.

If you still have these messages it's because they were partially deleted before the bug fixes we're put into place. If this is the case, please let us know and we'll go in and remove the phantom message.

Thats all for now, since I've got your attention why don't you check out the view I've got from my office this week. I'm visiting my parents in Ashland Oregon, the office looks out from their home nestled in the mountains - you can see mount ashland in the distance (barely).

We check out web-stats from time to time. It's a good place to see how much traffic you're getting be it in hits, pages, unique visitors etc. You can see what search keywords have returned search results with your website in them, you can see how many different countries you have visitors from. You can see where your most popular referrals are coming from, and you can see what days and time you got the most traffic.
So I was procrastinating today and took a peek at our stats, and even though it isn't why I'm writing this post, I should say things are looking great. We came close to half a million hits in April. We have over 10,000 different visitors - if you compare that to how many users we have that is about 35 visitors to each user on the site and since there are a handful of people who signed up but never came back it's safe to say that number is rounded down. We get visits from over 62 countries. Our traffic is steady from 4am to 10pm and then it drops slightly in the early morning hours.

The most popular keywords that found Ekaweeka in the past 7 days are: "briana love, custom sneakers, batz maru, ekaweeka, architexture ventura, artisan jewelry, brianna love gallery, chad/comments, china handcrafts, convikt clothing, custom air brushed sneakers, chaz davis, gene golden, hoon jewelry, how to airbrush sneakers, japanese zen tree paintings, leopard ribbon, new york city,south park girl".

So I'm writing this post because of the keywords, I am after all very intrigued by them, anyways... I saw "Batz Maru" I've never heard this term before, maybe some of you have, but I was like "WTF?". So I did a little search for the keywords in the Ekaweeka Search Engine and low & behold my dear friend Jess A.K.A. Zombii Lou from Wolverhampton, England had an item called the bad batz maru leopard choker.

That gave me a good chuckle. Perhaps you had to be there. If you've found Ekaweeka with some wild keyword search, let us know - we'll share it with the world.

Once your business is up and running it could be to your benefit to re-evaluate the structure and ongoing elements of the business. Things never turn out as you expect them to so it can only be to your benefit to take a step back. Look at how you thought things would be, then look at how they have actually turned out, and make some adjustments. You may have budgeted some money for certain expenses and you will need more then originally anticipated. Other operating expenses could turn out to be less necessary. It is these expenses - the superfluous ones which you should debate, it might behoove you to cut down on those costs as the money going into them might go to better use elsewhere. For us, we have a special line for phone calls from Ekaweeka users, as it turned out we already had enough phone lines and most users didn't bother with calling us since they knew email worked just as well. So we killed one of the phone lines. We were advertising with Google Adwords, this has worked with other businesses in the past but in our particular sector our word of mouth and viral marketing worked dramatically better then the pay per click advertising. Things like the Adwords and Phone lines can be over looked they don't cost a whole lot on their own after-all but when you start to put them together you realize there is a considerable amount of money going to them.

So make a point to analyze your expenses, figure out what is working best, what isn't getting enough funding, and figure out where you're money is not being used properly. This is where many businesses make or break themselves, with smart budgeting you can weather tough times, in others you will have extra profit simply because you were careful.

Are you going to have a booth at a local Festival Street Fair or Art/Craft Convention? Ekaweeka is not only looking to participate in upcoming small business events we want to help you get involved in them. We are looking to sponsor your booth to help you get that space and get your business bumping. Send an email to sponsormybusiness@ekaweeka.com, include what the event is along with where and when. Tell us how you will be participating. Qualified applicants in addition to receive financial support will be featured in upcoming print ads and will get featured in our Awesome Ekaster spotlights!

In a sort of unrelated but nonetheless pertinent development we've sealed the gap in all things friends related. Friend requests, pending friends, accepting friends all these things have been polished off.

New comer Jeanette Shanahan posted a comment on the Bead and Button forums about Ekaweeka. We're all so flattered with her comments: "I think they are really working hard on it. I really like what I see so far. Worth a looksee..."

Thanks Jeanette, this kind of stuff can only be earned. For those of you who haven't checked out Bead and Button, it is a kick ass magazine with galleries of beautiful jewelry, exclusive projects, newsletters and more.

Lord knows why some of these things don't pop out at me faster then this. Today after hundreds of times of thinking about it I jumped into the profile settings page and added some of the same formatting that is used in the blogging system to the profile info page. What the formatting does is when you are writing in stuff about yourself; any kind of formatting you did on your own would get lost when it was saved, rendering your 'about me' section as one big block of text. Now, with these updates your about me text will appear as you had typed it!

Other part that got fixed was the blog system. I noticed some slashes were getting added to the quote marks (which is a natural to protect the scripts from the quote marks) in the blog navigation column on the left. Those slashes happen whenever some sloppy coding has been done (my bad); one may have forgotten to remove the slashes before the text appears on the screen after being pulled from the database.

So there you go, one step closer to ... well... A BETTER EKAWEEKA
YAY :-)

Kerry Miller - staff writer for Business Week, just wrote a great piece on the dos and don'ts of social conduct online. Her points outline the mistakes many people and businesses make when marketing with social networks. Online just like in the real world she says "is all about giving, not taking". Sometimes online users overlook that they are still interacting in a person to person format, I found a few points extremely relevent like these points below:
"Showing up in flip-flops at a white-tie event is no way to make a good impression."
"Collecting a thick stack of business cards may make you feel important, but it's not a very good way to glean useful contacts."
and "Establishing a new connection doesn't end when the party's over".

I'll disclose right now that it's an article about conduct on Myspace but I think it's fair to say these lessons apply elsewhere.

It never ends!
I got up this morning to a bucket load of comments, messages, and more. No I'm not bragging this goes somewhere - after approving some comments, and reading some messages, I realized I had accidentally deleted a photo comment. Low and behold I had no more messages in my inbox, and no more pending comments, and yet there was a "You have a photo comment to approve!" message in my account page. Does this sound familiar? That sad little photo comment was sitting out there in database land with no coding in place to approve or delete it.
So..... I put the coding skills to work and made a pending photo comments page. It hasn't been added to the account as a hard coded link yet, but if you have a photo comment sadly floating around out there in database land, the link embedded in the "You have a photo comment to approve!" message in your account page will take you there now.

This brings up another issue, now that there are all these pending comments pages and stuff, those messages that go to your inbox aren't really necessary. Once I've had a chance to re-cooperate, I'll go in and fix that too.

The Groups System has been one of Ekaweeka's sad and neglected step children, we're working on it... what can I say we're getting busy but have less help then we have stuff going on which is good! As in - better then doing a bunch of stuff and having no one around to enjoy it ;-)

Anywhooooo you can leave a comment with a group now, we'll try to do the messages, comment settings and all that good stuff today.

We've started a new page for creating and managing preferences. Eventually all the settings for comments, friends, messages etc. will be placed here but for now we've started with one feature we think the Ekasters will be real jazzed about. Alot of people have dealt with the problem of having to filter out their comments either of pictures or embedded videos (youtube). So the first preference we've created is for removing imgs and videos from your comments. Just go to the preferences page click the set up link and then set the desired setting. Then you won't need to go through the comments one by one, as you'll know no images or videos will be showing up there!

Many Ekaweeka users already have a blog out there somewhere, and as much as we would like you set up a blog here on Ekaweeka we don't wish that kind of burden on you and we don't want to play tug of war for your choice of blogging service. After-all why would we even bother when we could just let you enter your RSS feed in your Ekaweeka account and have your primary blog streamed directly to the site?

Thats exactly the thought process that we went through recently so we decided to create the opportunity. So for all those out there already using another blog service, we invite you to add that RSS feed to your Ekaweeka Profile.

Thanks to Amber for inviting Jon San Nicolas. You guys make this the best job in the world with the pictures alone!

While we take another couple minutes to figure out our own event there are a few to mention which you should check out and support the participating Eksters.

Laura Iverson has posted an event for the Art Fair in Northern California where she will have a booth. Come check out her amazing paintings and jewelry Saturday June 10 in Santa Clara.

Folks in the Northeast should check out Jeanette Shanahan's booth at the Applefest in Warwick New York. The Applefest is going on 18 years and features 275 artisans displaying their handmade jewelry, stained glass, pottery, woodcarvings and many more.

Over 50% of our traffic comes from Internet Explorer Browsers on PC's. It's odd to think especially because we're all on Mac's, all the Eka users we come in direct contact with are on Mac but low and behold the stats don't lie. We have to stay up to date with those PC's though so for all you out there cruising the web on Internet Explorer you'll be happy know we fixed that little message that pops up on the index page. We've also gone though all the pages for format issues (which tend to only appear in IE). Thanks for your patience, let us know if we've missed anything!