EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

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!

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.

We're taking a slight deviation from all our developments so we can quickly add some browsing for photos. The original Ekaweeka blueprint naturally included photos. Pictures were a simple way for users to show more about themselves visually.

Meanwhile our primary focus was on items. Since many of the small businesses had a product or service to share and sell with the community we put much emphasis on the item. But even with all the emphasis, the users used the photo functions to share many of their works, maybe cause they weren't sure if an item had to be for sale (they don't). Or maybe because they knew how the photo system worked while they hadn't learned the item creation process. Who knows...

At any rate it happened! So today we're creating photo browsing and a featured photos section. We'll keep the featured photo selection about each photo's content relation to Ekaweeka themes. Ábrase los ojos, it's coming!