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 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.

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!

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.

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 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!

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!

There is much going on here for Ekaweeka on many fronts. We've raised a nice amount of attention from around the world, our family of shops and services have grown with the addition of wood workers, soap makers, screenplay writers and more. We have snagged a couple folks from the UK and Australia which is so exciting.

Can I take a second to digress though? Cause we just got back to Hollywood on the 30th and compared to the chilly air and gray mornings in Nor Cal, I am loving LA!!! It is 70 degrees fahrenheit which feels like 85 in the direct sunlight. Lets see here.. its 52 in Palo Alto (Bay Area), 40 in Chicago, 45 in London, 46 in New York, and 42 in Moscow....hmmm why did I ever grow up with a such a bad idea of LA? The question boggles my mind.

Anyhow back to Eka news, how about this, we fixed the image deletion on the edit item page YAY!!!!!

Alright already there is work to be done!

With the recent user surge we've gotten a load of feedback, suggestions for development, and the pressure to add more functionalities. Here are just a few:

Urlencode functions, most people are unaware of this feature; basically whenever you go to a page that requires you are logged in, the page sends you to the login page, but after you login it should redirect you back to where you were originally. An easy feature to put in, we just haven't gotten around to it.

Sent messages, and drafts. We've heard from users that they would like to see the messages they have sent and a folder for messages to send later. The message center should have a sent folder and a draft folder soon.

Image Uploads. Right now the image upload script is... well not perfect, it doesn't handle GIF's or PNG's which hasn't stopped many people, but we want it to be more smooth. Expect this in the next couple weeks.
Another image related issue, right now we just resize the width of your thumb image, this works in most cases, but to get a more even sized array of thumb images, we'll add an additional script that checks if the image height is greater then the set width, if so it will shrink the greater of the two without losing proportion.

Blogging - Thats right, you asked for it, we're gonna bring it. You'll be able to blog on your profile shortly. Right after that we'll add an RSS feed insert - this will be handy to those who already have a blog but want it to show up on Ekaweeka.

Photo Gallery - We know it! The current photo gallery is not much more then a preview and a link to a separate window. Soon it will open the image in a Ekaweeka formatted page with links to navigate to the next, previous image etc.. This plus a few other sweet functions coming in 2-3 weeks.

Event Invites - Get the party started! When it comes to marketing and stirring up business, sometimes there aren't many methods that are very fun. What is more fun then throwing a party to get the interest flowing? Nothing!!! So we'll be building an evite style event planning system for ya'll.

Of course.... the list just goes on and on.. but I thought you guys might like to hear about it from the source.

Have a great weekend.

The to-do list just keeps coming. We fixed (cross your fingers) the image bugs, the blog system is about to go in, and our browse system is still getting many upgrades. Still with all that happening many of our hopes lay waiting, here are some:

1. User Item Management - for managing and organizing items by type.
2. Account statistics
3. Multiple Accounts (you know instead of managing 5 accounts with 5 emails and 5 passwords...
4. Profile Category Selection (we're still not sure if this is a good idea).
5. Email Profile to Someone.
6. Pending Friend Requests.
7. Message Drafts.
8. User CMS - think managing your profile the same way a newspaper manages their pages with one system.
9. Uploading Images to Edit Styles Page (so you can stop using photobucket).
10. Event Invites... yes yes it's coming along.
11. Photo Gallery + Comments + Pagination.
12. Email This (for photos, items etc.).
13. Bookmark This (for photos, items etc.).
14. Hide Photos (right now if you you don't have any the blue bar is still there).
15. Materials (for items).
16. Organize Profiles & Items by Content.
17. Seller Ratings

There are a few others but we consider them to be top secret. Muhahahahaha!

Reputation Apparel had a couple suggestions for us mainly that people should be able to buy stuff without registering. This was my hope for the shopping cart system from the beginning. But for some reason I didn't think it was possible like the payment process wouldn't be secure if the buyer wasn't logged in.

Anyways I decided to try and see if I could fix it... low an behold after trying a few different fixes I got it to work. So there you go Eksters what else can we do to make your day :-D

PS on a different note we are taking Ekaweeka 100% green. Keep your eyes open for our global warming awareness page. Until then get your green on! Unplug your appliances, turn down your heater and go to www.climatecrisis.net to see what else you can do.

Development was slowed for the past few weeks. We've had a number of things in the works but most were stalled until we nailed the item image issue.

This morning the issue was isolated and hopefully (cross your fingers) this time it's fixed permanently. Now that it is fixed we're extremely excited about installing the improved browse system where users and items will be kept separate. And we have an event hosting system similar to evite that will be unveiled shortly. Once the browse and event updates are in place we'll be able to do some serious browsing filters and we'll add some more types of content to browse like blogs, photos, events and more.

This is all very exciting, and perhaps timely considering that we're all just around the corner from Spring!

We started tracking some of Ekaweeka's more tell tale keywords shortly after we launched. By tracking where we stood in Google's search results for terms like "small business community", "ekaweeka" and various user's search terms like "lullabee robe" we've been able to see how big of an impact we're making on the rest of the web.

Some of our most popular search strings happen to be some of the users and/or their items ex: Tina Spaic (you always were the center of attention Tina!).

Here are some more: peter gurnz, www.miloandmilk.com, briana love, lullabee bathrobe, artist healer teacher, convikt clothing, green arrow tee shirts, rightcart review, dirtbag.com, dirtgirl clothing, heart pasties, hip hop cartoon shoes/custom made, it takes money to make money lyrics, kataka reiki, katie dodd, love briana

Don't ask me why, those just happen to be some of the top 20 search terms that found us on any search engine out there.

Anyhow, today was special because we jumped up to the top 20 search results on Google for "small business community". Just a few days ago we were in the top 30, and before that the top 50 and so on and so on. I don't know about the rest of you but when I look at all the results for "small business community" it all looks like gibberish. Yes all the results have something to do with small businesses, but they fit in to the broad category of any business smaller then 500 employees. There isn't anything directly related to the OG of small biz i.e. 1 dude in his living-room making calls for his contracting service. When Ekaweeka hits #1 we will have single handedly (by means of thousands of hands of course) redefined what a small business is. Now that is big!

We're working away at a new feature, while looking at users and items you'll see all the categories the item or user you see is categorized in. This will help users to understand how they are categorized and who else they are categorized with. It will also get everyone and their items more visibility. This feature should be rolled out in the next 24 hours.

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!

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!

We're nearing in on another release, this one helps folks who are listing more then one type of item or have too many to fit on their profile page alone. This new feature will allow the creation of a specific gallery where items can be organized or selected to be on the main page. The new sections will be placed in the wide column on the right side of the user profile pages.

You can already get a peak of these feature - Galleries (or Item Sections) can be created in the item settings page. Once we wrap up the other half of this development you'll be able to add items to a specific gallery and designate where each gallery is displayed.

It's a new feature that we're kind of making up as we go so if you have any suggestions or ideas feel free to let us know.

Its been "just around the corner" for weeks now, but we gaurantee this is the week you will see Google Checkout and Paypal as payment options to add to your seller account this week. We promise!

Megocreations sent me a message last night. She missed the old days where the item images weren't cropped after being uploaded. She was right.. why should you have to make your images a square shape to not loose the original look and feel you had gone for? I'm not big on making life difficult, and I'm not big on disappointing the Ekasters :-) So I could not think of anything better to do at 8:30pm on Friday night then to make a switch that would allow users to decide how their images would look on their profile.

As a disclaimer the only images that were being cropped on user profiles were the item images that were displayed in item sections on the userpage and on item section pages.

Anywhoooo about 35 minutes later the switch was made, I went ahead and fixed Megans images as a surprise and wholla!.

You can set what type of image dimension your items will appear as in the item settings page.

Seriously though folks - if you don't like something let us know. We love a good challenge!

Not much we can share right now... so so busy getting this darn shopping cart to you in a fabulous new shiny fashion. We've found a couple extra parts to fix and we're still getting them in. Looks like it will be ready on Monday or Tuesday, thank you so much for your patience thus far.

You may also find our new profile organizer of interest - we haven't got it working with the item sections yet but you can take it for a spin by going to this link http://www.ekaweeka.com/profile.php?uid=X&mode=edit

The link is not active on purpose, copy and paste it into your browser then change the "x" after "uid=" to your user id. If you don't know what your user id is, go to your profile page and look in the browser address, the number that follows "http://www.ekaweeka.com/" is your profile id for example mine looks like http://www.ekaweeka.com/4 so my user id is 4.

So to go to my profile organization page I'd go to: http://www.ekaweeka.com/profile.php?uid=4&mode=edit

Go luck, hope those instructions help. If you don't understand what is different when you get to the profile organization page, take this hint: when your mouse rolls over the sections on your profile it will turn into a drag drop mouse icon, you can then hold down the mouse button and move that section to another part of the page.

This is very cool stuff, and very new, and very beta so have fun, it will be ready soon.

Have a great weekend!

Since adding the sections we have had lots of great feedback. We adding a feature for choosing what image dimensions to use for photos in the sections, now we've added a method for choosing what order the items in your section are displayed.

You can already select what order your items are displayed in the general item areas. Now in your all items page next to each section you've added the item to you will see the "order in section" field and an update button. All items default to #1 so you just need to change the number to correspond with where the item should be displayed in the list.

The shopping cart was completed this weekend. With the new cart we are also considering a switch to item sales directly between buyer and seller instead of buyer - Ekaweeka - Seller.

The shopping cart has taken us longer then we had hoped, regardless, the build is done. The finishing touches included switching over to cookies so anyone can shop Ekaweeka add items to their shopping cart, leave their computer for minutes/hours/ or days return and still have the items they'd added sitting right there ready for purchase. We fixed up the item attributes and item options which weren't being added to the shipping cart total. So now all those extra's like framing a picture, additional charges for shipping, and anything else will be included in your orders.

The biggest development was truly that sellers can now receive payments through Google Checkout and Paypal. And just in time as Authorize.net has become one of the worst financial services to provide credit card transactions literally overnight. Without getting into the gory details I will just say we are going to be switching to a different credit card authorization company, so keep your eyes open for it, we will be back up with all three sale processing options shortly.

As for processing methods, currently we retrieve the funds for sellers when a buyer has purchased an item. We watch the sale to make sure each party is happy before releasing the funds to the seller. This escrow like service was chosen to assure sellers and buyers a smooth transaction but in the recent past we've found more and more sellers who would be comfortable with managing the sale without our assistance. Since this would speed up the process for everyone we are giving it serious consideration and are opening up the floor to anyone who would like to chime in on the issue. So let us know folks - what would you prefer?

Seems like everyone's got groups. Why not? Part of our survival depends on getting together with like minded folks. Being in groups helps us share ideas, it helps us pass on helpful tips and advice. Animals, bacteria, people heck we all need to be amongst others from time to time to get by.

We started the groups section on Ekaweeka days ago. We've had much bigger fish to fry recently. Now with our partnership with Box Eight and other entities whom Ekaweeka can share the fun with we're putting the focus back on the groups section. Among things that we need to get into place are the group forums, inviting all and custom lists of friends to groups (currently you have to search and invite each person individually). There are 4 groups going already and more to come no doubt. Visit them here, and start your own here.

We were finally afforded sometime this morning to go through the Edit Styles page, it has been needing a good clean up for a bit now. Also we've given the group managers a tool for editing their group pages' style's. In both pages we've edited the instructions and sample tags so all you have to do is copy one style tag, edit the font style, size, colors, ect. once and you're done. Couldn't be easier. But don't worry we're already hacking away at an interface for just that.

For many people customizing the look of your profile is key. Thats why we launched the profile editor, that's why we added link color customization ( edit style page), and that's why today we have added a tool for uploading any image and a set of stock images to use for the color or background image of your headers.

This new tool opens an enormous can of worms with which we can give users a way to upload any kind of image for use as a background on their page, on the frames, on the headers, on anything really.

To start using your own custom backgrounds, go to the edit style page, in the top left above the color code column is a form for uploading images, select an image to upload, give the image a name, upload it, then in the right hand column you'll see a list of images, there is list of the images you've uploaded and a list of the images we've uploaded for anyone to use. Select the image you want to use as your header background, click save and WHOLLA!

With the shopping cart improvements in the past we see a new horizon of developments for Ekaweeka. New features like friends activity tracking, an event's calendar, group forums, and update emails will all be brought to you to enrich your experience with friends and associates on Ekaweeka. To improve communication, ease of following what others are up to, and common methods for following the ideas and activities around you that help you stay in touch with your network. All these features will be complete with customization settings to keep the experience in line with your personal preferences.

We'll also be bringing improved browsing methods to the items and user browsing pages, you'll be able to browse by the most active users or by their location be it via country, state or provide, or city. An endless list sits just beyond these developments, including a bulletin board and directory for easy business look up but we'll get these first developments out to you in the interim.