EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

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He signed up and we we're adding each other to our friend lists when we discovered the link in the internal message was no longer active.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.

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.

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!

One of the most difficult parts of working towards anything, be it riding a wave, or getting your business up and running, is going through your baby steps. Most people wouldn't jump on a short board and try to ride a double overhead wave out on the North Shore without any experience. But everyone tends to imagine themselves riding that 16 ft wave before they have even gotten their feet wet.

In the early days of planning out Ekaweeka we were so high up in the clouds. We had no idea what was waiting for us and we weren't planning for what was going to come first. "We'll have blogs, and calendars, and maps, and ajax customization!" Hahahah its funny just thinking about how silly some of the crap we conceived was. Truth is, we needed to be thinking about the best way to get started without burying ourselves in a heap of junk.

The problem with the big dreams is, you really have no idea where you are going to be after you go through the baby steps. Chances are you will not be anywhere you thought you would be, so why waste your time planning for a future that is all in your head? Start at the bottom, and guide yourself towards that goal.

For anyone out there just getting started, if you have high hopes, focus on the immediate. If you do not know what the immediate is, go get some books on what you are planning to do, read some blogs, research your craft/line of work. Find out what the first steps are and get started on doing those first steps. You can't ride the double overheads without trying some overheads first, and you can't ride the overheads without riding the four footers, and so on, and so on. Yes it is frustrating to start small, but time flies and if you just make a little progress everyday, you'll be there before you know it.

If you are having trouble figuring out where to start email me: tom (at) ekaweeka.com I'll be happy to help you explore what your baby steps are.

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.

I posted about the weather around the country and in Hollywood on January 1st earlier this week. So when I checked today's weather and saw it was 70 degrees in New York and 68 in Boston on January 7th, I had to give it up the East Coast. It's 63 in L.A. today — 61 at Manhattan Beach, where we're about to hit the waves.

They say it's a sign of global warming, which I wouldn't deny by any means. But the weather gods in the Northeast do throw a curveball every once in a while. Either way, it's a fair bet that millions of people have dropped their priorities and gone out to the park in a T-shirt. If you've been there you know what I mean. They are having an amazing weekend. I like to chill out in Union Square (in the Village, NYC) on days like that.

Cheers, NYC — lets go surfing :-)

We think small businesses are the way of the future. Why else would we bank so much on a site completely devoted to small businesses? The way we see it, while there have always been small businesses, the number of small businesses has gone through a bell curve style growth over time. In the beginning there were many, overtime their numbers diminished, but now they are coming back in a big way.

Before GM & Coca-Cola, hundreds of years ago people made a living by specializing in a craft or service. These crafts/service specialists could only handle so many clients, so over time business men began to pop up. Business men specialized in organizing one business to serve more customers than any single shop keeper could handle on his/her own. Eventually those enterprising businesses got so big a single business could employ thousands of people. And so the number of shops/services decreased for a time as more people worked for a large corporation rather then their own small business.

The enterprising business model expanded and evolved into to the corporate world that we live in today. But corporate life isn't for everyone and even those that can handle it don't always have a choice and their company lays them off. Some of these folks say "the heck with it!" and they start their own business.

We're biased of course, but from where we see it, many people are choosing to take their own path, and where possible many small businesses will continue to sprout up as long as the market and the small business people can handle it. Some of those that are very successful may choose to go down the direction of expanding their business to employ many people. But most will reach a point of self-sustainability and it will be enough for them. They'll stick with their own business because it is something they love, and they'll have no one to answer to but the people who love their business. For the small business person having his/her own company will be way better then working for or owning a large company with hundreds of employees.

And so for us, Ekaweeka is very much like a renaissance village. It's a place for all those small business people to get things done on their own, but with the help of many other small business people around them.

We knocked the photo gallery off the to do list in my previous post. We also got the blog system in, which could be partially responsible for the decreased amount of postings on the EkaBlog lately. But we're still tied down with this image problem. We hoped it was tackled with the image uploading improvements we recently made, but low and behold a number of images were knocked off anyways. We replaced most of them but a couple couldn't be recovered. This is definitely less then desirable, but we're hopeful and most users seem to be handling it well.

We've seen a little bit of everything lately, but in general we're ready for the next steps. The event system is completed but there are a couple small issues that need to be cleaned up before it's released to the public. Meanwhile we've got some less useful but still exciting stuff in the works, including an MP3 player and a an ajax drag and drop method for organizing top friends.

We've been gearing up for a press release and also have started planning our first series of events. The events will be semi casual, we hope they are a way for Ekaweeka users and their friends to mingle and see what each other does. We will let people put their creation and product or service on display to show and / or sell. If you would like to feature your work at one of our events, let us know. We'll most likely start with events in Los Angeles and New York and then move into San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

Three and half months after launching the site we now have 240 users in 36 categories, and 120 Items in 16 categories. People ask how we're doing and I am happy to say that we're doing very well. The data maybe not bring corporate development executives knocking on our doors, but Ekaweeka much like its users is growing naturally and monetary motivation is not the carrot we're chasing. Our carrot is to develop an authentic and relevant community for small businesses. So while by measure of advertising revenues we may not be terribly attractive, by measure of the culture and variety of businesses and creatives on the site we've already struck gold.

It's important that our users understand the difference I'm making here. Most of the users on Ekaweeka have a day job in addition to running their small business. They dream of quitting their day job and pursuing their passion full time. So they can easily bog down in the slowness of achieving their independence. This slowness shouldn't be confused for failure. Any of them with enough focus and patience can turn their business into a full time endeavor that pays the bills without supplemental income. What is important until achieving financial independence is recognizing the progress that has been made. Every victory is a step forward and seeing that helps to stay on track.

Cities, Trees, and People all grow at a natural organic pace. Small Businesses often feel pressured to go from idea to profitable overnight. Some of the best creations, organizations, inventions, and artwork took years to mature so why do we feel pressured to move faster then them? The way we see it here in Ekaweeka Land; nearly all of the 240 users on Ekaweeka are exactly the type of folk we want on the site. 240 artists, designers, computer programmers, actors, photographers, event coordinators... 240! Thats huge!. As long as we continue to stick by our goal and strive to make Ekaweeka a great place for its users to meet and help each other out by design or direct influence - we are doing our job. And by providing the arena for these synchronicities we are also providing a directory for the general public to find such gems. By constantly improving all of the above Ekaweeka gains recognition for being an authentic and relevant community. And if each and every member of Ekaweeka follows their own goals and strives for perfection they too have already succeeded.

As always - we're looking for ways to bring Ekaweeka users together and help everyone else understand the community. So we've added a little box to the home page for media clips. So far we've found some great animations to put up there, also a boutique meet and greet from Toronto, and in the past couple days we've given our friends Jimmy and John DiResta from HGTV's "Hammered" a feature. If you have any videos that might be appropriate let us know, we'd love to share them with everyone!

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.

As the community grows so does our memory use, RAM, and other unimaginable little globs of computer chips, hard drives, and super geeky stuff. Thank god it's a step we have to take! But it also means having those moments where you take a deep breath, flip off one switch so you can flip on another and pray everything still works.

Fortunately technology is a little more intelligent then that and we don't have to take such big risks, still there could be little things. What we're trying to say is... we're moving to a bigger better server, and as we do so we are moving all the database tables, image files, and system architecture. And by moving to a new system there are bound to be little things we have to tweak and change to keep Ekaweeka up and running as you know it to.

We should be performing our migration tonight during the wee hours. Fortunately one of our server consultants is in France and can service the site while all the US Ekasters are sound asleep (well most of them... you know who you are!). So pardon us for any unusual site behavior during those wee hours. And here here!! We're very excited about this step of growth.

My photography knowledge is pretty much limited to the pictures I have of my friends and family where I think I look good. Limited though MY experience is, I love looking at other people’s photography – people who really know what they’re doing! – and sometimes I feel like pictures (even abstract ones) can speak to me more than paintings or sculptures done by the masters. There’s something so real, so “capturable” in a picture taken by a good photographer.

San Francisco photographer Allison Tungseth has this “real” aspect of picture-taking down. She draws off a close inspection of other people’s possessions, and documents every-day objects, turning them into art.

So what does that mean? Since Allison is a friend, I let her come to my apartment a couple months back to take pictures of my possessions. She goes around a room, snapping dozens of pictures, in a disjointed kind of panorama. Snapping everything from my high heels standing by themselves in the bottom of a book case, to my cell phone charger and cord plugged in by my kitchen counter.

She takes many photographs in each space – from 50 to 200 single frames - to create
a 360-degree panoramic view. She then combines the images to create a larger
work.

And she’s all about getting her work into shows, where she’s trying to build up the base of people who have seen (and even purchased!) her work. Through connections made with other artists in her studio and professors and students in her graduate program, she showcases her art all around town.

Visit Allison’s EkaPage at: http://www.ekaweeka.com/415/
or her website:http://tungseth.com/allison/

Selling your goods from a kiosk in a busy shopping area may not be your idea of a great sales opportunity. But as a shopper and lover of unique jewelry, I’ve found some pretty great pieces by perusing these little stands.

I live near Union Square in San Francisco, and while sometimes it’s kind of annoying to deal with people hawking their goods while you’re trying to shop/catch the bus/walk/go to work, sometimes I actually stop and find something.

One such time was when I got my now-beloved fork ring. There is a vendor in the Union Square area who makes jewelry out of forks and stones – at really reasonable prices. I think I paid $10 for each for the ring and a bracelet. He had some samples set out, and then a bunch of loose stones you could pick from if you wanted him to make it for you right there. I’d been in the market for a black ring, so I chose a black rectangular stone, had him measure my ring size, and watched him go to work on my new piece of jewelry.

He said he bought the forks on the cheap where ever he could find them. He cut off what he didn’t need from the end (handle) of the fork and filed it down, then bent to remainder around his ring-sizing tool. He bent the tines, and used them to hold to hold the stone on the front of the ring.

His ring-making enterprise struck me as creative, and also pretty cheap to undertake. Forks you could probably get for free. And the stones weren’t really that high-quality, but the ensemble put together was cute enough to be irresistible!