EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

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!

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.
:-(

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

As promised, the urlencode function I spoke of last week has been added to the system.
Now when users get a message from Ekaweeka's notification system and they click on the message board link in their email, as usual they'll be prompted to login. But after logging in unlike before where they would be taken to their account page, now since they originally navigated to their message center before logging in, after logging in they'll be taken to their message center. This applies to any page on the site that requires you to be logged in, give it a test spin - try to go here: www.ekaweeka.com/my_friends.
If we've done our job properly, it will ask you to login, then it will take you to your friends page.

After some heavy analysis we've decided to reformat the item page. The original format fit into the family of pages that each users' content is organized with. The item page needed a special format to make it clear the item was the star of the page.

So we placed the item photo at the top of the page in a much larger preview. We still need to make the "buy it now" buttons more conspicuous but this was a great start. We hope to continue make every page serve it's content rather then the other way around.

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!

I added a new piece to the puzzle last night: User and Page views! Take a peek in your profile page in the "about" section. Unfortunately there was no obvious way to start the counter with everybody's actual page view count so I hope nobody's feelings get hurt cause everyone started at zero around 6pm last night! We also added this feature to the photo gallery, items, blog main page, and blog entries. Photo counters are coming shortly.

For such a tiny little piece of data this will be a huge service to all of us. Once those counters have been active for a couple of weeks everyone will get an idea of who's stuff is getting more hits then others, and what profiles are most popular. Without having "favorites" or "bookmarks" features this counter alone will allow us to create all sorts of data filters which people can then explore to get a better understanding of what types of traffic they are getting.

Rest assured this is the beginning of yet another thing that will be huge!

PS I know the picture is random (it's West Hollywood, Sunset Strip is in that photo) but in our short attention span culture sometimes pictures seem to be the only way to keep people around and happy. And just so you don't think I'm totally full of $h!7; I chose this pic because it's a view from my office and I felt the visibility and peek into my own life was similar to the visibility views counters will give to everyone on Ekaweeka. See I did go to an arts college!

Today we officially dropped in the new browsing system, and pulled out the old one. Previously, in order to browse items, you would have to go to browse and click on a radio button to specify whether you wanted to browse items or users. This was counter intuitive and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only person bothered by it. The new system separates items and users completely and either can be navigated to via the navigation bar by going to the items page or the users page. Each page lists only the categories for the browse content and should keep things simple and user friendly.

Our philosophy has been very much about implementing what we need, then shaving off any excess functionality or features that complicate the process. Sometimes the complications come with too much simplicity, either way we go through the site and slowly note anything that doesn't make sense. The more resistance and confusion we clean out of the maze the easier it is for everyone to get where they're going!

This just in! After ... welll *ehhemm* - WAY TOO LONG! We have finally installed the mp3 player. Take it for a swing, give your profile more feel and fun for the people who view you by adding a tune to your page. Also, we've included a link "keep listening" which opens the song in a popup window for those who wish to keep listening to a song as they browse. Song sizes are limited to 6 Megabytes which should be enough to host and 128bit encoded 4 minute song, if it becomes a problem we'll make the upload size bigger

For all the people who have been enjoying the new MP3 loading feature for your profile, we just added a little something extra to it. Now your MP3 player lists the artist and song title and you can enter a link for the artist's website. We'll get around to making a fancy schmancy player shortly but we figured the tunes couldn't wait!

Also on the agenda: The website URL feature no longer requires you to enter the HTML yourself. Anyone can go in enter the website URL and the website title click save and you're done. There isn't any obvious way to replace your old links but by hand in our database so give it a few days and we'll eventually have em' all migrated.

Happy (sort of) Earth Day!

Anyone browsing through the hundreds of different artists, crafters, services, clothes, paintings, designers and more in Ekaweeka's browsing system today will notice a different layout. We've moved all the filters and categories to a column on the left. We're also working on adding more hand picked featured content. We have few options for beefing up this area but it all depends on the balance we can keep between ease of browsing, more interest generating elements, and the distraction they could produce. Meanwhile in the sandbox we've got location browsing, directory (think phone book) and many more fun developments. Hope you're having a good week!! Happy Tuesday.

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.

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).

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.

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 :-)

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.

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!

We have a number of developments underway in the labs, unfortunately none of them are of much use or interest until we can actually show them to you. In the meantime however we have done a number of things entirely about what we can show you. From the very first day of our launch last year the question of how images should be displayed on every page of Ekaweeka has been a difficult one.
Should they align to the top? Should they float in the center? How big should they be? One of the biggest choices was if we should crop the photos we display in the main browsing and navigation sections of Ekaweeka. It was our consensus that we would display them as you guys had uploaded them - keeping true to your content, showing it as you had made it.
So here we are 6 months down the road, a little more grown up, a little more proud. With a new perspective we realized the appearance (especially on the home page) of Ekaweeka with the natural shapes of the photos; squares and rectangles, was a little too chaotic. So we played around with the idea of cropping and found that it really freshened things up!

Tell us what you think, we've used the method on the index page, and all the main browsing pages, everything else is still 100% true to form.

We've done it again! All sorts of great stuff is being added to the site on a regular basis. This time it's featured items. Point your browser to the edit items page, now next to the item order, edit, and delete options, there is a "add to featured" link. You can add up to 3 items to be featured which essentially puts them at the top of your items gallery. Once an item is featured you can just click "remove from featured" to pull it from the featured section if you don't want it there.

Also in the works are multiple item sections. Once this bad boy system is in place you'll be able to make a special gallery for each type of item you're selling.

This is really the week of updates!!! But make no mistake, today's update is by far the most exciting of any for some time now.

Many people have been asking for a way to organize their items (ex: separate paintings from jewelry), and even more have wanted a way to put them in the right side of their profile to draw more attention to them.

In the Eka labs we've been hashing out an AJAX content manager so you could literally drag and drop your profile content to wherever you'd like but that is just taking soooo long! So knowing full well that this was a development which couldn't wait, we went in and drafted up a nifty little section creation functionality and item organization system.

It is very cool and you just gotta give it a try yourself to see what I mean! Here's a little more on how to set it up:

Item Sections Creation and Organization:
First make some sections - go to the "items settings" page (http://www.ekaweeka.com/itemsettings.php), you'll see a field that say's "create item section" just make a name for the new section and click create.

Once you have made the section, go to your "edit items" page (http://www.ekaweeka.com/allitems.php), under the delete and edit links for each item you'll see an "add to (your section)" link, click on the link for each item you want to add to the section.

Now take a look at your profile you'll see the item section in the top right!

Now that this has been wrapped up we can finally get around to adding Google Checkout and Paypal payment options to your method of receiving payments.

Some of the longer running users of Ekaweeka may notice a few cosmetic developments on the site. To name a couple we have added a cute little envelope and new mail counter at the top of the pages. So when you are logged in you can browse around and that little guy will let you know if you've gotten new mail! Such a great little envelope :)

Also with the help of Love Briana's exquisite color expertise we've changed the login cell on the index page from the pointy edged soft blue box to a summer grass green with oh so friendly looking rounded corners.

And for those who have started using the item section tools now a little navigation cell in the left column of your item pages displays every item section and links to a page displaying that section.

All a day in the life here in Ekaweeka Land.

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!

Our Shopping Cart has been temporarily unavailable for the past 3 days as we install the Google Checkout and Paypal processing services. I am happy to announce that we are done with that part of the installation. We have found a couple other elements in the shopping cart to improve whilst in down mode so we are going to jump on this rare opportunity to implement those adjustments.

Once we are done you will be able to add items to your shopping cart and those items will stay in your cart with the help of a cookie stored on your browser. Cookies get a bad rap but any shopping cart you've used be it on Amazon, eBay, CDBaby, etc. all depend in one way or another on cookies. Yes some sites might abuse cookies by overloading your browser with unneccesary-memory-indulgent data which is where their bad rap comes from. But our cookie will be a nice simple trans fat free (and I mean no trans fats none of this FDA loop hole mumbo jumbo!) semi-sweet chocolate morsel, natural buttery good cookie. Just kidding! No it will be a simple tiny cookie that stores an item ID for each item you've added to your cart. This way you could add something to your cart leave Ekaweeka, come back later and the item will still be waiting for you to bring it home.

We're shooting for 2 days on these developments. Once complete the new and improved shopping cart will be up and kickin EkaButt. We'll keep you posted with any news until then :-)

There was an itsy bitsy little spider in the image uploading page of the setup wizard. Actually it was a bug... which isn't really a specific type of problem as I thought for oh so long. A bug can be anything as simple as a way of saying something isn't working the way I thought it did.

Anywho.... this bug was giving some folks problems if they tried to upload more then one photo in the item creation wizard pages. It also didn't listen when you tried to change one image to the preview for the item. And gosh darn it, that little bug also wouldn't let you delete the image from the wizard pages.

Thank you Laura for pointing this out, we knew something was wrong, but we have been so tied down with this new shopping cart there was no time to try to figure it out.

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?

The "Manhattan Project" of Ekaweeka projects is unveiled today, we have been quietly developing an AJAX method of organizing the content in your profile. Some of you may have seen websites using this technology like iGoogle, Netvibes, Windows Live, and Page Flakes to name a few.

This method allows you to drag and drop the sections of your profile where ever you choose to place them. It's a long shot from perfect but it puts us further down the path of innovation and giving Ekaweeka Users total control over the appearance of their profile. In the near future we'll be applying this technology to every one of your pages, with abilities to add and remove any widget on any of your pages. We'll also separate the website links and EkaPages navigation list under your profile photo so you can choose to have those or move em' or RE-move them altogether.

This is a fairly new type of web technology much more familiar to the world of PC based software, we don't expect everyone to "get it" immediately. But we do think that those who do catch on quickly will be able to share the knowledge and get the word out!

As far as using the editor, it's quite simple, just click on the "PROFILE EDITOR" link in your account page (it's kind of hard to m