The Dandelife Blog

I noticed on Lifehacker this week a lot of links to sites that help you with your New Years Resolutions. The site is chock full of good advice from setting realistic goals to finding the free sites that will help you manager those goals (my personal favorites are Mint and Traineo). Naturally, there are already a lot of Lifehacker readers here on Dandelife because of the generous coverage they’ve posted regarding our timelines in the past. Then again, what’s Dandelife but a big geek-to-live Lifehack in general?

Below are some screenshots that will help some simple ways to fold your new years resolutions into your life in general. I also posted a video which shows all of the same screens in action: Tracking New Years Resolutions.

 
The “quick post” feature quickly lets you post goals for the future, not just stories from the past. Keep them private, add tags, or share more details once you accomplish them. The key is to tag the goals with keywords that make sense. So if you’re dieting, tag the goal “diet, resolution”. If you want to run more, tag it “running, resolution”. Tags are comma-separated and will allow to track your goals along multiple timelines.

Of course, Dandelife is a light blogging platform too. So if you want to add photos and videos, you can. you can embed any content you want, really. But since it’s a personal blogging service, you can keep your stories private (which is often the case with sensitive goals such as weight loss and saving money).

Here’s a timeline of my “running” goals. You can see over time what the goals are and how I’ve progressed. I’ve also chosen to share one of the stories publicly as an accomplishment. Doing so allows others to comment on it and your story immediately goes into a larger public pool of stories that share share the same tags.

Again, one of the great things about Dandelife is that it’s not just a place you can track your goals for the new year. You can record your stories for all your life’s events. Go way back, deep into your past, but also plan for the future. Either way, ambitions and actions are great material for you life blog here.

Here’s to a prosperous 2008 for all. Whatever your ambitions - be they for a better world, a better self, or better circumstances - may they all come true.

Thrive!,
K

Blogged with Flock

Tags: dandelife, demo, new years resolutions, how-to, life

I posted a story today that gives some insight into what we’ve been working on here for the past few months. I had hoped to have these features live by today (the first day of spring) but they’re not all stable yet. I want them to be perfect when they do go live. You dig?

“The Letter”

You know the kind of letter I’m talking about. Say you get in touch with a girl you knew back in middle school. Someone you knew because your older brothers used to hang out. Then you had little 6th grade crushes on each other that went nowhere except for — maybe — the Saturday matinee. You went the rest of your middle school years socializing in the same group of friends, going to the pool in the summer together, eating at the same table in the cafeteria. And when you passed each other in the hallway, you said “Hi, how are you doing?” and were genuinely interested in the response.

So you write the letter [and she makes mental notes].

(more…)

A number of new features in this version. Here’s a list:

• What color is your privacy?
• Contextual timelines - tags and people are related to the author first, the world second.
  • Cleveland stories
  • My Cleveland stories
  • Stories from 2005
  • My stories from 2005
• SIMILE Timeline Export
• Re-design of your vanity page.
• Putting your favorites on display.
• Ad sponsorship (Apple, yay!)
• Story page layout has changed.
• Adding tags has changed a bit.
• Download ALL of your stories.
• Photo slide show.
• Speed, speed, speed.
• Export your life in XML format.
• Emphasize the widget (widgetbox widget now available too).

Took out:

• People’s blog.
• Sidebar on the story page.

I also wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who is giving us feedback in the forums too. It really makes life a lot easier here at “Dandelife Central” (I use that term loosely since none of us working on the project actually lives in the same city). Without positive feeback, contructive criticism and complaints we would have to run on instinct alone. That said, our instincts can’t be that bad, but the words of our members is much, much better indeed.

Thanks to ALL who’ve made this place hum with activity. Keep sharing those stories!

For Screenshots and More explanation of the recently added features, please keep on reading . . .

(more…)

You may have noticed that I just added advertising to this blog in the top right corner of the site. Just thought you’d like to know that I’m experimenting with advertising. If you have any feedback, I’d love to have it. The blog is often the proving ground for *features* that may show up elsewhere at Dandelife.com. Enjoy!

S-p-e-e-d

No doubt you’ve noticed that the site has been slow lately. Thankfully we have the problem of being a regularly visited Web site. With that luck comes the task of making the experience an enjoyable one for those who regularly visit. That said, load times for any particular page lately has been hovering in the nasty region of 10-15 seconds. Yikes!

Yesterday, my right-hand-man, Shakhruz was able to get those load times down to a more acceptable range of 2-4 seconds. Some pages, like your vanity page, your buddy list, etc. can be long if you have a lot of stories or buddies. But individual stories, the home page, the wander pages are all much, much quicker thanks to his efforts.

What  you see below are the two reports I use most often. One shows load times and outages which I monitor using a (very expensive) web-based site monitoring system. The second is good ol’ Google Analytics, which is free and helps me figure out how many visitors, page views and referrers I have each hour, day, week, month and year. As  you can tell, at about 2PM PST yesterday, the floodgates released, and our traffic surged as a result. What does that mean? Well now that the site takes less time to load, it’s more enjoyable and people stick around for longer. As my buddy, Aaron would say, “Easy, peasy, Japanesey.” We hope you find it peasy, too.

Load Time

Traffic

Rafe Neeldeman responded with a comment on yesterday’s post with a link to more details from the discussion over at his blog. The ideas is beginning to take form. I’m thinking it would  be a good idea to get the guys at Twitter involved. Seems that they have the infrastructure already in place to get mobile message-response going. Twitter mashed up with Platial for a trip status updater. I think another layer to add would be an emergency contact round-robin. If you stray from course or fail to respond to a check-in, your emergency list will be contacted who will then be responsible for assessing the severity/lethality of the situation and calling the authorities if necessary.
A Webware challenge: Make cell phones better lifelines

Their words, not mine. I just got a marketing message from one of my registrars pimping the .mobi second level domain. I started looking into it and noticed that the .mobi’s have a pretty good documentation for making apps look good on mobile devices. I don’t know how legit the .mobi TLD is, given that you can accomplish for the small screen with CSS and user-agent detection anyway - one hardly needs a .mobi extension to get the right mobile message. Upon further investigation the organization looks a lot like a professional consortium (like the Wi-Fi Alliance) to me including registrars, mobile operators, site owners, device manufacturers in their working “advisory group.” Nevertheless, their effort at .mobi is largely in developer education lumped into wha they call “Switch On! Guides” 

• .mobi Developer Guide is the meatiest.

Thought you might like to take a look at their standard’s guide, but to be honest, I don’t know why one would marry their domain to a TLD. It seems to me that the first rule of technology is that it’s always in flux. One day you’re a hot dot-com and the next your a dud-dot com when all the cool kids are playing in the dot-us pool.  Anyway, there you have it. Go dot-mobi and see if it’s your cup of tea. Me? I’m loosely-coupled.

I published another article at iMedia Connection this week. There’s always a feeling of vulnerability in publishing anything. Exposing the world to your thoughts is not as easy as it seems. I say that because my latest article will ruffle some feathers. I wrote about the commercialization of SecondLife, which is a massive, multiplayer game whose content is created entirely by its members. I love the idea of it, even if the execution could be made more rewarding. It has some growing up to do. And as such, it also has some growing pains to overcome. Namely, commercial growing pains. SecondLife, I argue, is going to have to learn to live with its capacity to be commercialized. There’s no way around it. I offer a less bleak way of doing so in the article, but nevertheless, I have a feeling that most SL members will find my conclusions disturbing. SecondLife is not designed to be a refuge from commerce. So commercial and residential will have to learn to get along.

I’m bringing this up on the Dandelife blog now because I fear the same will be true of Dandelife. I know Dandelife cannot survive on my good looks alone. I’ve been reluctant to commercialize the site beyond Google adsense for the time being. I’d like my members to think that I have their best interests at heart when I finally figure out a way to match the needs of my advertisers with theirs as members. We’re in it together, after all.
iMedia Connection: The Marketing Reality of a Virtual World

It’s been a good month for development. Many of the changes that have been made here at Dandelife Central are those that would improve performance and enable more feature development, if not the features themselves. Since most of the work has been done behind the scenes to re-factor the code, it manifests itself in a faster performing site. It should also manifest itself in more rapidly produced features forthcoming (none of which I’m prepared to discuss here, yet). That said, the one noticeable affect of the re-factoring process is load-time. That is, the pages should load more quickly in your browser. Pre-re-factoring, we had load times of about 20 seconds. Post, that number goes down to 8. More than twice as fast as before. We’ll keep working harder to make the Dandelife experience even more enjoyable - whether it be speed, function or form.

As always, thanks for Dandelifing!

Thrive,

K