List it like you stole it

In case you have not noticed, I have been having a little fun by changing the sub heading under the "Your Community Marketplace" for a few weeks now. This week it is the same as the heading for this blog post.

A lot of new and exciting things happening. First off I updated the site last night, changes include a new "Invite" tab on the My Tiki page that you can use to invite others to use tikiwade. We will send an email out to your friends inviting them to use tikiwade. Added a new press release regarding the TikiWade Foundation. Some bug fixes, and some ground work on some bigger up and coming changes.

We also are now in the TechCrunch CrunchBase. TechCrunch is a company that reports on startups and other tech companies. We are excited to be in their company of companies. We are also continually looking for ways to get the word out about tikiwade through news outlets, so if you know of someone who may be interested in doing a nice story about us please don't hesitate to mention us.

'Back' again

A couple of people have noted that to be consistent with the "shopping experience" it would be nice if when you looked at a listing on page 4 of the search results that you searched for, whether it be from a category, a search term, or a combination, that you be returned to the page you were on rather than the initial page. Well... ask and you shall receive (as long as its within reason).

I also took some advice from my good friend Brian Bezanson and added the ability to sort the results by clicking on the column header in the search results, thus getting rid of the need for the individual search buttons and cleaning up the main page. Thanks Brian!

Other enhancements involve removing the min amount/max amount from the search criteria, now that you can sort items by price, and the removal of voting, vote totals, and viewing a list of search results sorted by views (favorites) as I think that this does not add to the experience of using tikiwade.

There is still some more really cool changes that will be coming soon. Stay Tuned!

Fixed...

We found that people were unable to sign up to use tikiwade.... Not good!! So I was able to fix that last night. Whew! Now on to business. I am having a lot of fun on twitter. There is a lot of cool people using it and I can catch a lot of interesting tidbits from other users that I have followed in the past, but not in real time like this. It is a lot of fun.

I have some ideas for some new enhancements for tikiwade, but I'll keep them under wraps for the moment, but there are some really cool changes coming soon.

Also, Brad and I are being interviewed by the Prior Lake news paper. I'll post a link to the article when it is available online, but in the meantime here is a link to the paper doing the story http://www.plamerican.com/.

We get down to Business

Some changes that have happened since the last post. First off, you may now change your email address, that was not possible before. We also are also implementing the ability to have a "TikiNews" mailing that will go out to users. I will just use it to let you know of changes. If you do not want to receive emails from me, you can just log in and go to the "My Tiki" -> "Settings" tab and un-check the "Receive TikiNews" box. No other action is required. We added a few new pages too. You will notice the links at the top have changed, we have added press releases and thanks.

Next is the bigger change. We changed the title "Services" to "Business" as that seems more appropriate for the types of listings that are going into that category. We also worked very hard to beef up the list of business categories for that section. As always, if you don't see one that you need, just drop me a note and I can add it.

Enjoy, and thanks for using tikiwade.

Long Night

It was a long night while I was online watching the tweets fly by on twitter and enjoying watching the race between Ashton and CNN when Dave Grohl, at least I hope it is really Dave Grohl, came online. He finally responded to one of my tweets and we were able to have a little conversation, I even uploaded some photos for him to enjoy. It was really cool being able to connect to someone whose music I enjoy so much and with whom I would normally not have such access. That is what makes twitter exciting for me. If anyone can verify the "reality" status of @davidgrohl I would appreciate being in the know too.

Have Dinner on Us

We have begun our very first contest. We will be having a weekly drawing for a gift card to a local restaurant, and a tikiwade sweatshirt (sizes and colors vary). All you have to do is create listings on tikwade. For every listing you create, you are entered into the drawing. There is no limit. The more listings you create, the better your chances are at winning. Please see the contest rules here: http://www.tikiwade.com/tikiwade/inc/contests.jsp.

Cleaning the Clutter

Some exciting changes on the site over the weekend. First I increased the text size on the search results, and on the 'My Tiki' listings. I also added a 'contact seller' link on the bottom of each item listings description text. The reason was that it was not obvious to select the button with the question mark to contact the seller.

The BIG change was with the 'My Tiki' page. I separated out all the categories (Items, Real Estate, Jobs, Services) into separate tabs, to allow the user to narrow their view. I also added pagination to the listings so that you are only presented with 10 at a time, like the search results. This will greatly increase the page load time and cut down on scrolling through listings.

Some more minor changes, I removed the listings end date displays and instead chose to put in start date's. I am still displaying the number of day left, which changes to hours:minutes:seconds when there is less than 1 day left. I think that overall it provides more valuable information and cleans up some of the clutter.