Thoughts & Musings Blog

This page contains a running log about our group & recent web site changes. For general information, please see our FAQ. Note this website and all design decisions noted below are copyright Rob Laddish, all rights reserved.

2009, Dec 27 - Performance improvements & new invite format

As we've been adding users and events, things have been slowing down. Good news - I implemented a cache system that should make all our pages load in 5 seconds or less. (worst case before was about 30 seconds sometimes - yuck!) Please let me know if you see any issues.

I changed the html email invitations to be much smaller and concise - you'll need to select the link to come to our site for full details. This may prompt you to login to our site. We recommend you never log out on your home or work systems, and only logout for public computers such as internet cafe's and libraries. This will cut the login prompts down to once a year.

We made this change for several reasons: (1) many people were going off the email invite, and when circumstances changed (such as the start time or date), they showed up on our web site & it was often missed. (2) when we implement our new web-based response system, you'll only be able to see other peoples responses if you go to the web site. We realize that viewing your email then jumping to the web site is a bit more inconvenient, but hope that the improved interaction & always current information make it more worthwhile.

I tested the new invite format with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (latest versions only) as well as the email client with google mail. As there are hundreds of combinations out there, I can't test them all, so there are bound to be a few bugs. As always, please let me know if you see something that looks odd. (besides my picture :)

2009, Dec 23 - New features to share partner invites & others fee/donation events

Happy Holidays from all of us at Northbay Hikes!

On Oct 13 we sent out a survey for your opinion on some site changes. We received ~50 responses & many great suggestions. This post summarizes what we heard and how we're improving the site.

Question #1: There are several other hiking/walking groups in Sonoma County. Occasionally, we do a joint outing. We have the ability to list some of their events on our web site - would you be interested in seeing these options when they're not led by us?

Summary #1: 46 voted yes, 4 voted no ==> yes it is! With some opt out options below ...

Question #2: We've asked before if people are interested in hearing from others on paid events, usually charity, and the response was a pretty solid no. There's a gray area where some places are free but ... have a suggested donation. What are your thoughts here?

Summary #2: 31 voted yes, 15 voted no ==> yes it is! With some opt out options below ... Most said they'd be interested in required donation activities as well.

When designing a program or web site, it's an art to make things seem simple while allowing lots of options. Well, my engineer talents are showing as our user preferences page and events page are chock full of options! So, what are a few more? While people voted yes to both these questions, we got several good suggestions to make these events obvious and the ability for people to opt out. Even better, we will ease into sharing these kinds of events so we can improve the process with your feedback.

First off, we want to make these types of events obvious! This means showing it in several places:

The email subject line for your invitations.
The short event name on the home page.
The title of the event on the main event page.
The "key info" box at the top of each event - makes it stand out!
The name of the event in the long events listing.

We chose the following format:

PARTNER: event name [$5 donation]
Example: LAGUNA: walk from stone road to center [$5 optional donation]
In this case, the name of the other group, or partner, shows up in CAPS at the beginning.
If a $$ amount is needed, it shows up at the end, and we note if it is required or optional, and if it is a fee or a donation.
Since it shows up in the email subject line, it will make it easy for you to skip if you wish.

If this isn't enough for you, we've added the ability to opt out. To do this, login and go to your settings.

Under Contact Information, Set "Filter Email" to all.
Under General Preferences, you can set "Allow Partner Events" to no.
Under General Preferences, you can set "Allow Fee Events" to no.
If you do this, you won't get email invites for those events, but you will see them on our home page and event listing page.

Right now, we only have 1 partner loaded into the system. Some partners prefer we don't share their invites, and some people get email from both places and don't want that either. So ... we'll start slowly, and if there is a bug or if you can suggest a better way, please let us know.

We hope this meets most of your suggestions, and always welcome your feedback!

Happy holidays & see you on the trails in 2010,

Rob

2009, Dec 20 - New web style events on hold for a bit longer

On Oct 13 we announced a plan to make our event pages more interactive. Well ... it's taking a bit longer than I wanted. Paul, TJ, and I met and I demonstrated the new functionality. [Agile/Scrum processes for project management is great!] I got a lot of good feedback and suggestions.

Most of the functionality looked great, but there was 1 feature missing that both TJ and Paul thought had to come now rather than later. This is the ability for an admin or event organizer to create/delete/edit a response. It's important, as we still get emails and the occasional phone call to join a hike, and they need to add it in. So while I hoped to release this in phases, we decided to hold back the first phase until this one was in place.

In the meantime, some other changes have come through:

User settings now requires you to enter the closest city - this lets us better plan carpools and events in the future!
User settings has a new option for "Allow Alternate Carpool" to yes or no. This will be a default value when signing up for new events that allows other members in your area to contact you so you can organize your own carpool. We're still thinking through how to present this information, but it should help groups of people that live far from Paul, TJ, and I. (such as those in Sebastopol)
The events listing page had a face lift - it now looks much cleaner, and we clearly note upcoming vs. past hikes. By default, we'll show photo links, # people, and average ratings for an event when the new event style is released.
A new FAQ icon is added next to some user and event settings. These are help for more complex things when the ? help icon can't show enough info.
We added this new blog page to share updates with you. Occasionally, we'll still send emails, but we'll try to keep them simple and put most of the detail here.

I hope to get the new interactive event pages finished early 2010. After a month of several up to 2am development nights, I burned out and needed to take a break. Our twins will arrive in Feb or March, so I hope to get back into the swing of things soon. Once our daughters arrive I'll have much more important things to do. Besides, you won't want to see spit up all over our pretty web site. :)

2009, Oct 13 - Note on upcoming changes & a survey for partner organizations

This was sent out by email to all our members:

We're pleased to announce some upcoming changes to our web site. They will help bring us closer together as a community. I also have a couple of general questions I'd like your thoughts on for some future changes:

1) There are several other hiking/walking groups in Sonoma County. Occasionally, we do a joint outing. We have the ability to list some of their events on our web site - would you be interested in seeing these options when they're not led by us?

2) We've asked before if people are interested in hearing from others on paid events, usually charity, and the response was a pretty solid no. There's a gray area where some places are free but ... have a suggested donation. What are your thoughts here?

Tangible examples often help - I'll send out a notice for a Laguna Walks event, that has a suggested donation, but is free for us if you want. It will use the new features below, to allow anyone who wants to go to self organize any carpools you want.

Please respond to this email with your thoughts within the next 5 days or so, and I'll tally the results. Thanks!

Now on to the new web site changes:

A) When you respond to an event, your response will be posted to the event page on our web site for all to see. This will help others see who is going, and help to self-organize non-standard carpools. It should be a big help to event organizers - as that role can take 2-3 hours per event responding to emails and listing the names on paper.

B) Posting your response to the web site will not send any emails to the organizer or anyone else. The option to have this happen is there, and will be implemented at a later time.

C) After an event is over, please come back to the event page and rate your experience. You will be able to rate it from 1-5 stars, enter a comment, and post a link to any pictures you have for the event. All reviews will show up at the top of the event page. Later on we may add an option to the event listing page to sort all events by the highest ratings, and link to peoples pictures from our static pictures site.

As always, there will be bugs. Please email me directly if you run into a problem. By default, all events will use the old email style of responses unless the organizer specifically asks for the new web style. This way previously planned events will continue using the old style, and if we run into a bunch of bugs, we'll fix them before starting another event with the new style. If all heck breaks loose, you will always be able to respond to your email invitation and it will go directly to the organizer.

See you on the trail,

Rob Laddish (rob@laddish.net)

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