comments

looking great to me!

hey brian -

we actually do record people's sex, but it's not a required field and it's hidden kind of deep in your profile, so a lot of people (a substantial majority, actually) don't specify it. of those that do, just under 54% are male.

hey andrey -

do you have a popup blocker installed? that code you're seeing is just so we can track which links get clicked on. but since all external links get targeted to a new window, i think your popup blocker may be getting in the way.

john

i'll look into that, thanks howard.

hey thanks andrey.

rachel, howard and mindy - that is what happens when i type '>' instead of '<'. crazy!

and just to clarify on the technical side of the redirect thing, we do it in such a way that google and anyone else is told that it is a permanent change, and not the result of some monkey business on the site. so all of you page rank and seo kung fu is maintained in their eyes.

hey everybody -

just wanted to let you know that i did the thing that bill is talking about above. from now on, anytime your url changes, if someone goes to the old one, they will be redirected to your new url, rather than getting a "page not found" error. this will work for everyone going forward.

justin and keith - i manually inserted entries for your old urls that dan edited, so if you go to those now they will send you to your current profile.

john

As a member of the Biznik team, i just want to clarify Chris's post and say that we do not sell, give access to, or let anyone even take a look at any of our member's email addresses ever.

When you sign up for Biznik, the only email messages that you opt-in to receive are communications that come from Biznik (and from Biznik only). You can opt-out of receiving these emails by unchecking a couple of boxes under "privacy settings" in the account section of your profile. Posting anywhere on the site, hosting or rsvping to an event, or any other action that you may take here does not expose your email address to email harvesters, marketers or spam-bots ever. And it never will.

That said, spam has been rising at an exponential rate on the Internet as a whole for some time now. And the sad fact is that once your email address is harvested once, it is just a matter of time before the spambots et al. start targeting you with increasing frequency. But you can be certain that we here at Biznik do everything we can to keep your email address safe and secure.

You roadies always get up so early....

leila - i've made some changes to the printing so that it should look a lot better. it's still not what i would call "pretty", but it's better.

howard, that was a bug that has been fixed.

thanks a lot!

hey leif -

i think your easy idea is great, and i'm going to do that very soon, the harder idea is great too, but (duh) would take longer, so we will have to see how that fits into our dev schedule. generally speaking, i think we'll be tweaking the profile pages somewhat next week in order to account for some of the criticisms that we've seen here. stay tuned, and thanks for the feedback everybody!

john

hey y'all -

i've just deployed a patch to the image upload code - you should be able to get your logos up there now.

john

hi all -

just thought i'd chime in with some more of our reasoning for why we changed the format up.

the first, over-arching goal that we set ourselves to was to give you all more opportunities to promote your business. to this end, we've given members a place to post their business's logo (a much requested feature), a new place to list associations and endorsements that they have in real life, and a new promotions tool that lets you advertise your services, both to the Biznik community and to the world at large. we've also added the ability for you to add more links to your external sites. we think all of these things will only help members to get businesses out there.

after that, our second major goal was to facilitate networking between members. we have gotten a lot of comments from people who are looking to hire someone and found a number of people on Biznik that provide the services that they may be looking for, but have then wondered, "but how do i know if this person's any good?" Answering that dilemma was the rational behind making the posts visible, bringing the network and the "members you have in common" onto the profile page, and creating the "meet this member at" section. Hopefully now, if a member is thinking of hiring, say, a graphic designer, they can get a feel for whether they think a given member is any good by reading their posts; they can see who the designer knows, and who they both know, in order to ask for an opinion or even an introduction; and then they can go to an event that the designer is attending and meet them face to face.

the third thing that we wanted to do was to give members an easier way to keep tabs on the members in their network, their bookmarks, and anyone else they may have their eyes on. to echo rachel's point, the "recent activity" log is designed expressly for that. now when i go to dan's profile, i can get an instant idea of what he's up to lately. also, when i go onto the main Biznik homepage, i can see what everyone in my network has been doing, too. This goes along with an ancillary goal, which was to bolster the meaning of "your network" throughout the site.

nancy, i definitely see what you're saying, and it's possible that we've erred too far in the direction of increasing members' "networkability". but hopefully this will clear up the rationale behind the new features - we certainly aren't trying to just bolster Biznik as a site, or to engender any kind of rote popularity contest amongst our members. rather, our goal is, and has always been, to facilitate both the member's ability to promote themselves and to foster a sense of trust between people who may not know each other outside of this virtual world. and rest assured, we will continue to tweak things according to all of the feedback that we receive from you guys.

thanks a lot,

john

hey jeff,

thanks for bringing that to our attention. we added a script so that we can keep track of how many people are clicking through from our site to yours (more on that from dan a little while), but apparently internet explorer wanted to be a little buggy about it. i've just deployed a fix so your links should be showing up a-ok now.

hey thanks for the report, will. i've just deployed a fix for that.

the formatting bar is actually kind of complicated - but it is coming. in the meantime you can just put it in parentheses to make it link. ( http://biznik.com ) = (http://biznik.com). there are lots of simple things to do, to see them, just click the "formatting help" button when you go to post.

thanks frank!

the home page and members section use a lot of partial page caching (aka fragment caching), but we never got around implementing it for the events and forums because of time. but priorities sure shift when your server is inaccessible for a while.

thanks jeevan, and sorry about that. i'll look into this issue.

caching is hard!

hey killorn -

check out (http://www.torpedoscreenprinting.com/). they're located on capitol hill and do a pretty good job from what i've heard (though i haven't used them).

john

hey frank -

um, the answer to both questions is "that's a bug." it's been fixed. thanks!

ps - i will not be entertaining bug reports or feature requests. sorry. i deal with them all day long...

i'll be there. looking forward to meeting you, bill, and everyone else, too!

one of the things that we did think of was the one that you noticed - showing the events that members who are in your network are attending. to that end, if you have any suggestions of other things that would be useful or fun, let us know!

thanks, cere!

we will be adding local forums and of course making them searchable shortly. i,m still fixing bugs, but i'm hoping to get to adding in new features starting next week.