Blog of Dave

As I posted recently, I have hit my stride again doing the 4-hours of sleep per night thing and coding like a junkie does smack. Of course this only occurs when I am not at my 7-4 day job, my 1-hour commute, spending time with the family, taking care of the yard, Jeepin, etc... so about 15-20 hours a week!

The biggest recipient of this newly regained vigor is InstantSpot! This week, Aaron and I finally rolled a couple of pieces that we feel really pushes InstantSpot to the next level when it comes to the "social" part of being a social network. That is... actually being able to communicate with other members!

You see, until this week, we kind of half-way had the concept of "Friends" in place, which was fine except that it was almost impossible to figure out how to have a friend, and then once you had one... then what?

Around January, we partially answered this question in the form of the "Shoutbox" on each Spot's "My Friends" page. This work was in large part Aaron's contribution, and came out pretty sweet!

So... with that piece people with extraordinary IQs were able to have conversations with their equally smart friends who all must have magically figured out how to befriend each other!

Now, bringing us to today, with a lot of banging out new code this past week, Aaron and I put some sweet new features in place that we feel is going to really help the growth of our little Spot!

First off, we finally found a way to manage friends in a reasonable fashion. Now, any user can easily request to be added to other member's friends list. We added this in three places (that I can think of at the moment!): 1) On the My Friends page, which you see in the screen shot of Aaron's Spot. 2) On the Friend Activity page, which is basically an aggregator of your friends' blog activity. Here's mine. and 3) in our new feature that allows private messaging through our system.

Now on all the Spots (including mine if you look at the top of this page) there is a link in the browser bar that says "Send a Private Message!". You can click that above to see how it works. In case you are not an InstantSpot member and you see the login/join buttons, it looks like the image on the left to the rest of us. From that form you can send a message to anyone on your friends list. And they will receive an email notification in addition to a notification message (example here) that appears on any Spot they are visiting.

We put some features in the Control Panel to manage all of this, including an Inbox (screenshot here) and another private messaging form that has the same functionality as the one at the top of each Spot (screenshot here).

So with that I think we are going to call it a week and knock out the final touches (thanks in large part to some VERY reusable code!) on our newest project --- a cousin of InstantSpot called ResumeSpot. I am sure I will be yapping about that one soon! :)