Mediology Blog

The popularity of the beta of iPals.com has been fantastic.

I had mentioned in a previous post that we had an influx of about 400 new users. That number topped 550 in a very short time. This popularity just from word of mouth and maybe type in traffic has been a pleasant surprise but not completely unexpected.

Moving forward we will be slowing things down a bit. The roll out process is going to take time and will be done in stages as time permits. This is one of the drawbacks of not seeking VC for a project like this but then again not having anyone to answer to makes it well worth it.

iPals beta has been promising. Plenty of traffic and posts. One of the members decided to set up a site for members interested in custom styles. Catchy name too http//stylemyipals.com.

Although a “true” launch won’t be for a while these are the type of spin off sites which are vital to the existence of any social networking site.

The more options a new member has with regard to custom skins and cool enhancements the more they’ll share the site with their friends further increasing our visibility.

Wow, I never anticipated we would beta launch the and have over 400 users sign up and begin testing in just a couple of months time.
Unfortunately, we dont anticipate a REAL launch for several months due to some other projects which are slated to begin more or less right now. We are hopeful the layoff doesn’t competely kill the project but realistically we could not launch right now without finishing the movie and video players.

Any programmers need a job? (Im only half joking).

The ipals project had us pretty busy all winter. The last of our major module additions is working in beta however we are not making it available to users until we work out all of the bugs and are able to button up the back end.

The music and video players work. There are some bugs uploading video however those can be worked out. The design is a little clunky so that will need some attention.

People have been asking me if allowing members to upload and share their videos and music will be cost prohibitive. We’ll be extremely pleased if we receive enough page views to warrant an increase in bandwidth.

1. Multi Blog Support
2. Custom Styling using css
3. AJAX Comment system with custom ajax client side javascript.
4. Validation System for input forms.
5. Interest Sharing
6. Favorite Lists
7. RSS Support
8. Friends - ( Add, remove, activate, block )
9. Image Gallery - Full album support with private and public albums
10. Groups ( Private, Public, Limited ) - Beta
11. ATOM Feeds
12. CSS ( multiple css / share css )
13. Custom Image Gallery

Probably doing in the next few months:

* Cell Phone Updating
* Cell Phone Browsing

1) Adding a user photo is a little bugged and needs some work as it does not always work.
2) Adding multiple photos to your photo gallery does not always work. Maybe due to size being to much. Need to figure out a better way to adding photos that are larger or have to many photos.
3) Being able to upload bitmaps. (bmp). This should be done by uploading and converting over to JPG and then adding to the photo gallery.
4) Adding group icon does not work fully.. Needs work so it works like how the avatars ( user photo ) works.
5) Groups need photo galleries. Also allowing them to add image or other attachments to the posts on the groups.
6) Adding images to posts needs to be clearer, and maybe an ajax thing for uploading images to iPals and being able to add them in the post in 1 fluid motion.
7) Adding bbcode buttons to all input fields that use bbcode to be parsed out.
Fix on group posting where you add a post and it escapes out newlines.

Ok, fixed all email issues. Fixed almost all CSS issues. Made it easier to figure out how to update CSS. Fixed links.

We’re getting there! It’s going to take a while to work through all of the bugs but so far so good.

The launch was a little hairy with a bunch of registration bugs popping up. Unfortunately many revolved around email address extensions which was a complete surprise.

Among other things we also found that users were having some issues modifying their pages look and feel.

Many fixes done with more slated for tomorrow.

Today we officially launched our bloggerlines AKA ipals site. With over 100 testers set to go we are optimistic that we will find a lot of bugs reall fast! I know that doesn’t sound like a positive outlook but realistically the more we find right off the bat the better off we are in the long run.

Although this project will be ongoing for the foreseeable future we are excited to move closer to a “true” launch.