Subscriptions Changes (Behind the Scenes)

As part of our effort to make it more fun and easy for you to stay up to date on the goals and people that you’re interested in, we are simplifying subscriptions. In the past you could subscribe to people who are not 43 Things users or subscribe to part of a user (if that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry…). Now you can only subscribe to users (if that seems obvious… well, that’s why we are changing it :)). If all goes well, most of you will only notice minor changes. Of course if you have been subscribed to some of the not-actual-users I mentioned above the number of people you’re subscribed to may change (this should only apply to people who used 43 People extensively).

Tonight (May 25) at around 10PM PDT I will be moving subscriptions over to the new system. 43 Things will stay up and you will be able to do everything as normal, but if you are on the site around that time, you may notice that your subscriptions have disappeared. This should be (very) temporary! If you come back later and there’s still a problem with your subscriptions, or if you see any other bugs, or just have feedback, please report them using the Contact Us form.

Update: 10:21 PM PDT: starting the migration, if your subscriptions are missing, sit tight…

Update: 11:07 PM PDT: the migration is complete, all subscriptions should be restored

New iPhone App

We robots love our iPhones (Joe is the only robot without one).  Now there’s an all new version of the 43 Things app.  It’s gotten a complete UI redesign and some new features that we hope will make it more fun and useful.  You can post entries with photos using the built in camera, add new goals, and review your goals, completed goals, and entries.  There’s one new feature for iPhone app users only: a 0-100% progress meter for each goal.

Carry your list of goals in your pocket

Track progress and review your entries on your goals

Post entries with photos

Download it for free from the iTunes Store using this link, or search for “43 things” (PS. we had to release a new app rather than do an upgrade of our existing app, so users who already have our app will have to install it again instead of upgrading).  We hope you like it!

Personal Challenges

We’re always looking for ways to better engage the software in your head that actually changes behavior rather than just gives you a new tool or feature. The influences of peer pressure, reputation, and other social contracts are a lot more powerful as motivators than sms reminders and blinking task bars.

Along these lines, as people are creating their goals and New Year’s Resolutions, we’ve added a simple feature called the Personal Challenge.

A personal challenge is like anything else on your list of 43 things that you want to do before you die, except you give yourself a deadline and consequences. This goal then jumps to the top of your list and is highlighted with the date and consequences there for everyone to see. You can’t remove it from your list anymore… you can either mark it as done, or give up on it. You have now become accountable… and a bit of your reputation is on the line.

Choose something that you really want to do because you can only have one personal challenge at a time. For more info on motivating yourself by creating public consequences for yourself and staking your reputation on the line, you can watch this talk I gave at Ignite Seattle a few weeks ago: How to use technology to get what you want.

Try out Personal Challenges by logging in, going to your profile page, and clicking on the link in the left column to “learn more” about the brand new personal challenge and see if it doesn’t change the way you think about your goals. No more dilly-dallying.

logmerge

logmerge is the tool we use to merge access log files from our web servers. As an added bonus you get a utility to quickly perform DNS lookups on the IP addresses in the log files.

Enjoy!

dev.robotcoop.com

dev.robotcoop.com is a new site that contains some of the libraries and tools we use to make our sites go.

Just yesterday we released two libraries that help make our sites go so fast, memcache-client and cached_model!