nshrine news

A “Share” button will now appear in each of member’s shrine (when they are logged in). It will also appear amond “Edit” and “Delete” on their profile pages (again, when they are logged in). On it there’re ways to email and otherwise publicize the shrine, include a badge for profile pages on other sites. I’ve got many more ideas, including using OpenSocial and site specific APIs from other sites. Stay tuned.

Also, nshrine.com now holds over 500 candles burning. This will be a laughably small number soon, but for now it’s a landmark.

By popular request, shrines can now be set to Friends Only. This is to support groups that wish to share a shrine for common expression, but are concerned about the possibility of others’ possible contribution.

By becoming friends, two or more people can become the only people allowed to enter candles into a shrine. In order to become friends of a shrine maintainer, simply log in, go to the shrine you’d like to share, click the maintainer name at the bottom, and click on the link to befriend the maintainer on their profile page. The maintainer will receive an email telling them that you’ve befriended them with a link to your profile. Once they follow that link and befriended you, you can share shrines set to Friends Only.

This will be much easier later.

I’ve chaged the color of the framing on the shrines in order to better support the site’s design. I’m willing to change it back if there are any huge objections. Ad-free service (and paid) service will be available soon for those who are interested.

Also, I’ve changed the profiles even more to make them a bit less cluttered and to make space for more options.

I started doing some design changes based on some fantastic advice. There are many to go, so if you see something change a bit, don’t panic. If you see something you hate, complain to me.

I also endowed the profile pages with some more structure to make room for the rich future ahead. No new functionality at this point, but watch this space.

I’ve also begun a facebook application. It’s always been part of the plan, and the successes so far have prodded me to look into it even more, and besides, everyone is making one. I was surprised in looking into it how well the nshrine services might fit in with regular facebook usages. At any rate, again, watch this space.

I’ve decided to reverse my decision to offer subdomains for shrines.  The issues regarding search engines and session cookies got to be too much.  I may return to this feature at a later date.

Also added: The ability to delete your own account and all associated shrines in one process.

http://twitter.com/nshrine is the bot account. Follow it and direct message it “d nshrine your message here”. Then check the twitter nshrine at http://twitter.nshrine.com to see your candles.

This is currently more of an exploration of connecting nshrine to other services, but I imagine that I will develop this into something more useful. Perhaps it could replace the old commonwheal from the oracula. It just needs an output account for people to follow.

I’ve just uploaded a search feature and most recently active list. As the base hardens, the tower can grow.

It’s now possible to access shrines by using the shrine’s name as a subdomain, so that the Hope shrine can be accessed via http://hope.nshrine.com/. This will be more important as we go forward in offering different ways of publicizing and linking to your shrines.

nshrine.com moved to a small slice at slicehost. Things went remarkably smoothly and performance is noticably faster. I still ahven’t decided what the added flexibility will mean, but for now, I can be certain that mail integration is a distinct possiblity.

Another plus, the icon and other images used within shrines will be on a separate virtual server. This will allow moving it to another machine, or at least a featureless server when the time comes.

This blog will remain on dreamhost for the year, probably. At some point it will move into the slice with the rest.

Since nshrine is now ready to take on new shrines and memorials, I’ve shut down new accounts and new shrines on oracula. I did it near the end of the work day, so I didn’t give it much thought. I should have. PEople have been making shrines on the oracula for over ten years. Today was a big deal.

Tonight I’ve decided to take nshrine.com out of beta. It’s not the big deal I thought it would be. There are still a ton of improvements and features to add, but I imagine that will always be true.

Also, fixed a problem with my application of the farbtastic color wheel in the shrine editing mode. I’ll get it initializing with the right color eventually, but at least for now, the ‘Apply’ and ‘Save’ work in a way that one would expect.

Also, I’ve been imagining how I might use pibb to offer some new features.