nshrine news

The growth of nshrine.com is steady and appropriate. I’m feeling almost ready for a publicity push, but still have a few things on the GottaDo list to check off. Links to individual shrines are spreading throughout myspace, livejournal and various special interest forums at a manageable rate, and that’s a pleasure to see. Many shrines are being visited and cared for daily. The intentions of the site are being fulfilled.

One feature launched today is a tool to recover and change passwords. Now there is a “Forgot Your Password?” link on the Log In page. Also on each users’ profile page, there is a password change form. Passwords can be changed at any time.

I’ve created a new page displaying the latest candles and linking them to their place in their shrines. Hopefully this will help people familiarize themselves with the many thoughts and prayers folks have when they place candles.

The shrines so far have been on the average more serious than the oracula’s old shrines. I don’t think that is a better or worse culture for a group of shrines. It does seem that my efforts are being well appreciated. Still, it would be nice to see a bit more play. It will come.

I fiddled with the homepage to hopefully make it more compelling. I still have a ton of design issues to tackle, and a lot of good input to be inspired by, but if you have any, definitely let me know.

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.