nshrine news

At long last, nshrine is offering privacy settings for your shrines.  This means you can set a shrine to allow only yourself, only your friends, or only nshrine members to see your shrine and its candles. The default will allow anyone to see your shrine, as it has been to this point.  You can still idependently limit candle placing to yourself, friends or members.

This new feature will be available only to advertising free shrines after December 1st of this year, so give it a try for free this month and see if it’s right for you.

Nshrine.com will no longer send out “silent” candle notifications for your shrine Candles with a thought or message attached will still be mailed as always, but those placed with no words will no longer be sent via email. Shrines not set to send email notifications will not send email, as always.

“Silent” candles will still appear in the shrine, and in the shrine’s RSS feed, but the email will no longer be sent. This was inspired by shrine maintainer suggestion, as well as recent delivery problems with some email service providers.

Probably related to this, Hotmail and MSN email addresses are currently not receiving email from nshrine.com. I am currently corresponding with their administrators to get this straightened out.

This weekend nshrine past the 400 shrines milestone. To celebrate, I’ve reduced the cost of gift candles by at least 50% for the next two days. If you are interested in removing ads from your shrine or any shrine you appreciate, now is a great opportunity.

To learn more about gift candles, go to http://nshrine.com/help/giftcandles.html

To purchase gift candles, check the “Gift Candle” tab on your profile page.

Internet Explorer 7 users should now have full access to color changing tools on their shrines.  A conflict between the color wheel, the excellent farbtastic, and the odd manner in which Internet Explorer 7 uses jquery’s offsetParent, made the color wheel act poorly at best. It should now be fine.

Also new is the ability to change your email address through the “Settings” tab of you profile change.

Enjoy.

Now you can add special “gift candles” to your favorite shrines.   Each candle removes advertising from the shrines for one week (or adds a week to the ad-free time if any).

Simply login in to your account and look for the ‘Make This A Gift Candle’ checkbox when you place a candle in your favorite shrine.  When you check that box, you’ll see a special gold base on your candle and all ads will be removed.
To see one, see the candle placed by artwells in the hope shrine.
(This is also a good opportunity to see what an ad-free shrine looks like, if you haven’t seen one lately.)

More gift candles can be purchased for your account by visiting your profile page and clicking on the ‘Gift Candles’ tab.  Here you will also see how many gift candles you have left.  Gift candles can be purchased for other accounts by visiting that account’s ‘Gift Candle’ tab.

Enjoy. As always, do let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

The 10,000th candle was lit in nshrine.com at Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:38:25 GMT. It was in the Bumblebee Shrine and was accompanied by the dedication “Voor Syl”.

It’s been a great 10,000 candles. I’m looking forward to making room for millions more.

Thanks to all of you, nshrine.com is becoming a success.  To celebrate several minor milestones this week, I’ve made all current shrines advertising free for a week.  Those of you that have ad-free shrines already will have one free week added.

To learn how to keep your shrines ad-free status, you can click on the “Keep Ads Off This Shrine” button on any ad-free shrine.  (In shrines with advertisements, you will be able to find this information through the “Remove Ads From This Shrine” button.)  If you don’t want to have the Keep/Remove buttons in your shrine, you can block this through the “Change Shrine Settings”.

If you haven’t checked your shrine out in a while, or haven’t visited others, now is a good time.  You can start here:
http://nshrine.com/shrines.html
If you haven’t got any shrines yet, get started
http://nshrine.com/

Thanks again for using nshrine and spreading the word.

Growth is steady and great input is coming in. New tools are in the works and the nshrine experience keeps getting better.

I’ve just launched a simple listing of all publicly-available shrines. Many shrines have opted-out of listing, as is completely understandable. Hopefully we can soon offer greater privacy through access control. For now, shrines may be removed from the directory by “Change Shrine Settings” in the shrine editor.

According to the settings the shrine creator gives, some shrines welcome candles from all, some from just nshrine members, some from friends only, and some just from the creator. Browse around and respect a new shrine or two with a candle: Visit the Shrines Page.

The number of shrines grows at nshrine.com, as does the number of candles and the new members. Welcome all.

To help visitors discover new shrines, nshrine.com will soon have directories of shrines. In order to preserve the low profile many shrines currently have, the option to keep shrines out of directory listings is now available. To remove your shrines, log in to account and click on the ‘Edit’ button for the shrine you wish to de-list. The option to remove a shrine from listings is in the
‘Change Shrine Settings’ panel.

Removing a shrine from directories won’t make it completely hidden–people will still be able to visit from links to your shrine on other sites or through search engines, The ability to close the shrine to all but your own account, your friends, or to nshrine members in general is coming soon to ad-free shrines.

Today’s launch includes paging for shrines. Some shrines have had hundreds of candles placed in them and this has led to large pages too large to be appreciated. I’ve programmed arrow keys to appear on shrines with more than eight candles. I may move this number up over time. You can see an example of the arrows at work on the play shrine. Let me know what you think.

Also, some of you may have noticed a change in shrine advertising (for shrines that have ads on them, that is). I’ve placed a block of text ads at the bottom of each page instead of ads at the top. I’ve also enabled a per-session ad-free option for all visitors and all shrines. If a visitor clicks on the “Remove Ads From This Shrine” button (for those shrines that don’t have this button disabled), ads will be removed for that visitor for 20 minutes. I am experimenting with different advertising services, so please let me know if you see any offensive ads or malfunctions with your shrines. Thanks.