Someone forgot to pay the bills around here so our WordPress domain mapping quietly expired yesterday. Sorry if you were unable to get to our blog. Everything should be back to normal now.
The Robots
Category Archives: Announcements
How to get all your stories from 43 People
Thank you to everyone for the feedback on 43 People. We whipped up a page that will show you all the stories by and about you, including all the comments for each story.
You can get to this page at the bottom of your profile page, by clicking “see all stories.” From there, you can save the HTML file, or copy/paste the content of individual stories to 43 Things, etc.
For instance, the URL for my page is: http://joe.43people.com/profile/entries
Note that this page can be very big, so it may take a while to load. We’ve tested it on some of our most prolific users and we don’t think there are any issues, but please let us know if you find any. We’ll give everyone plenty of time to get your stories archived before we shut down 43 People.
Posted in Announcements
Robot Co-op Diet Update
Last summer, we started a team “diet”. Our objective was to be a sleeker and swifter Co-op, with faster and more responsive web sites. We’ve spent the past year focusing on site speed, and doubling-down on the sites we felt were most reflective of our goals.
In order to stay on the wagon, we shut down Should Do This last year. Running fewer websites frees up space in our brains and allows us to pay more attention to sites that people care about. In this spirit, we plan to shut down 43people.com, sometime in the near future.
43people was our third site, which helped you answer the question “Who do you want to meet?” But it seems like most of you are using 43things to track who you want to meet just fine. Also, the most popular and innovative feature on 43people was subscriptions, which we’ve since ported over to 43things.
We had a fun time building the site and want to thank everyone who used it. Once it’s down, we’ll be able to focus our attention even more on our four remaining sites.
Update: Here’s how to get all your stories and comments off of 43 People
Posted in Announcements
Scheduled Maintenance Sat night (hopefully no downtime)
Happy almost-Spring! Just a heads up that our web host is doing some scheduled maintenance on Saturday night, from 10:00PM to 2:00AM Sunday morning (Pacific Time). We’re told that the maintenance won’t include downtime, but you know how these things go.
Posted in Announcements, Site Status
Heads up: “Place lists” moving from Lists of Bests to 43 Places
This is a post about two of our lesser-known websites, 43 Places and Lists of Bests.
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun work on a big revamp of 43 Places. One of our first orders of business is improving the way users can create lists of places. To simplify the list-making process across all our websites, we’re going to move all the Lists of Bests place lists into 43 Places.
No need to worry about missing lists, lost data, or broken links, as nothing will be removed in the process. You’ll still be able to track your progress as you step foot onto each of the 7 continents, and keep checking off items on the 50 places to see before you die.
As always, please let us know if you have suggestions on how we can improve our sites, even if the suggestions aren’t related to hyphenation.
Posted in Announcements
Update to home page
It’s almost 43 days after New Year’s, and we hope you’ve got your New Year’s Resolutions squared away. We just took the Resolutions feature off the home page, but you can always access your 2010 Resolutions with the tab on your profile page:
Or you can go directly to your 2010 Resolutions if you know your username, e.g. http://www.43things.com/people/resolutions/joe
From that page, you can copy individual Resolutions over to your Life List with the click of a button!
While we were at it, we did an update to the homepage, which should make it easier to add new goals and create a new account. New users can play around with the site, adopting goals which are temporarily saved until they create a 43 Things account. We also cleaned up the log in and sign up pages.
Check it out: http://www.43things.com
As always, please let us know if you see bugs, slownesses, or any other ghosts in the machine.
Thanks, from the Robots
Posted in Announcements, Site Status
Site outage Sunday morning
How’s your 2010 going so far? We hope you’re sticking to your New Years Resolutions!
Sunday morning starting at 2:00am Pacific time, we’re bringing all the sites down for database maintenance. The outage may last up to 4 hours, but probably won’t take that long. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we hope we picked a time that will impact as few people as possible.
update: maintenance completed without any problems. The sites were down for about 2.5 hours. Thanks for your patience (especially those further East from us who had to go without 43 Things in the middle of their days!)
[Photo by andrewscott]
Posted in Announcements, Site Status
Your Year in Review
Are you curious about how many things you’ve accomplished this year? What your most successful month was? Whether you’ve given more cheers or received more cheers? Maybe you’re making some New Year’s Resolutions and you just want to look back on the past year. We’ve added a new feature for data nerds and anyone who wants to reflect on 2009:
It’s your 43 Things Year In Review. All the gory details in list format are also available. There’s a link to it on the right side of your profile page, like so:
When I looked at my Year In Review I noticed that I write entries and give cheers in fits and spurts. I also found a few goals from the beginning of the year that I totally forgot about. Is there anything interesting, surprising, or totally expected in yours?
Posted in Announcements
Tagged 2009, 43 things, 43things, charts, graphs, year in review
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.
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- Carry your list of goals in your pocket
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- Track progress and review your entries on your goals
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- 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!
Working the machines
We’ve made some recent hardware changes in our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and keep things more stable. We just finished commissioning 7 new boxes in our fleet, 
with a net increase of 2 servers.
We are now running on a total of 9 web servers with of 16GB of RAM per box.
New hardware is not all it takes to keep 43things.com running fast and stable, but it is part of the solution, and some of the hardware we replaced was 4 years old. We’ll update you on some of the network and software changes we are also making to deal with the increased usage of the site. Thanks for putting up with some of the site’s setbacks. We feel lucky to have a problem like too much content and too many heavy users – that is the sort of problem we never want to get rid of.
Posted in Announcements, Site Status
