If you’re having trouble logging in, I apologize for any bugs, and please contact us so we can get things sorted out.

If you’re curious about our reasons for doing this, it’s mostly to reduce confusion (with things like logging in with facebook, closing accounts, etc) as we develop the two sites in different directions. If you haven’t had a look at 43 Places in a while, go take a look.

Jumpstart for new users

Jumpstart is a feature for new users that helps them dive into 43 Places and easily build their travel list. When a new user comes to the home page, they’ll see a fun display of all continents on Earth. From there they can select which continents they’ve visited, then which countries on those continents. After they’ve finished they can save their info by creating an account (with Facebook, if they want), and share their travel list with friends.

New Q&A

One of our main goals on 43 Places is to connect travelers (and armchair travelers) to people knowledgeable about every corner of the globe, and to give travel enthusiasts a forum to catalog their travel experience. One of the ways people can do that on 43 Places is by asking and answering travel questions.

We revamped the Q&A section of the site, making it easier to target your questions to people knowledgable about a particular region, and for travel enthusiasts to see which questions have been asked about areas they’re familiar with.

Give it a try, I think you’ll be surprised with what you can learn!

Sign in with Facebook

You can now use your Facebook account to sign in to 43 Places, or create a new 43 Places account. If you already have a 43 Places account, you can still use Facebook to sign in, or just sign in with your 43 Places username and password like before. It’s up to you!

Above, you can see the “Login with Facebook” button at the top of every page, and the login popup that now contians the option to login with Facebook instead of your username and password.

List reorder

You can now reorder the items on your travel lists. Just look for the little “reorder” icon to the right of each place name. It’s not available on every list, we’re working on that.

(PS: Have you tried making a travel list yet? It’s fun and easy.)

Bug fixes, etc.
A number of bug fixes went into this release. If there was something bothering you about the site, take a look and see if it’s been fixed. Many of the bugs were spotted by our users, so if you see anything strange on the site, please let us know!

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.

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

We’ve been hearing more and more from members of 43Things that they are, frankly, just not digging those How I Did It stories parked at the top of the goals pages. So we are going to test some new designs that get those ever-useful accounts of how a goal is accomplished back in the flow with the rest of the content on the page. By testing, we mean some people will see the current page, and others will see the new one. It will probably take a couple weeks to dial in just what change we think will work best, but all the tests will involve getting more timely content higher up on the page.

Whenever we test something out or make a change, there is always a period of adjustment. By testing things we are trying to make sure that what is working on 43 Things doesn’t get broken in the process. We will do our best to make the site better and you can help us with your feedback.

Thanks!

So what’s new? Out of the gate, the changes are mostly in the infrastructure. All of the Robot Co-op sites were built around a shared database and at various times were cached and served collectively. This new 43places is running on a different set of hardware, with a different database, making it almost fully separate from the other sites. For users, we hope this means no difference. But for the Co-op, it has been a good chunk of work to allow it to get to this more flexible and independent set-up. Moreover, we’ve chosen to go forward with a hosting set-up that operates “in the cloud”. We are serving the whole site from EC2 webservers and the RDS database in the sky.

So what’s else? Well as we said in a previous post, we are moving the travel lists that lived on listsofbests.com over to 43places.com. We think this will lead to more list building greatness and we’ve got a few new features for lists (like voting and new display formats). When the site is back up, check out a few lists, like:

With the new infrastructure work done, we are looking forward to getting more new features out that make 43Places a useful and fun place for travel enthusiasts. And with these back-end improvements, we’ll now be able to work quicker on launching new features.

With all this change, there are bound to be bugs and some half baked ideas exposed. As always let us know about them. With the move of the lists, there might be a week or so when some lists aren’t yet showing up on 43Places, but we will be working to get them there as soon as we can.

Thanks everybody!

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.

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