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Topic: New chumby.com website release

Good Morning,

I am please to announce that after many long days (and weekends) of design, implementation, and testing the new chumby.com website is up. As always we value the input of everyone of the chumby community to give feedback. Let us know what you like/dislike, confused about, or give general praise to the web team *wave* for their efforts.

Thanks for all your help.

Regards,

JT (someone on the Chumby Web Team)

PS - Some people are having issues viewing the new site. We request that you refresh your cache on your web browser or hit Reload a few times. If a problem still occurs. Let us know.

Re: New chumby.com website release

JT, The new site looks great!

Also, thanks for moving all our published widgets out to the categories. 140 "other" widgets was getting to be overwhelming.

Oh yea, we still need the RSS  to have the absolute URL so we can click on them from Google Homepage.

-John Forsythe
www.jforsythe.com

Re: New chumby.com website release

Looks good!

Question:  Did we lose the "Experimental" Widgets section - or was it just relocated to somewhere I can't find it?

Re: New chumby.com website release

boeke wrote:

Question:  Did we lose the "Experimental" Widgets section - or was it just relocated to somewhere I can't find it?

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?pid=9045#p9045

Re: New chumby.com website release

JT,  So you were the one who drew the short straw and had to write the "birth announcement" while everybody else had already left to the local pub for a quick beer before getting some sleep?.. :-)

The site looks nice... clean and readable.  Though I must admit it took me a while to figure out it was new and not just that I had been looking at the forums too long and not at the main site... Guess it's a good thing that it was that easy to get used to.

Duane.. JT should get a cigar for sticking around to write the note...

Re: New chumby.com website release

Overall, the site looks nice, although I don't like the new version of the widget area. The old version was a lot better, if you ask me. Definitely like the new front page stuff.

Re: New chumby.com website release

Very nice

Re: New chumby.com website release

Wow really nice. Better navigation on the whole! Great job with the author categorizing....but,

Since I was always looking to Labs, sorting by newest, to see what fresh widgets have come across the board, this functionality is a bit lost now. Sure I can see the top ten newest, but what if 12 are posted by the time I look, two or more have gone into their categories, and I miss the chance to check them out.

That or I missed something.

9 (edited by g33k 2008-02-12 10:07:06)

Re: New chumby.com website release

I've just spent about twenty minutes reading through the new site. It feels more refined and looks more attractive. I have three concerns, content-wise, however.

1) I, like several others, bought my Chumby without realizing that our channels would include advertising content. This was mentioned on the original site, but it wasn't made terribly clear. In the ensuing discussion, this was acknowledged by the Chumby Team as something that should be made more clear to potential purchasers. If anything, I feel the new site makes it *less* clear. On the original site, the vague acknowledgment of an ad-supported revenue model was (IIRC) on the first, main page of the Chumby site. The new, more graphical site buries this info on the FAQ-like page. (specifics below)

2) Touting the Chumby as a "digital photo frame" seems dubious to me. While there's no white paper spec to refer to defining the term, the marketplace is currently flooded with DPFs, all of which have a common minimal feature set: the ability to load images into local storage and display them directly. Some people - maybe even most, I don't know - may think the Chumby way (loading images exclusively from online photo sharing services) is preferable, or at least adequate. There are others, however who specifically avoid posting their personal images online for privacy reasons and out of safety concerns. I know many people who this describes. I feel you need to make it clea

Re: New chumby.com website release

...I feel you need to make it clear that Chumby does not accomodate this usage, particularly if you are going to use an established term such as "digital photo frame" to describe the functionality.

3) Chumby requires a wifi connection to the net to do virtually everything. This is a relatively new and unfamiliar model that most people aren't going to understand right away. I think when you tout the online aspects of Chumby, they may come across as "value added" - extra features the competition isn't offering - as opposed to a totally different way of doing things. When you say it plays music or shows photos, then give examples of doing so online, I think that the ability to do so offline is going to be taken as a given by some.

Specific notes:

What is a Chumby? section

"Plug it in, connect to your wireless network, and use your computer to choose a playlist of "widgets" (the bite-sized applications that run on a chumby). And if, say, you want to see news, the surf report, and traffic in the morning, and animations, web cams and eBay auctions at night, you can group widgets in "channels.""

This would be a good, logical and fair place to acknowledge the ad widgets. Instead, choice is emphasized and it is implied that one can fully control their channels.

"Chumby Network" section

"It's paid for by Chumby Industries and by sponsor companies who will be sending you widgets such as..."

This does not communicate clearly that the ad widgets are a mandatory part of all of your channels.

"When you use a chumby, you choose what shows up on it."

This specifically suggests that if the user didn't like the ad widgets, they could avoid seeing them in their channels. Not so.

Re: New chumby.com website release

Overall like the new site

I did notice a minor item on the account settings page.  Under here I needed to fill in my zip code & gender.  When doing so I have to input my password at the bottom, when I do so I get the following issue: Username must be between 4 and 32 letters or numbers, starting with a letter

There is no area that lists my username in this area, for what its worth my username is longer than 4 letter and my first name is exactly 4 letters.  could it be that my username has a "." in it?

Thanks,
Beau

Re: New chumby.com website release

Hmmm, apparently you slipped in that user name quite a while ago, when the site wasn't very good at enforcing the rules.

The server guys are discussing it.

Re: New chumby.com website release

I really like the new web page. Its much more organized and it makes it easier to explore more places. You guys are doing great and I really really liked the new video. It symbolizes chumby perfectly

Re: New chumby.com website release

Duane,

if you gents need me to change it (or you want to change it on the backend) I have no problem with that.  smile

Cheers,
Beau (with or without a dot)... wink

Duane wrote:

Hmmm, apparently you slipped in that user name quite a while ago, when the site wasn't very good at enforcing the rules.

The server guys are discussing it.

Re: New chumby.com website release

The charm sales page btw doesn't show pictures of the charms, until you drill down two layers to the More Images button.




Could we add a descending by date category? We just added 7 widgets, if I was to go a week with out checking the site, the newest widgets will disappear into the categories.

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Re: New chumby.com website release

GoodDoctor wrote:

Could we add a descending by date category? We just added 7 widgets, if I was to go a week with out checking the site, the newest widgets will disappear into the categories.

I believe we have what you are looking for.

Newest Widgets category: http://www.chumby.com/guide/category/Newest

Re: New chumby.com website release

Perfect. Brilliant.

of course there is one more thing. I can't really see how someone would intuit this method from the widget page, like me, without asking for help.

I knew there was a way, thanks!

You did a great job!

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Re: New chumby.com website release

GoodDoctor wrote:

Perfect. Brilliant.

of course there is one more thing. I can't really see how someone would intuit this method from the widget page, like me, without asking for help.

I knew there was a way, thanks!

You did a great job!

You can now go to each category and see an RSS feed icon next to each category name. Also your browser should also automatically 'sense' the RSS feed now.

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Re: New chumby.com website release

jforsythe wrote:

Oh yea, we still need the RSS  to have the absolute URL so we can click on them from Google Homepage.

All feeds should have the necessary absolute paths.

Re: New chumby.com website release

brilliant thanks!