(Bruce Lewis) OurDoings wants more early-adopter users like you. Your feedback has helped enhance and refine OurDoings in countless ways. It's been great seeing you still here as years go by.
Today, though, OurDoings isn't bringing in as many early adopters as it used to. There are so many new services coming out all the time that early adopters have to cut corners in how they evaluate them. As the saying goes, "Don't judge a book by its cover." But when there are lots of books, how do you choose which covers to open?
OurDoings has visual cues that tell early adopters there's nothing new here. Of course, you know we're still ahead of the pack in functionality. But when an early adopter looks at OurDoings and sees the tree list archive (plus signs that expand years), the tall masthead (Google, Twitter and Facebook all have narrow top bars), and the low-resolution calendar icons (very visible on new iPads), they aren't going to take the time to find out about Dropbox uploads, automatic organization into skeleton blogs, and one-click export to Facebook and Picasaweb.
In consultation with some of you (FriendFeed OurDoings Users) I've been working on a redesign based on Twitter Bootstrap, a popular starting point for modern web sites. There is still some work needed, but it's good enough now to put in production. If you have a custom style, it won't work at first; later it will.
Tomorrow morning I'll put it in production. If you want to see it now change "ourdoings.com" to "alpha.ourdoings.com" in your site URL. I hope you like it as much as I do.
(Bruce Lewis) The next time you're looking at OurDoings photos on your iPad or iPhone, try this: Bring up Mobile Safari's menu and choose "Add to Home Screen". You'll get an icon on your home screen that lets you put that retina display to good use, showing your latest photos in high resolution. If you're in a place with low bandwidth, the old "Mobile Version" link is still there.
Instagram is a popular, free photo-sharing app on the iPhone. If you shoot with it, I suggest uploading the photos from your photo roll via Dropbox for the best resolution and most accurate dates. If you're an OurDoings veteran and just want to try out the real-time integration described here, create a separate site just for the instant medium-resolution photos, as I did with InstaBruce. That way if you later decide to put the full-resolution photos on your main OurDoings site you won't end up with a bunch of duplicates that OurDoings can't detect. The cool thing about this integration is that the photo gets posted immediately when you tap Done in Instagram.
If you aren't using OurDoings yet, but you're an Instagram user looking to try something new, follow these steps:
1. Start sending photos to OurDoings
The easiest way to start from your iPhone is email-based registration, though other options are available on that same page.
Wait for a "Welcome to OurDoings" email message. If it doesn't arrive in 2 minutes, check your spam folder.
2. Integrate with Instagram
In the "Welcome to OurDoings" email click the "choose a password" link. Type a password twice.
There is a series of links ("breadcrumbs") near the top of that page toward the left. Click the Edit link. On that page, click Site Integration (near the bottom, next to a puzzle-piece icon).
On the Site Integration page, scroll down and check the Instagram box, and authorize OurDoings.
3. Watch your Instagram feed come in
Go back to the home page of your OurDoings site. Refresh every so often. Photos will come in, about 20 a minute. Click the "Get Updates" tab to see different available options like media/geoRSS, embedding in another web page, etc. Pasting your m.xml RSS URL into Google Maps search can be fun. In addition to geoRSS, photo metadata gets latitude, longitude and caption. Give it a try!
(Bruce Lewis) I've previously used the written word when explaining what makes OurDoings better than other photo sharing options, but I just posted a video that I think does the job better: http://ourdoings.com/
Those of you who like iPad/iPhone interfaces will appreciate the new ability to swipe through photos. It's shown but not talked about in the video.
If anyone has the time and inclination to make another version of this video dubbed in a non-English language, I would love to see it.
(Bruce Lewis) Sometimes it's fun to share a photo of where you are right now. Of course, out of consideration for the people you're sending the photo to, you want to explain what's going on. You start typing on your phone. Now you're showing a little less consideration for the people you're with. It's OK, but not ideal.
The ideal is achievable, though. One approach is to compose an email to OurDoings before the event you plan on live-photoblogging, and save the message as a draft. Later, when you're at the event, you open the draft, attach the picture, and send.
But there's an even faster way. If you've already created a Dropbox shared folder and shared it with box@ourdoings.com, create a subfolder for the event with the title you want people to see, e.g. "Lunch with Robert Scoble". On your phone, navigate your Dropbox app to that folder. Later, when you're having lunch, you'll be ready to upload a photo in seconds, hardly interrupting the conversation at all. You'll be live-photoblogging like a professional.
If you've set up FriendFeed on your Site Integration page, your doings can zip off to FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook while you're still talking. It's fun. Try it!
(Bruce Lewis) Right now a lot of modern web sites are temporarily unavailable: Quora, Reddit, Foursquare, Hootsuite and FriendFeed are among the notable ones. They all rely on a service called Amazon EC2 to host their services.
OurDoings does not make use of EC2 and remains available. We do make use of another Amazon service, S3, for backups. S3 remains available, and OurDoings' continuous backup system is running normally. In the event S3 does become unavailable, OurDoings will catch up after S3 recovers, backing up all photos that couldn't be backed up during the outage. Similarly, if you queue photos to go to Facebook and Facebook is unavailable, OurDoings will later catch up and post them for you.
In the event OurDoings itself becomes unavailable, you can email photos or put them in your Dropbox, and they will be posted after the service is back. But we strive to be there whenever you are. Generally, posting your photos to OurDoings serves as a single instant backup, and redundant backups within minutes. Keep those memories safe!
(Bruce Lewis) Every year the Internet is filled with pranks and jokes, most of them not very funny. Some of us have had enough. If you don't want to participate in this annual festival of mediocre humor, there's a Firefox add-on for you. It's called Do Not Fool. Analagous to "Do Not Track", it notifies web sites that you do not wish to be fooled. If you aren't already running Firefox 4, it's worth upgrading just to get this add-on.
On OurDoings, if you've turned on "Do Not Fool" and visit any day page that ends in 04-01, you'll be redirected to a photo of llamas busily ignoring April Fools Day. With the option turned off (but why would you do that?) the normal page appears. Be careful! There are a lot of silly people out there.
(Bruce Lewis) In September, 2009 OurDoings bested Flickr and other major photo sharing sites with easier, faster photo sharing. We gave you a folder on your computer that you can simply copy photos to, and OurDoings picks them up and puts them in the right place, organized for you. Set it up once, and you're set for life.
Given all the headaches people have with the Flickr uploader, one might think by now they would have followed our lead and made something simpler. But it's been almost 18 months and they haven't. Why not? It isn't that they lack resources. I think it's that they don't want to.
When people upload lots of photos to OurDoings without thinking too hard about it, the result is an interesting, nicely organized chronology of their doings. What would happen if suddenly it became easy for people to upload lots of photos to Flickr? Without tagging, splitting into sets, etc. it would look like one big mess.
(Bruce Lewis) For many people, Facebook is the new email. It's their primary way of staying in touch online. That's where they want to be able to comment on your photos. And they want to "tag" their friends in photos. But Facebook lacks many of the nice features you find on OurDoings, such as uploading via Dropbox and having your photos organized for you.
Starting in 2011, you can have the best of both worlds. Check the Facebook box on your Site Integration page. Once you've done that, you can click the Edit tab on any month's page and use the "Send month to Facebook album" link. If you add photos, just use the same link again and new photos will be posted to the existing Facebook album for that month.
If you don't use Facebook, that's OK. No information is sent to them until you check that box on your Site Integration page. If you do use Facebook, please give this new feature a try. If you like it, please write a review on Facebook.
![[ff]](http://img.ourdoings.com/friendfeedico.png)
(Bruce Lewis) OurDoings wants more early-adopter users like you. Your feedback has helped enhance and refine OurDoings in countless ways. It's been great seeing you still here as years go by.