Registration Done

When you’re just throwing a site together, or when you anticipate a small (or highly technical) audience, some of “supporting characters” on the site might not need to have the same level of investment as the the main features. Take user registration, for instance. A few fields tossed on a barebones form, a submit button, and some slightly less than cryptic error messages might suffice in some cases. In this case, though, we felt it was important to make every step of the process as usable and user-friendly as possible. That’s why I spent more time designing, tweaking, and coding the PostFresh registration screen than I have any other I’ve worked on. I’m pretty happy with the result.

The main feature of the registration screen is preliminary validation of all of the required form elements. We use AJAX to check the availability of the username, your email and password are evaluated in the browser, and you even get on-screen confirmation that your passwords match. In addition, each field has specific instructions as to what is required.

Over the coming week I’m hoping to get the rest of the user management features finished up, including integration of the TypeKey and OpenID systems into the login and event handling. After that we move on to event management. Hard to say how far out we are right now. I’m guessing sometime in the second half of June we should be ready for initial beta release. The plan is still for that to be a relatively limited release. More to come on that this week.

Privacy Policy

We’ve been around enough to know that the way a site handles your data says a lot about them. Gmail does a decent job of keeping spam out, but I don’t like the idea that some site I signed up for is going to turn around and sell me out to make a quick buck. At the same time, it’s important that the privacy policy isn’t so strict that growth (by ethical means) is hindered. That said, we put a draft of the privacy policy together today, and I hope that it gives enough protection to everyone involved. If not, that’s what drafts are for… feel free to leave a comment or send an email if something seems off to you.

Design is Live

Although it seemed as though we had dropped off the face of the earth, we’re back and the new design is live. We’ve got a little bit more development before we’re ready to open registrations again or do any more demos, but this is a step in the right direction.

School and work came between us and our pet project for a few months, but we’re back on the horse.

Anyway… go check it out. Your comments are welcome.