Release #20 – New Features Added…

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New Home Page Layout

The home page of your myfamily.com site has been redesigned for a cleaner, more polished look. The featured photo and member list have been moved to the right side, the What’s New module has been removed and replaced by a What’s Happening module, and some unnecessary links were taken out to reduce visual clutter. We’ve also added a sub-navigation bar that lets you easily add new content and members to your site.

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What’s Happening Module

The brand new What’s Happening module was designed as a more robust, user-friendly replacement for the What’s New module on your site’s home page. The What’s Happening module gives you a day-by-day news feed of all site activity, and also groups items together in a logical manner. You can still access What’s New by clicking on the What’s New tab of your site.

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Three New Site Themes Added

We’ve added three new site themes for fall: Candy, Leaf and Spooky. Just go to the ‘Site Settings’ section of any Essentials Site you administer to add them to your site.

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Other Enhancements & Fixes

• Fixed a bug that led users to the wrong page while trying to upgrade from the home page. • Fixed a bug that was removing playback controls for Photo Stories in certain instances. • Fixed a bug that kept users from creating an album using only photos from the ‘Photos Not in Albums’ album. • Changed the location and dimensions of the advertisements found on Free sites. • Made a few slight changes to the names and positions of links under the ‘People’ tab. • Fixed a bug that was making the Tags panel disappear for some users.

Photo Stories – problems with dial-in number

You may experience problems when dialing in to create a photo story. If so, when calling the 800 number, you’ll be greeted with the following message – “We’re sorry, due to heavy calling we cannot complete your call at this time.  Please hang up and try your call again later.”

We’re working to fix the issue and will let you know when we’re back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update (9-23-08): we’re back up again with photo stories. problems with the T-1 line was preventing dial-in. Thanks for your patience.

Family Trees service going down for 30-45 min tonight

At about 11:00PM PST tonight we’ll be working on the tree service. Should be back up w/in an hour.

Release #19 – New Features Added…

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10 New Site Themes Added

Add one of our 10 new themes to your myfamily.com site. Just click on the ‘Change Site Theme’ link on any site you administer. Free Themes: Blue Leaf, Green Leaf, White Essentials Themes: Baby Blue, Baby Green, Baby Pink, Basketball, Beach, School, Squadron

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Custom Web Addresses For Essentials Sites

Now you can also customize your site’s web address along with its theme. Any myfamily.com Essentials Site allows you to change the URL of the site to something unique, personal and much more convenient. This will also make your Essentials Site easier for you and your members to link to.

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New Three-Pane Power Uploader

The Power Uploader now has a new three-pane view. This new layout allows you to navigate the folders on your computer, view the image files in each of these folders, and then drag-and-drop the images you want to add into the upload window. Adding images is now even easier because you don’t need to switch back and forth between your computer’s desktop and myfamily.com.

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Sort Your Content By Title

In addition to being able to sort your site content by the date it was added or by the member who added it, you can now also sort by title. This is helpful if you are looking for a specific item or if you want your content to appear in alphabetical order. The sort by title feature is available in the What’s New, Search, Photos, Albums, Videos, Discussions and Photo Stories sections of your site.

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Membership Request Auto-Accept

If you have a Public Page for your myfamily.com site where people can ‘Request Membership’ to join, you can now choose to have all these requests auto-accepted instead of manually approving them. This new option is found on the Public Page Settings page.

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Other Enhancements & Fixes

• If the last photo within an album is deleted from your site, that album will now also be deleted. • The character limit of your site’s Welcome Message has been increased from 1,000 to 2,000. • Fixed a bug that was not allowing users to add photos to an existing album with the ‘Add More Photos’ feature. • Implemented a new site URL structure. • When creating an album, the default name of that album has been changed from ‘Untitled Album’ to ‘<Your Username>’s Album’ for better organization. • Fixed a bug that caused some Discussions to appear in the incorrect sections when sorting by Date Added and Member Name.

Release #18 – New Features Added Today

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Embedding Your Photos, Videos & Photo Stories

Any photo, video or Photo Story on a myfamily.com site can be embedded elsewhere on the Internet, like on your blog or personal web site. Just click on the ‘Embed This…’ link and copy the HTML code that appears. Then paste it wherever you’d like. You can even embed as a comment on any of your myfamily.com sites.

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“My Recent Contributions” On Member Profiles

The Member Profile page now contains much more than just a person’s contact information. We just added a section called “My Recent Contributions” that displays the content that that member has added to the site. This section replaces the ‘View My Content’ link that previously existed on this page. To access a member’s profile page, click on their profile picture in the Member List of your site’s home page.

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Sharing Is Now Quicker & Easier

Sharing photos, albums, videos and Photo Stories is now easier than ever with the new ‘Share’ feature. Just find the item you want to share and click on the ‘Share This…’ link. Instead of being taken to a separate page, a module will appear that lets you send share emails or generate share links that you can post anywhere online.

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Embedding YouTube & Google Videos

Along with being able to upload your own videos to your myfamily.com site, you can also now embed videos from YouTube and Google into your comments and Discussions. All you need to do is switch to HTML View and enter the embed coding. We’ve also added support for embedded music files, like MP3s and WMAs.

Release #17 – New Features Added Today

Recurring Events
When you create a new Event on your myfamily.com site, you can set it to recur once every month or every year. So if you’re adding birthdays, anniversaries or holidays to your site, just select a Yearly reoccurance and a new iteration of the Event will be automatically created every year. You won’t have to re-enter them again in the future.

Updates To What’s New
There are now ten items displaying in the What’s New module of your site’s home page, rather than five. We’ve also added a “More…” link that will take you to your What’s New page with the Show New filter already selected.

The What’s New section now remembers your filtering and sorting criteria. So once you filter by item type, who added the content and whether or not it’s new, the What’s New section will remember your settings until you visit a different section of your site.

Inviting Contacts From Multiple Sites
When inviting people from your Contact List to your site, you can now select from any contact on any of your sites, not just those on the site you’re inviting from. From the Invite page, click on ‘Select From Site Contact List’, choose the site and select the contacts you’d like to add to your invitation.

The ‘View My Content’ Link
We’ve added a ‘View My Content’ link to all member profile pages. This link will take you to a search page that displays all the content that person has added to the site.

Also, clicking on member avatars or nicknames in the comments section of an item will take you directly to that member’s profile page.

Release #16 – New Features Added Today

New And More Convenient Ways To Invite
Our new invite page lets you import email addresses from your online address book or email provider, including AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and more. Just click on the ‘Import Email Address’ link, select the people from your address book you want to invite, send your invitation and you’ll have your site growing in no time.

You can also invite people from your site’s Contact List directly on the invite page, or generate an Invitation Link that you can post on your blog or web site. If you want to send invitations with your own email account, you can do so by simply copying and pasting the Invitation Link into that email.

New Invitation Email Design
We redesigned the look and feel of the myfamily.com invitation email, giving it a more personal touch. This includes adding the avatar of the person who sent the invitation and making the invitation link much more obvious to the recipient.

Feature Albums On Your Home Page
The album options have been redesigned to provide a better experience for you as you manage your albums. We’ve also added a much-requested new album feature called “Feature on home page”. When you select this option for an album, all of the photos within that album will begin appearing at random as the featured photo on your site’s home page. This is great for when you don’t want to feature just one photo on your home page, but want to feature a collection of photos.

Finding Photos That Aren’t In Albums
When you’ve got a lot of photos and albums on your site, it can be really difficult to know which of your photos have been placed in albums, and which ones haven’t. We added a new default album to your myfamily.com sites called ‘Photos Not in Albums’ to help solve this problem. All of the photos found in this album have not been placed in any other album on your site. Just go to your All Albums page to check out this new feature.

Filter By Item Type In What’s New
In addition to being able to filter the content in the What’s New section by Members and Show All vs. Show New, you can now also filter all items in the What’s New section by item type. You’ll find this filter right next to the Members filter on the What’s New page, and can filter by any combination of Albums, Discussions, Files, Photos, Stories or Videos.

New Comments Now Easier To Find
When you visit any item on your myfamily.com site, all of the comments that have been added since you last saw that item will be labelled as ‘New’. This is very helpful when navigating through long comment threads on your photos or discussions.

SnapGenie outage.

We’ve been having some issues with our SnapGenie feature. If you have already created SnapGenie’s, they should play just fine, but creating new ones is at issue. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have things working once again soon. We’ll post an update.

UPDATE: 5/23 — Whew!! We had a significant hardware malfunction with our telephony system. But, we are back online with SnapGenies. Thank you so much for your patience, and our apologies for the inconvenience.

More new fixes and features added today

Comment Permissions

• Site administrators can now determine who can add comments to their site by using the Administrator Settings page, found under Site Settings.
• The following options are available:
  • Administrators and members can comment.
  • Administrators, members, and guests can comment.

Search Results Page

• You can save your search criteria and share it with others by clicking on the ‘Link to this page’ link. It will generate a URL that you can post anywhere on your site.
• Search results can now be viewed in either a List or Thumbnail view. You can also select the size of the thumbnails.

Personal Info/Settings Screen

• Prior to this release, when you joined a site, your personal preferences were automatically set to the default settings (i.e. Display personal information, Daily Site Notifications, etc.). To change the settings, you would have to go to the My Memberships page.
• Now, when you visit a myfamily.com site for the first time, a screen will appear that allows you to set your nickname, choose your notification preferences and determine whether or not to display your email address, mailing address, phone number or birth date.

“Remove Me”

• Before, only site administrators could remove people from sites. You can now remove yourself from a myfamily.com site by going to the My Memberships page and clicking on the “Remove me from this site” link for the site you’d like to be removed from.
• Before, if you were the last site administrator of a free myfamily.com site, you could not remove yourself from that site. Now you can, and removing yourself from the site will also delete that site.

Albums

• When you view a single photo from an album of photos, you’ll now get additional album details. This includes the album name and links to start the slideshow, set the photo as the album cover and remove the photo from the album.
• You can now add a photo to an album straight from the single photo view page by clicking on the “Add to album” link under Photo Options. Before, you could only add photos to an album from the All Photos page.
• All site administrators and members can now add photos to any album on the site. Before, the only people who could add a photo to an album were site administrators and the person who created the album.

Single Item Views

• The options that used to appear below an item on the single item view page have been moved to the right side of the screen to increase their visibility to users.
• When viewing a single item, the avatar of the person who added it is now also displayed. If you click on that avatar or name, you’ll be taken to a search results page that shows you all the items of that type added by that person. This works for photos, videos, discussions, SnapGenies and files.

Upload Button Always Active

• When adding photos, videos and files to your myfamily.com site, the ‘Upload’ button is now always active. Before, this button was disabled until the user had chosen content to upload. Periodically, the button would remain disabled even after content was selected, so we changed it to always keep it active. If you click on the active ‘Upload’ button without selecting anything to upload, you’ll simply get a message telling you that no content has been selected.

What’s New Updates

• If you click on a comment in the What’s New section, you will be taken directly to that comment’s location in the comment list, rather than top. If that item has a lot of comments, it was often difficult to find the one you clicked on in the What’s New section.
• When you visit the What’s New page, the ‘Show All’ filter is now the default, rather than ‘Show New’ because most users were switching to ‘Show All’ upon landing on the What’s New page.

Previous/Next

• Improved performance and accuracy of the previous/next links when viewing single items

New functionality added today

Today we added the following new features to myfamily 2.0:

1. Invitation Permissions - Site admins can now select what types of users can invite people to their site. To try it out, login to your site and go to Site Settings then to the Administrator Settings tab. (Of course only admins will be able to try this out)

2. Finding Tagged Items on Your Site – Click on a tag, and you’ll be taken to a “search result” page that displays all items on that site with the same tag. You can filter your search results by clicking on the ‘edit search’ link and selecting the item types and members that you’d like to see. You can also add to or change your search results by entering new tags in the ‘with these tags field’. Keep in mind that right now we’re only returning search results that are exact matches. We’ll be beefing up our search capabilities in a future release.

3. Login Help - We hear from a lot of users who are having trouble logging in to their sites. We’ve released two small changes today that should help fix some of those issues.

The first one is the ability to request a list of usernames that are associated with your email address. We’ve learned that a lot of users don’t realize when they have more than one username associated with the same email address (e.g. mom & dad sharing an email address, or someone creates a unique username to join a site, but uses the same email address that is already attached to a different username on one of their other sites). Next time you login, you’ll notice that we’ve added a message to the top of your personal start page that tells you what email address is on your account, and how many usernames are associated with it. It also provides a link to request a list of all usernames and sites associated with your email address. Once you receive the list, you’ll hopefully be able to find the site you’re looking for, and know how to access it.

The second small enhancement that we hope will help with site accessibility is a simple ‘Remember Me’ check box on the login page. If you want the site to automatically log you in next time you visit, check the box. If you’re using a shared computer (whether in your home or in a public place), and you don’t want to log in automatically, make sure the box is unchecked when you log in.

I know these login enhancements are relatively small, and they certainly don’t address all of the login issues that folks are facing. If you have others that you’d like to add to the list, please let us know.

– UPDATE –
(I can’t believe I forgot this in my original post!)

4. Updated Text Editor - We upgraded the software that we use for our text editor in discussions, comments, etc. So far, it seems like many of the previously reported issues have gone away. Looking forward to hearing whether or not the update makes text entry and edits easier for you.