Did you know?…
June 9th 2011, 12:19 pm
… 280daily has thousands and thousands of users who have written millions and millions of characters… no really, it’s true! It’s all the more surprising when you consider it’s a completely unsociable platform far removed from the vast social sea of liking, tweeting, stumbling and poking. We must be doing something right if you like it enough to share it with friends over afternoon tea.
With all that said, we’ve now introduced an incentive for referring friends to 280daily. A small incentive, but an incentive nonetheless. You might have noticed you now have an extra monthly quota. Well now you can earn an extra 250 characters per month for each person who signs up using your referral link. You can find your referral link in your account overview. Let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Additional character quota and grid layout
May 11th 2011, 12:34 am
Many of you have requested the ability to add additional characters on those days when too much happens and you don’t have enough space. We’ve added an additional quota of 500 characters per month, which will be reset at the beginning of each month. Before you begin writing your entry, in the knowledge you’ve had an eventful day, you can add as many additional characters as you have available.
The grid layout feature is still in early stages, but is available to try. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.
Short roadmap laying out future development
March 29th 2011, 9:26 pm
We base our decisions on your feedback. Below is an overview of the larger goals and features 280daily is working towards. As always, thank you for your continued support and feedback!
Plan for April
- Grid layout when viewing entries – switching from a traditional linear layout to a grid layout (with the option to switch back).
- Additional character quota – an additional 500 characters a month, which can be used for those days where simply too much happened.
May onwards
- Ability to change the look and feel of 280daily.
- Book export – fully featured.
- Improve PDF export functionality – more control over appearance, layout and content.
- More date based relation – increasing the possibilities regarding to linking to other entries.
- More settings – even more control over 280daily.
- Improved photo support – better galleries and photo integration.
Native mobile apps
Native mobile apps for mobile devices such as iOS and Android are being put on hold. Getting a mobile app right isn’t easy, at this point in time 280daily can’t invest the time and resources into creating the high quality app we’d want to put out there. 280daily has a fully featured mobile interface and we’ll keep working to improve it.
Startups are rightfully being forced into the mobile market-place, but we’ve always been of the mind-set that because 280 characters doesn’t take a great deal of time, it’s something you can sit down at your computer to do at the end of the day. But we don’t want to dictate how you should use 280daily. This is why it’s important that those who want to post quickly from their mobile have the ability to. At this point in time, mobile email clients seem to be the answer.
Hopefully this is a helpful overview, please submit any questions, feedback or requests you have. If you could also take the time to leave a review on the Google Chrome Web Store and ‘like’ 280daily on Facebook that’d be really appreciated too!
New features and a small pledge
March 20th 2011, 11:39 pm
Everyday we receive an overwhelming amount of complimentary feedback, it’s always greatly appreciated. Yesterday a user sent in some unexpected thoughts on recent events in Christchurch,
“Recently, Christchurch had a large earthquake while I was there, and 280daily helped me see the stark difference in my posts between the day before and after the quake. Before, I was complaining about little things like not enough hot water, but now afterwards I can see how ridiculous this was compared to the devastation and loss surrounding me. Looking back at my posts, this helped me get some perspective, and for that, thank you.”
The Christchurch earthquake last month was New Zealand’s deadliest natural disaster in 80 years. Little more than a week ago an 8.9-magnitude earthquake hit Japan causing a national disaster. It’s a small pledge, but for the next month, any profit we make on 280daily mugs will go towards the Japan Tsunami Appeal.
More stats
Just a quick note regarding new features. In your account statistics, you now have the option to view your most frequently used words, we’ll be expanding functionality here also. Let us know what stats are important to you.
Including a link
Another feature requested by users has been the ability to include a web link along with an entry. You can enable this by visiting Settings -> New Entry. There you’ll find the option to display a field for an interesting web address you’ve found that day.
Features, criticism and general comments are always welcome.
Daylight saving time
March 18th 2011, 7:37 pm
We’ll be pushing out a few updates later tonight. Part of the update will fix any issues with DST. If at any point you’re experiencing any irregularities regarding daylight saving time… please let us know!
Thank you for your continued support and feedback!
3 improvements plus CSV support
March 6th 2011, 12:10 pm
New Recommendation Options
We’ve provided two new recommendation options. You can now email up to 100 people at a time using email recommendation. Or we can post you 280daily handouts free of charge. You can recommend by clicking the “Recommend friends” button on your account overview.
Advanced Date Selection
We were never happy with how we implemented advanced date selection for both selecting a new entry and viewing previous entries. If you now visit advanced date selection (at the bottom of those pages), you will now be able to navigate quickly in a smooth linear fashion.
Export to Spreadsheet
We’ve added the option to export to CSV, this allows you to export all your entries and open the file with spreadsheet software such as Excel and Numbers.
Larger New Entry Space
We’ve cleaned up the New Entry page, so that you can focus on writing your entry. As always, if you have any feedback, please let us know.
Video update
March 5th 2011, 5:43 pm
We’ve recently updated the 280daily introduction video to reflect new features as well as providing a more comprehensive overview. Let us know why you think!
We’ll also be releasing a few updates tomorrow. Stay tuned for an update.
Keeping a journal
March 5th 2011, 4:56 pm
Keeping a personal journal is just one use for 280daily. As you may have seen, it can also be used for travel, business, sport, food, targets and a backwards to-do list. Don’t limit yourself to these uses, feel free to find your own.
If you are thinking of keeping a personal journal there are certain things you should think about.
How is a journal useful?
- Keep organised
- Focus your mind
- A personal reminder
- Treasured keepsake
- Stress reducer
- Goal marker
What medium should I use?
280daily isn’t for everyone, 280 characters can be limiting. 280daily was created because consistently keeping a full-blown journal can be unrealistic, intimidating and can too quickly become a chore. The idea of keeping up with 50 words a day is an accessible task for anyone, depending on whether the idea of journaling/keeping a diary or archiving your life is something you’d like to do. In most cases, 280 characters should be all you need. There are certain cases where 280daily just isn’t appropriate. For example, sometimes journals are used as a form of therapy, which requires excessive amounts of writing.
If you’re not in the business of 280 characters, there are a number of ways you can keep a journal, you might consider scrapbooking, letter writing or just use an old fashioned notebook.
Where should I write my journal?
Although 280daily can be used on the move, we primarily intended entries to be written on a laptop computer in an area you’re comfortable in. 280 characters is short, taking the time to write properly will leave you with a journal worth having, maybe try and find a quiet part of the house where you know you won’t be disturbed.
What do you want to convey to future you?
It’s easy to blurt out your thoughts and feelings, but with just 280 characters, it’s important to think about what you want to convey to yourself when you re-read the entry in future. Do you want to express your feelings, what you did, what you’re looking to achieve in future? 280 characters will help limit your excess. Focus on the positives, but don’t ignore the negatives.
Who are you writing for?
280daily allows you to export your entries to PDF along with book, print and spreadsheet. You should think about whether you want this to be just for you, or whether you want to eventually share it with your family. If you are planning on sharing with friends, be careful not to over share, a worst case scenario would be talking negatively about the very person you are sharing your journal with.
When should you write?
It’s generally thought the best time to write a journal is before you go to bed, the events are fresh in your mind and if you’ve had a good/bad day, you’re likely to want to write about it as soon as possible. Alternatively you could take a step back, let the days events settle and write your entry the next day.
It doesn’t need to be beautiful.
It’s easy to become obsessed with keeping your journal looking beautiful and can detract from the actual content. Using a computerised journal will take away the issues involved with making changes. Similarly, don’t worry about spelling mistakes and grammar too much.
Keeping your journal safe.
One of the issues with keeping a physical journal is keeping it safe and away from prying eyes. 280daily is a great way to keep your thoughts, feelings and events safe.
In summary.
Remember that a journal is an free gift to your future self. You will undoubtedly find things you have long forgotten!
28 days of 280daily
February 12th 2011, 8:54 pm
It’s been 28 days since 280daily officially launched. In total across the site, members have written millions of characters and we have sent out tens of thousands of email reminders.
The feedback we’ve been receiving through our internal feedback form, Twitter, blogs, websites and the Chrome Web Store has been unbelievable. It’s reassuring to know that we’ve found a niche and are providing a service that a lot of people have been looking for.
We’re hoping to roll out plenty of features before the end of February. It’s great to see so many of these users volunteering themselves to help out.
Thanks again for all your support, if you have any feature requests or issues with 280daily, as always, let us know using the feedback form.
Chrome Web Store… plus Firefox
February 5th 2011, 12:16 pm
Today one user suggested we submit 280daily to the Google Chrome Web Store. Upon looking into it, we found out the web store isn’t just for native Chrome extensions, but also for online apps (did you know this?).
280daily has been submitted to the web store and hopefully it will be another great way of spreading the word. However, just to make things clear, installing 280daily in Chrome doesn’t add any extra functionality, it simply adds an icon to your Chrome dashboard. We’d really appreciate it if you could take the time to write a short review for 280daily at the Chrome Web Store.
Firefox
The majority of 280daily users are browsing with Firefox, which is why we thought it’d be a nice idea to create a Firefox Extension. We’ve almost finished working on it and we’ll let you know when it’s available. It’s a really simple tool that provides a quick overview of 280daily in your statusbar, you’ll have full control, so that you only see the information you want to see. We think it’ll be a great unobtrusive way of helping you keep your archive updated.
UPDATE: The Firefox extension is no longer being developed as we don’t have the resources to introduce an extension for all browsers, so it doesn’t make sense at this point to maintain a Firefox extension. If you already have the extension installed it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
