blog.itsonthegrid.com

And...we're back.

Ugh.  The salesforce.com servers were down for several hours this afternoon, which made www.itsonthegrid.com unavailable for most of the afternoon.  We're back up now, and thanks for your patience.

A couple of site enhancements

Now that www.itsonthegrid.com has been live for a couple of months we've begun planning our next phase of development in earnest.  In the meantime, though, we continue to tweak the site for usability. A few days ago we made two pretty significant changes to the search results pages and browse feature:  

• When you do a search or click the "Browse" tab, the results now come up in the "Expanded" view rather than the "Collapsed" view, eliminating the need to click to see more information about the record.  (You can still click "Collapse" to minimize the ones you're not interested in.)
• In addition, you can now enter your private notes directly in the search results, rather than having to first click through to the detail page.  Just click in the "Private Notes" box -- a mini-window appears in which you can input your private information, just like the one on the detail page.  As always, those notes can be seen only by you, and persist in the system even when you're not logged in.

Both of the above adjustments were recommended by our users, and we really appreciate the feedback. If you have suggestions for ways to improve the site, don't be bashful.  Feel free to comment here or use one of the feedback forms on the main site (all of which are now secured by SSL encryption, even though you can't see the little lock icon in your browser -- we can't make that happen due to how the underlying platform presents the webpages).

Back to School Special: IOTG's Introductory Pricing Extended to Feb 1

Welcome back, everyone, and Happy New Year.  Just a quick note before you scroll down to check out the 2009 OWA Scorecard posts we'll be putting up between now and the start of Sundance:  We're planning to raise our monthly fees to $14.99 and $29.99 as of February 1, but before we do we wanted to extend our introductory pricing offer for an extra month so those of you who didn't feel like subscribing over the holidays can take advantage of them.

Here's the deal:  If you sign up between now and February 1, you'll lock in our introductory rates for as long as you stay a subscriber.  So if you've been thinking about signing up and checking out the site, now's the time.  If you keep your subscription, you'll save over $100 per year.  (No-brainer, right?)  As always, you have three days to surf around and decide whether the service is something you'd use.  If not, no problem:  Just send an email to customerservice@itsonthegrid.com and we'll deactivate your account, no questions asked.  And as always, subscription are month-to-month, so there's no obligation if you decide it's not for you at any time in the future.

So what are you waiting for?  Head over to www.itsonthegrid.com right now and sign up.  All the cool kids are doing it...

UPDATE: Service Restored

UPDATE 1:20pm:  Salesforce.com is back up, and www.itsonthegrid.com is back online as well.  Took longer than expected, and sorry for the inconvenience.

12:10pm: We just got an alert that the salesforce.com's servers are down, which means www.itsonthegrid.com is offline.  Salesforce.com is very responsive, so we expect to be back up shortly.  Thanks for your patience.

Next site enhancement: Advanced Search

We're in the planning stage of a redesign of IOTG's Advanced Search page to make it easier to do some of the most common searches ("OWAs that were filled in November 2009") as well as some seriously granular searches (as in, "all WME's sold specs from the second half of 2009 not taken out by Mike Esola"), and I thought I'd ask for some help from the crowd:  

Can you suggest a few websites that you think do advanced search particularly well?  

And more specifically to the film development business, what are some of the searches you do (or would do, if you were a subscriber) on a regular basis that you'd like to see coded into a single button?

Thanks in advance...

IOTG Site Enhancements

That's more like it.  The bugs we identified yesterday have been fixed (only our few "Basic" subscribers were affected, fortunately) and the site is humming along nicely.  Here are the two major new features and enhancements we just completed:

• Improved Search Results/Browse Page Navigation:  We added three major enhancements to help you browse through lists of projects, people and companies.  It's easier than ever to surf through large numbers of records.
• "Thumbtack" Feature:  Until we can develop a proper "My Account" feature, where you'll be able not only to manage your own account details but create and manage your own lists of people, projects and companies, we wanted to give you a way to at least flag projects that you want to keep an eye on.  Hence the new thumbtack field, a checkbox that you can turn on and off at will and persists whether you're logged into the system or not, just like your private notes.  Clicking on the thumbtack icon in the column headers doesn't sort by that column, unfortunately (that's beyond the platform's capabilties at this point), but it will show you just the flagged items in a set of search results, and then clicking on the icon a second time shows you just the unflagged items.  To see the entire set of results again, you'll need to re-do your search, which isn't the most elegant solution, but one works with what one has.

In addition to the above new features, we've also made a number of smaller but cool improvements:

• Once you've entered your username and password, you can just hit "return" instead of having to click on the "Login" box to log in.  This happens now both on the Home page as well as when you log in from the "Subscribe" page.
• On the Home page, management companies now show up in the Spec Grid Snapshot in the Representation column (previously, only agencies were showing up).  Also, the date indicated in that Snapshot is the "Date Logged," instead of the date last updated, so you can see the progression of specs as they hit the market.
• Also on the Home page, the date in the OWA Grid Snapshot is the "Date Last Updated," which since our launch has become more meaningful (at the time, all the dates showed the date we uploaded our database into the system).
• Over on the Browse page, projects listed under the OWAs, Specs and All Projects tabs start out sorted by the date last updated, but you can sort alphabetically by title by clicking on the column header.  Now that we've added the Previous/Next buttons and the "Page XX of YY" navigation features, browsing through long lists becomes much easier.
• Also on the Browse page, we've made the "Project Status" column more useful by adding each project's OWA, ODA and Development priority values.  So rather than simply seeing that someing is "in development," you can also see at a glance whether it's being fast tracked and whether it needs a writer or a director, and how urgently.

There are a bunch of other small tweaks that you may or may not notice, as well.  Next up for our short-term development schedule:  A major overhaul of our Advanced Search feature, plus adjustments to the layouts of the detail pages.

If you haven't checked out IOTG yet, there's no reason not to:  We've extended our no-risk, free trial period to three business days.  So sign up, see if it's for you, and if not, just shoot an email to customerservice at itsonthegrid dot com within those three days and we'll deactivate your account and delete your payment information, no questions asked.

Site Update, er...Update

Last night we deployed a pretty significant improvement to a couple of features of  www.itsonthegrid.com -- you subscribers will notice how much easier it is to browse through the projects, people and companies on the grid, both on the "Browse" page and in the search results, thanks to three new navigation features.  Plus we've added the ability to flag a project in the search results and Browse pages and then sort by the flagged items.

Unfortunately, "will notice" in this case means tomorrow, since there are a couple of bugs that didn't get completely ironed out before we made the changes to the live site.  Right now the new features work great for the "People" and "Company" records, but the "All Projects" tab isn't working correctly, and the "OWAs" and "Specs" tabs have disappeared completely.  You can still search for specific projects using the Quick Search feature; the individual detail pages are working fine and the Grid Snapshots on the Home page will still show the most recent new/updated Specs and OWAs.  But the "View All" buttons for both of those snapshot boxes aren't working properly.

We'll have this stuff ironed out by tomorrow morning, and thanks for your patience in the meantime.  

Spotty service on IOTG tonight

Just got a note from the developers that specific pieces of IOTG's search features will be unavailable off and on overnight as they deploy some new navigation features we've been working on.  We should be back to normal by morning.  Thanks for your patience.

Let the site refinements begin

Our developers are wrapping up a set of revisions, refinements and enhancements to the site that will go live on a rolling basis over the next couple of days.  There will be no interruption of service, the new features will simply appear when they're done.  We'll post the most important ones here as they go into production.

One of my favorites is already live:  You no longer have to click the "Login" box after typing your username and password in order to sign in -- just hit return.  It's a small change, but it's one of those things that somehow makes a big difference in one's perception of the service, and we've wanted to make it since the first week we turned on the site.  It's been the second most commonly requested adjustment by our subscribers so far.  

The single most commonly requested adjustment is the ability to flag projects that you're interested in, and sort search results and the browse page by the that flag.  As of this morning, that feature has been built (along with a couple of other significant changes to the search results navigation) and we'll elevate it to production once we've tested it sufficiently, hopefully by the end of this week.  

If you're an IOTG subscriber and have suggestions for new or refined features for the site, please don't hesitate to email them to us.

More to come...

IOTG's free trial period extended to 3 days

We made a small change to our subscription policy to sucker entice new subscribers to try out our service:  Now, instead of having just one day to surf around www.itsonthegrid.com to see if it's for you, we've extended the free trial period to three business days.  Once you sign up, you have three business days to decide whether to keep your subscription.  If it's not what you expected, shoot us an email at customerservice@itsonthegrid.com and we'll deactivate your account.

Everything else is the same:  Our subscriptions are month-to-month, so you can cancel your subscription with aplomb later (seriously, though, you're going to love it).  And you have until the end of this month to sign up and lock in our great introductory rates for as long as you stay subscribed.  

So what are you waiting for?  Head over to www.itsonthegrid.com and sign up.  Right now.