rss/ical works for any .nz

Just a note, by popular demand the simplename RSS and iCalendar renewal exports work for any .nz domains now, not just those registered through simplename.

Additional geeky cuteness

Added iCalendar support to simplename, so you can subscribe to a calendar with events for each of your domain renewals. Got a bunch of extra features to implement yet for that one, including alarms and a decent wizardy thing to create the subscription url..but it's still cool :)

Feeds!

Ok, I really wanted to talk about this feature, but I decided a while ago not to talk about stuff that wasn't released unless I needed specific feedback.

So, I went and did an early release today just so I could blog about it :)

Anyway, simplename now has an RSS feed (and atom) that lets you pick up expiry notices for simplename-managed domains. A simple URL format allows you to subscribe to an arbitrary set of up to 25 domains and 20 days before expiry, the feed will be populated with an expiry notice, one per expiring domain.

The main reason I liked it was that the idea came from Kirk on the nz2.0 list, and I thought it was a good idea. Less than an hour later I had an implementation and I released the next day. The idea of being able to take simple features I find exciting and run with them is definitely a perk of the job.

Also, thanks to Turbogears and the FeedController for making support for atom/rss/etc trivial :)

Where has phi been?

Well, I was going to post lots more, but then I got busy writing code and doing design etc.

Anyway, the results are I have much more to talk about so, in theory this is a win right?

New things on the simplename front include the shiny new design, so very rounded-corners and green. To be honest I'm not sure I prefer it when you combine everything including elegance. The old design required 3 files to download, the page, the CSS and one primary image. The new one has..like..10 images alone. Still, there is a price to be paid for aesthetics.

The main motivator was simply that I observed I was losing a fair number of people on the first page. I felt a more polished, more spacious look would help encourage people to look around further.

Currently, users spend 1m23s on the site on average, and look at 3 pages (typically index, features and faq). It'll be interesting to see if that picks up.

I don't actually believe I'll convince more people to buy due to the new look, but I needed more space on the main page for the suggest feature and future things, and much of the content needed reworking so it seemed like a logical thing to do. I'll probably look at an iterative redesign in another month or two.

Shiny new features include the suggestion wizard that lets you combine one or two sets of words into a bunch of domains, and then does an availability check for you - hopefully making it easier to brainstorm that new domain name.

Not quite so recent but still unannounced here, are the URL and Email forwarding services. The URL forwarding service is interesting in that it allows you to enter, say, your livejournal username and it will redirect the domain to your main livejournal page without having to go and find the URL yourself. Of course, you can enter any other url if you want, but this seemed like a nice touch and let me name-drop a bit.

Did a post to nz2.0 asking whether people had any ideas for stuff they wanted in an API yesterday afternoon. Hint for marketers to geeks - It seems that posting a link to a mailing list on a friday afternoon attracts immediate attention. I presume everyones just sitting there waiting for 5pm refreshing their email window :)

Got a couple of good suggestions back, one of which I liked so much I implemented it immediately. More on that next release :)

I'm always open to ideas btw, so if anyone reading this thinks "I wish my registrar would do X", flick me an email - richard@simplename.co.nz, it could well end up on simplename.

Minor update to simplename

Got a new release out for simplename, mostly importantly from a coding perspective the new phone number widget for tg which works much much better than individual fields.

I'm still really catching up to the state of the art for some of the stuff, particularly in areas of being extra helpful when the name you want to register isn't available or equivalent.

However I feel I've done sufficient work in that area and the system is now reasonably mature. On to the next milestone! :)

The problem with shiny

The problem with having a nice new shiny screen is..it makes your website look really good..

much better than it looks for everyone else..

:/