OK, we heard you and we know that we were shockingly deficient in the Christmas backgrounds department. We added a few back on December 31 for you to use as backdrops to Santa’s big day. Sorry for the oversight 
Some samples:
Update: we recently launched a related social shopping site where you can get help remodeling the bathroom in your home, finding someone to install central air conditioning or even select the perfect rooftop cargo box for your car. Check it out!
Over half of our ParentShack site owners choose to protect their family website with a password. Even though they lock their site, a big chunk of these people still have family and friends on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter.
To accomodate this group of site owners, we have modified our “Share on: Facebook | MySpace | Twitter” feature. Now, instead of hiding our “Share on:” feature on locked sites, we allow you to post a link to just the page you are viewing.
In other words, when you share a photo or video on a locked site, a visitor from Facebook, MySpace or Twitter will be directed to a page which just shows the photo or video that you shared. There is no navigation to any other area of your site.
Given the more public nature of Twitter, this is the way the “Share on Twitter” feature has always worked regardless of if your site was locked or open.
Please keep in mind, that this linked page will not be password protected. Any of your friends or family who click on the link will be able to see your shared photo or video without entering your site password.
So, For Password Protected Sites:
And for Open Sites:
I hope this clarifies things a bit and adequately allows those with protected sites to still share a photo or two on their other social networks. You know what to do if you have questions.
Our site owners with paid subscriptions know photo stats well. Their “Stats” page which list recent visitors, top visitors, top photos, top videos and overall site traffic (each broken out month-to-date and all-time) is one of their favorite pages on their site.
Knowing that feedback is a big part of the joy of posting your photos and videos online, as of last night we now display the individual stats for each of the photos and videos on your site, as well as the day that it was uploaded.
These stats are only incremented when visitors view your site, if you as the site owner are logged into your ParentShack account, your page views are excluded.
Paid subscribers will continue to have the added benefit of having all of these stats aggregated and presented on their stats page, but now everyone will get feedback on how often visitors are viewing their photos and videos. We all like that.
Well, it took a little while, but last night we launched the ability to share your ParentShack photos on Twitter. Just like our “Share on Facebook” and “Share on MySpace” features, you must be logged into your ParentShack account and visiting your site to see the three “Share on” options.
When you are logged in and viewing your site, click on the little Twitter “[ t ]” icon. A page will pop up displaying the image that you will share as well as a text box where you can enter your 110-character maximum message.
Enter your tweet text:
When you click the “Tweet this photo” button, a Twitter page will appear asking you to give ParentShack permission to post your message to your Twitter account. Clicking “Allow” on this page will post your message with a shortened link back to a special page on your ParentShack site.
Enter your Twitter username and password:
(Technical detail: we use a process called OAuth to connect to your Twitter account. This is a fancy way of saying that you never have to reveal to us your Twitter username and password. Twitter handles all the login stuff, keeping your credentials extra safe and sound.)
Your tweet will look like this:
And the special ParentShack page looks like this:
As of now, visitors from Twitter can only see the single image (and image comments) that you selected for sharing, they have no access to the rest of your ParentShack website.
In the future, we may add the option to share your entire site or an entire album. Let us know in the comments or by contacting us if you have a preference.
Continuing our efforts to allow you to connect your ParentShack family website to your social networks, we have added the ability for site owners to share their photos, videos and birth announcements on their MySpace page.
To share a photo or video from ParentShack, log into your ParentShack account and view your site. Go to the photo or video that you would like to share and click the myspace icon.
A MySpace window will pop up with your image and title pre-filled in. If you would like, add a caption and indicate where on your page you would like to post it (choices are to your blog, bulletin or about me).
If you are already signed in to MySpace, all you have to do is click the red (or is it orange??) “Post It!” button. If you are not currently logged into MySpace, enter the email and password you use to sign in to MySpace and then hit the orange (or is it red??) “Post It!” button.
OK, this time we’re really going to finish that “Post to Twitter” feature!
Adding a simple slide show feature has always been near the very top of our “to-do” list for ParentShack. Well tonight, we’re happy to slide it over to the “to-done” pile.
At the top of any image, from your thumbnail page or under the main image on your home page, click the “Start slide show” link and a slide show with all the images in that album will automatically start playing. Click anywhere in the window (besides the control bar) to close the slide show and return to the ParentShack page that you were on.
A slide show started from your home page shows all of your site’s images in a random order. A slide show started from a photo or thumbnail page shows only the images in that album and in the order that they appear in that album.
The slide show automatically loops from the last photo in the album back to the first, so you can run it in full screen mode (by hitting F11 on most browsers), sit back and enjoy all the photos while you drink your coffee.
OK, back onto Twitter sharing now…
We just pushed up another small, but useful change to your ParentShack family website.
You can now visit a page which lists all of the public guestbook messages that have been left on your homepage, photos, videos and journal entries (private messages are still available by logging into your site and clicking the “Guestbook” tab.)
To get to this page, just click the “See all messages” link that appears next to all of the “Messages” section on your site.
We call this the change “Project Josh’s Momma” since it was our friend Josh’s Momma who suggested it to us…go figure.
The next time you visit your ParentShack site you will notice a small change that makes browsing your photos a bit easier.
When you rollover the name of your photo or video a small thumbnail appears with a preview of the image.
Click on the link and you will go to the full size version of the photo.
Now if only they made a nice “bloop” sound like VH1′s “Pop-up Video” used to :)
Responding to some user feedback from our good friend Josh, yesterday we added the ability for site owners to share their photos, videos and birth announcements on their Facebook profile.
To share a photo or video from ParentShack, log into your ParentShack account and view your site. Go to the photo or video that you would like to share and click the “Share on Facebook” link above it.
If you are not already logged into your Facebook account, you will be asked to. After that, just add an optional message and click the “Share” button.
The post will then appear in your Facebook profile with a link back to the photo on your ParentShack website.
Notes on this feature:
We’re working on sharing your ParentShack content via Twitter next. Check back for updates!
UPDATE: Read our related posts “Share on MySpace“, “Post to Twitter” and “UPDATED: Share on Facebook, MySpace & Twitter“.
We just launched an improvement to our video upload page. Building on our much-improved photo uploading tool, the new video uploading page allows you to select and queue multiple video files for uploading and gives you a clear status of how much time is left in the overall and individual file uploads.
Our testing has shown that this upload tool is more robust than our first attempt (no more stalled progress bars even though the upload continued!) Try it out and let us know how it works for you.