The ParentShack Blog

As much as we would have loved to take a little breather after our last major product launch (videos), we got right back on the horse and started working feverishly on another big change for our ParentShack site owners. This time we have greatly expanded the functionality of the journal tool.

You can continue to use the journal to post quick notes about what is going on in your family’s life, but now you also have the option to treat your journal as a full-fledged family blog. We’ve added the most important features of the most popular blogging tools, while working hard to keep the interface as simple and intuitive as possible.

All of your old journal entries have been converted over to the upgraded journal, there’s nothing you need to do. If you would like to use the new “advanced” post editor, simply click on your “Journal” tab and then select the  “Use advanced editor” option. Once you do this, you will see that the journal entry field will have buttons at the top to help you format your text.

Let us know what you think, a summary of the new features is below:

1. Rich-text editing: add text colors, bolding, easy links, emoticons, etc…
2. Featured photos: highlight one of your uploaded photos in your journal entry, a picture is worth a thousand words, after all
3. Titles: add a title to your entry (the default is the entry date)
4. Categories: create categories to organize your entries (baby news, vacations, home stuff, etc)
5. Journal comments: your guest can now leave comments on each of your entries
6. Journal stats: a snapshot of month-to-date and overall journal visits
7. Dedicated journal page: no longer is your journal crammed at the bottom of your home page

As always, we have more things we plan to add to this latest product change (RSS feeds, for one) but we’ll prioritize those against the other great features we have coming your way. Enjoy!

We’ve just finished an incredibly productive three months at ParentShack. It’s hard to believe that at the start of April we didn’t have photo printing, video upload and display or even this blog. We have really enjoyed this frantic expansion of ParentShack, most importantly for your benefit but also for our own (we have ParentShack sites too, you know )

We strongly believe that these changes, coupled with the hefty storage increases that we put in place in April have made ParentShack the best option for safely and easily creating your family website or online birth announcement.

So, what now? Well, we’d love to hear your take on what is needed to further enhance ParentShack. We have our own ideas: improved site creation usability, a slide show feature, an upgraded journal, video birth announcements, more control on which photos your friends and family can see. What would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments.

As a ParentShack family website owner, you can now upload and display high quality web videos on your site. Today’s successful launch represents the most important feature change to ParentShack since we started the company way back in 2000.

With this major new product feature, ParentShack becomes the only family website provider to offer you the following features in one place:

• photo display
• video display
• high-quality photo prints and gifts
• automatic friends and family notifications
• a personal family journal
• guestbooks on your homepage, photos and videos
• detailed usage statistics tracking, and
• over a hundred family-focused site backgrounds

When you upload your first video, you’ll notice that we have added a progress bar to give you an idea of how long the upload will take. As a rough estimate, figure 1 to 5 minutes per MB.

After your file is uploaded, we will automatically convert it into a smaller web-friendly video format, so please be sure to save the original file on your home computer.

To start, we’ll allow uploading of the following video types: MPG, AVI, WMV and MOV. Give us suggestions in the comments for other formats you’d like supported.

The maximum size of an individual video that can be uploaded is determined by the package that you have.

• 25 MB Starter Sites: Can upload videos up to 25 MB
• 250 MB Full Sites: Can upload videos up to 250 MB
• 1,000 MB Premium Sites: Can upload videos up to 1,000 MB

To commemorate this occasion, we’ve added a few new video-themed backgrounds to complement your little Zack Efrons and Dakota Fannings. We’ll add more in the future.

Enjoy this exciting new feature and let us know in the comments or through direct feedback what you think. As we continue to expand the video offering, your feedback will be very valuable to us.

We have just launched a new photo printing feature which allows you, the site owner, to control whether photo printing is available to your site visitors. Thank you Linda (a ParentShack user since the end of 2007) for encouraging the prioritization of this feature.

To toggle photo printing on or off, follow these steps:

1. Log into your ParentShack account
2. Click your “PHOTOS & ALBUMS” tab
3. Select either “allow visitors to print” or “do not allow printing” under “Photo Printing Status”

That’s it. The photo printing links on your ParentShack site will magically appear or disappear depending on what you select. Thanks Linda, for pushing us to add this feature.

Many of you have expressed a strong interest in a feature we’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts: video upload and display. In response to a recent blog comment by longtime ParentShack user Alexis (an active ParentShack site owner since 2003!) I figure I’d write a quick update of where we stand with video, so here goes…

Video upload and display is no longer on the back burner or a feature we may offer “in the near future”. The development of this feature is actively happening now and we hope to have a beta version of the service launched before the end of June. We’re working out the details, but the gist of it is that you will be able to upload video files to your ParentShack family website and display them to your friends and family in much the same way as you do your photos.

As we build and test this new functionality a few questions come up:

• Which formats should we support (AVI, WMV, MOV, 3GP, ASF)?
• Should we partner with someone like YouTube or fully develop and integrate the feature ourselves so we have more control over the experience?
• With much larger files being uploaded, should we offer larger capacity packages?

We’d really love to hear our users’ opinions on the above. What do you use to shoot your video? What are the extension of the files that you would like to upload? Are you interested in us optimizing for short, easier-to-upload clips (under 5 min each) or do you want the ability to add longer mega-clips to your site?

Give us feedback in the comments and your wishes will help shape the final product. Thanks for you interest in this new feature!

Photo printing is a feature that we have wanted to add to ParentShack for a long, long time. Unfortunately, since we lack sufficient expertise in offline product fulfillment and shipping, we pushed it off again and again.

Recently, we came across a company called QOOP (pronounced que-oop) which provides printing and fulfillment services for photo-based web communities. QOOP works with the biggies: facebook, flickr, and now ParentShack, and they are experts in turning your photos into fantastic prints and photo gifts.

You can access photo printing under your “My Home Page” and “Photos & Albums” tabs. Simply click on the link that says “Order prints & gifts” and you will be taken to QOOP’s awesome interface for selecting and customizing your prints and gifts.

4×6 prints are 15 cents each, and don’t miss out on the other cool products as well:

• Mugs
• Photobooks
• Calendars
• Framed prints
• Posters
• Photo wrapping paper
• Greeting cards
• Puzzles
• Mousepads
• Shirts
• Postcards
• Magnets
• Stickers
• Keychains
• Luggage tags
• Backup disks, and more…

We are very excited to launch this new feature. Currently, it is only available to site owners, but within a couple of weeks we’ll roll it out to your site visitors as well. No more printing and mailing photos to Grandma, soon she’ll be able to do it herself when she visits your ParentShack family website!

Let us know what you think in the comments and thanks, as always, for choosing ParentShack as your family’s home on the web!

No, you’re not seeing things. We have decided to reward our loyal ParentShack customers with a huge and free upgrade to their family website accounts. Depending on the package that you subscribe to, this upgrade was about 5-times what you had before!

We admit it, our old packages and pricing offers were a product of the time when ParentShack was born (2000). Back then, storage and website hosting was more expensive. As we all know, times have changed, storage costs have dropped and digital cameras keep churning out bigger and sharper pictures of your smiling bundles of joy.

The underlying economics was certainly an important factor in our decision to upgrade your account. However an even more exciting reason are the big changes we have in store for you which are going to require larger storage space (we are currently working on adding video display and photo printing as our next features.)

Enjoy your larger sites, upload more photos, keep telling your friends about us, and stay tuned for a bunch of exciting changes to ParentShack!

We have a long and exciting list, but your list is much more important. You’re the boss, after all. We’ll be conducting a real survey in the coming weeks, but until that time feel free to post in the comments what you’d like to see.

Our take on the next features to add: video, photo ordering, more site customization. What’s yours?

This morning we successfully completed a migration to a faster, more modern hosting environment (moving from Texas to California in just a few keyboard clicks!) This is a big change for us; we’ve been with our other hosting provider since we launched our public service way back in 2002.

Our internal testing results show a 5-times improvement in general site speed. This means things like shrinking or rotating your photos and general page generation times should feel noticeably faster to you.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also improved how we backup your photos and protect your private sites. You shouldn’t notice anything different here, just know that your family’s website is even more secure and protected than before.

More optimizations are in the works. We’ll be sure to update this blog when they hit.

A couple of weeks ago, we started seeing some crude SPAM posts appearing on our sample family website and a few of our member’s sites. At the same time, we also started getting spam via our online “contact us” form.

SPAM is horrible and tasteless and annoying and…unfortunately…not going away. As bad as SPAM is, it is even worse when it appears on your family’s website. We fully understand that. Your ParentShack site is your family’s home on the web. It is where you direct your closest family and friends to watch your children grow.

As fast as we deleted the junk, more appeared; most likely the result of an automated script targeting any site it found. As we deleted the SPAM that came in, we also developed a CAPTCHA solution to automatically protect your sites going forward.

Put simply, a CAPTCHA solution generates an image that is easy to read by a human, but difficult to read by an automated script. Since we launched our CAPTCHA, we haven’t seen a single SPAM post.

Thank you for your patience as we addressed this issue. Please let us know if anything gets through our new CAPTCHA barrier so we can strengthen it further, if necessary.