Real Name’s, Searching & Editing

The early risers out there may have caught site of our “Undergoing Maintenance” header this morning as we pushed several updates to the site.

• Profile info editing has been organized, and you now have the option of displaying your real name on your profile page. Help other bitstrippers find you by making your name visible.
• The friend finder now has an option to search for friends by name. Remember - Bitstripping is better with friends!
• Searching now indexes tags and author’s names. Try it out - it makes a big difference.
• Character/Strip permissions - when you edit a strip, we now double check you have permission to use all the characters that appear. If you don’t, we’ll swap in Buddy’s basics for you.

Have fun, and keep on bitstrippin’!

Bitstrips + RSS = Joy

That’s right boys and girls, RSS feeds are here! Most types of content can now be accessed through RSS feeds. Character appearances, your friend’s strips, even searches can all be subscribed to. We’re still sorting out where to put an “RSS” icon on the pages themselves… until then, access the RSS feed link in your browser’s location bar.

A few series fixes also arrived, you can now delete or rename a series from a series’ profile page.

In other exciting news, the scene builder has officially landed. You can now access it from the main navigation menu on the left. Check out Buddy’s scenes for a sample of the “My Scenes” management page.

Have fun, and keep on bitstrippin’!

Thursday updates

Hello Bitstrippers! Lots of performance improvements going on behind the scenes this week, as well as a few visible updates which we just committed:

• Confirmation when you’re about to leave a comic/character builder without saving your work
• Embedded blog viewer reads will soon be included in a comic’s view count
• Improved friend finder - search by email

We had wanted to improve the friend finder for awhile, not everyone has an accessible webmail address book, and not everyone wants to give us their password (we promise not to read your email!) - for those situations, you can now type in as many email address as you’ve got and search for them on the site.

Searching for users based on their username, and Real Name will be coming soon as well. Visit the new friend finder and check it out (you’ll need to be logged in to see it).

Easter Monday Update

A few of the eggs from the update this evening:

• Comic searching - use the search box at the top right of most pages. It will search the title, text-bubbles and character names for your search terms.
• Friends thumbnail/Character list image - they’re working! They’ll update when you add/remove friends, and when you make new characters.
• You can now change your email address in your account settings.

We’ve also passed the 20,000 character mark earlier today - amazing stuff!

Stay tuned for more updates…

Teeny-tiny update

Hi everybody - a few small changes this evening:

• glasses with clear lenses are back
• lost your password? You can reset it through the site (just try logging in a couple times and then follow the link)
• your personal profile is listed in a linkable way, send the URL to your friends and they’ll view your specific profile (and not their own!)

State of the Strip - 7 days old

Good evening my fellow Bitstrippers, 7 days and 12 hours ago we removed the velvet rope and released the site to the world. It’s been an unbelievable rush to watch the reactions ripple out across the net and to witness the explosion of content, creativity and humour amongst our users. We had no idea some of the strips you’ve been making were possible!  More than anything, seeing your reaction is inspiring us to work that much harder on bringing you the best possible bitstrip experience we can.

What should you expect in the next 7 days? A small mountain improvements and fixes that you’ve been asking for: searching, rss feeds, better friend searching, performance improvements, better series management and of course, more artwork! As much as we enjoy seeing banana phones we’ll soon have an array of cellphones and telephones art to use.

We’ll also be keeping this dev blog up to date with the latest changes and improvements. You can also follow bitstrips on twitter for status notices.

Thanks again to all our new users in the last week for making our first week such a blast. We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with next!

Full of Filters and Features

Good evening my fellow Bitstrippers… On this auspicious leap-day, I would like to bring to your attention several new features.

The most visible change will be the new Mature Content thumbnails that will be popping up. We knew some bitstrippers would be dirty, but not that dirty… A few details - you have a new Content Filter setting in your account, this will allow you to show or hide content that has been flagged as mature or offensive. It also function to filter words like f@#k and sh#t. Soon, before you can view a mature strip, you’ll need to confirm that you do in fact want to view mature content.

Inviting Friends - so far everyone seems to be enjoying the Design a Friend feature, but wanted to make it even easier to send out invites to your whole entire address book! On your Friends page you’ll now see a link to Invite your Friends - the process is similar to Find your Friends, but Bitstrips will email a personalized invitation to each friend you choose to invite. It’s really a great looking invite, so you should test it out on all your friends. As people are discovering, Bitstripping really is best done with friends.

And who doesn’t love to get email from Bitstrips? Well, maybe someone out there doesn’t want to hear from us (or you!) - if that’s the case, all our emails now have a opt-out link. You should now feel free to mass-mail away in full comfort your friends can easily ignore you if they so choose.

There’s also a very huge exciting new builder coming your way, believe me kids, you’ll feel like a kid in a candy store on Christmas eve when you sink your teeth in to it. Who knows, if we can break 200 users tomorrow, maybe we’ll release it early!

Thank you for your attention, now get strippin’!

Lazy, lazy developers

It’s true, we’re lazy…. lazy like a fox! Are foxes lazy? We’ll need to investigate here at BSHQ, but not before we get our baby off the ground. That’s right, we’ll be launching in less than two weeks! At that point, we’ll be able to pursue such important facets of life such as: sleeping, going outside and of course researching fox behaviour.

A few of the exciting new features coming your way:

• Scene Building
• Finding Friends/Inviting Friends - webmail address book integration
• lots of new artwork
• and more!

plus more regular development updates. In the meantime, you’ll notice a new link in the menu bars “Create/Friend”. Creating friends let’s you send a customized invitation to a friend with a pre-built avatar. Now you can send your friend Joe, the guy with huge ears and no nose, an accurate caricature and have them join Bitstrips with their new persona ready to go. Fun stuff!

Bugs? Comments? Oops!

We were all congratulating ourselves on a bug-free website, 0 bug/comment reports in the last 24 hours… until we discovered a bug in submitting the reports themselves!

If you have tried to submit a bug/comment using the Bug/Comment link on the sidebar, please submit it again, we really do want to hear about it.

Funny Faces

A couple changes landed tonight to fix some face issues people had been seeing (beard/moustache issues with rotations). New characters faces will rotate much more cleanly than old ones, but the downside - current chracters may need to be edited and adjusted to fit the new system.

Everyone should notice a big change when saving bitstrips later tonight. Up until now, strips have been “Published” by default when saving. In a few hours, the default will be “unpublished”. Make sure to publish your strips! Unpublished content won’t show up in the normal feeds.