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.

State of the Strip - 2008-01-08

A few updates, and a couple issues this evening:

• You might be missing some friends, they don’t hate you, but you’ll need to friend request them again.
• If you’re having trouble with beards on old characters, let me know. You’ll need to swap jaws to get proper beard alignment first, but if things are still off, post a comment.
• Feed/Read nav bar - it’s a bit messy right now, hold on tight and it will be fixed soon.

And the fun stuff:

• Favourites and Laugh/Groan - live feedback now when you’re rating/faving comics - yay!
• Comments - try out the new comment system, share your joy or disgust at the latest strips.

It begins…

Welcome to the Bitstrips Developers’ Blog.

Watch this space for behind-the-scenes updates, chronicling the trials and tribulations of the Bitstrips.com development team.

For now, our Beta v0.1 is finally up, and we can’t be more excited! New beta builds will be launching every 2 weeks from this point on, leading up to our worldwide launch in March 2008.

The next update for the Beta will be January 11, 2008. Get ready to make some bitstrips!!!