Petentials.com Beta Blog

Happy Summer, animal friends! We’re plugging away on some key upgrades here at Petentials Central. In fact, we brought in a yak and a trio of grizzly cubs (wise beyond their years) to help reconfigure our database.

While we’re waiting, I wanted to address a quirk a few of you have encountered regarding how your names show up on comments. The problem stems from animals who share the same name.

Unfortunately, the way the system works now is to go “first come, first serve,” so that if a Manx from Winnipeg named Al happens to join the site, then–since I was here first–my picture, footprint, and link will appear next to his comment instead of his info. As you can imagine, this wasn’t part of the master plan. While it will be corrected in our next big upgrade, if you’d prefer not to wait for that, what I recommend is a temporary name change. So, instead of Bubbles, maybe you can be Queen Bubbles or Bubbles2 or Bubbles~ or BubblesUK, etc. Then, when the upgrade happens, you can either stick with the modified name or go back to the original, and all will be right with the world–or at least that one small corner of it.

Another big change that’s coming down the tracks involves how we handle the pictures you upload. We think it’ll make you happy.

Thank you all again for all you do to help the Petentials community thrive!

Here’s hopping,
Al

ps To edit your name, go to MyPetentials, select the pet whose name you want to change in the tan “Welcome” box, and–under Options–click on the “Edit” link next to Profile.

Petentials is out of the cage!

Our friends at Fox 35 in Orlando aired a great feature story on Petentials this week, and it’s been the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve heard rumors that the story also aired in Tampa and Minneapolis/St. Paul, and we’ve got a hunch that it may have popped up in Tennessee and North Carolina, too.

Meanwhile, the ferrets have been scouring the papers, and they tell us we’ve also recently appeared on the Detroit Free Press Web site as well as on LivingstonDaily.com.

Did they miss anything?

How did you first hear about Petentials?

Whatever the source, it’s our pleasure to have you here!

- Al & The Gang

Animal Friends,
Greetings from Al and the Petentials team. As our community of pets starts to expand geographically, we want to continue to do everything we can to make your experience on Petentials as rich and full as possible. To do so, we need human help!
Guardians, please take a gander at our Call for Volunteers, and let us know if you’re able to take a turn behind the wheel at this community-driven site.
Many thanks,
Al & The Gang

Just wanted to pass along a special welcome to our new friends from today’s Paws in the Park gathering in downtown Orlando! We had a great time meeting scores of dogs and their human companions. It was great to see some of our old friends, too–like Gaeil, Odysseus, Cecil, Trust, and Mac (or at least Mac’s guardian). Dr. Jane took questions from inquiring dogs–and even a few cats. We’re especially grateful for the incredible help we received from P-Team supreme members John, Jen, Mel, Jackie, and Gianna.
A very impressive pit bull leaped upon the table twice in succession, and, while we didn’t manage to capture it on video, we’ve got a lot of great footage of dogs, dogs, and more dogs–plus Dr. Jane–that we’ll post as soon as we can get the ferrets back to work in the edit bay.
Hop on,
Al

Above: Petentials members Trust and Cecil don the garb!

Rhino again with a cool new feature for you…

Do you say you get lost in the hundreds of pets, videos, news links, local listings and blogs on Petentials? You say you’d like a simple way to find that one funny profile quickly? Well, I have the solution for you!

Favorites!

Yes, that’s right, every clan now has a list of favorite pages on Petentials, by visiting petentials.com/bookmarks/1 you can view and edit your list of favorites. If you want to view someone else’s favorites, simply visit their pet profile page and click the “Favorites” link at the top. Here’s a list of favorites from my friends Kermit and Jax, the Price clan.

We have a few more things up our sleeves with the favorites feature, but what do you think we should do? Let us know in the comments.

Attention to all “beta testers” and close personal friends of Petentials:

The Rhino has moved

Yes! It’s true! Late last night (or early this morning) we took the metaphorical gloves off (not that rhinos are all that good at glove-wearing). Now there is no “gateway”, no second layer of defense, just good ol’ fun-lovin’ Petentials.com, and we like it that way!

The home page has also seen some major improvements lately, and as it’s the first thing all our users and visitors will see, we hope it will do its job. There are still tons of tweaks and things to re-work, but we feel very comfortable with the state of things here.

There are a few things that are still a bit bothersome, however:

• Pet-to-Pet Messaging is wonky. We’ve had reports from pets saying they’ve been unable to read mail, and some reports of disappearing inboxes. Yikes!
• Some things still go ‘clunk’ when you use them. Others don’t work at all. If you see anything like this, please take a moment to file a bug report with the proper authorities. The “Beta Box” on the left side of every page will direct you to the right place.
• There are some links and buttons that don’t respond when clicked. In most cases (like the Marketplace), this is the intended effect. We will be sure to update you as soon as these features become available.

That’s all for now! Lots more to do! Come back soon! Tell your friends!

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been making some major updates to the ways you and your humans can interact with Petentials lately. Many of our most recent changes have happened around our hub of creativity and sharing, The Park.

As with so many things here at Petentials, we’re asking you to accept these features “as is”, because if we could get everything perfect on the first shot, we’d be launching a rocket to Mars tomorrow (sorry, we still love you, but we love the idea of the first Earth-based inhabitants of Mars to be animal and not human).

There are some really neat things one can see, share and experience in the Park. First of all, images:

• Upload images of yourself, your pet clan and your friends (maybe your human guardians if they’re nice). All images will be resized to 500pixels tall or wide, depending on the biggest side. This is still a nice size for the web, but it’s not really intended for hard-core photo sharing and making digital prints. There are other sites for that. Which brings me to my next point!
• Link to images hosted on Flickr, Photobucket or Imageshack (for now). As time goes on, we’ll be adding more photo sharing services. Same as with the uploaded images, we’ll grab a thumbnail-sized image and a 500 pixel web-sized version of your picture to show on the site. Please note that this feature may not work for photos marked as private or friends only in the external host. Most photo services have public photos by default, so most people won’t have to worry about this. If you you use one photo sharing site in particular you’d like us to support, please send us a message or leave a comment on this blog so we can get our priorities straight.
• Link to videos from big-name providers like YouTube and MySpace. This means you and your human guardian can find or upload a video to one of 9 popular hosting services and link it to a page on Petentials for your friends and the rest of the community. We currently support: Blip.tv, Brightcove, Google, iFilm, JumpCut, Live Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, Revver, Sevenload, and YouTube. Again, if you have a specific request let us know.
• Enter Contests based on holidays, the current season or some other fun promotion. As of this post, the contest is called “You, Turkey!” and encourages you to upload a photo of yourself with a turkey win…something. That something hasn’t been announced yet, but it will be special. Considering how young Petentials is, it will likely be one-of-a-kind or the first of it’s kind for sure. Check out the contest page and upload your images to be part of our first contest!

That’s all from Rhino’s desk today, but when we’ve got more fun stuff to share with you, this is where you’ll find it!

Yes, it’s true, we have some big news in development land. The once old-and-dusty Petentials Forums are now the new-and-improved Petentials Forums!

Go explore and post to the forums now.

You may also notice some new buttons just inside the blue-bordered-box, AKA the “Main Pane” of the site. These new actions are still a little rough around the edges, but soon you’ll be able to use them to quickly get at common tasks, like comments, help, flagging inappropriate content and search. For now, you’ll mostly be clicking on the “Add” and “Comment” links, which will change behavior depending on where you see them. If you’re reading a forum post, your browser will jump down to the comment form at the bottom, and if you’re not logged in to Petentials, you’ll be prompted to do so.

The “Add” link, or in this case “New Discussion” will create a new forum topic underneath the last subject you visited. So if you were just reading a topic called “Offline Hobbies” in the Activities & Lifestyle > Work/Hobbies section, your new forum topic will be created in the Work/Hobbies forum. If you don’t want your discussion to live there, you can select a new category from the drop-down box provided.

Here’s a link to that nifty Offline Hobbies topic I referred to just now.

Yeah, seriously - this is a big announcement - you may have noticed when you logged in (as of about 1PM today) that there is now a tab on the pet profile pages called “Comments”. There’s also a tab for “Profile” and “Clan” - all of these items show up without having to reload the page, so don’t use the back/forward buttons for now unless you want to navigate AWAY from the profile you’re currently viewing.

At this time, one can only leave a comment - we don’t have a notification set up, such as emailing you or even showing up on the MyPetentials page. When we have something ready, you’ll just need to log in and view your home screen, so stay tuned.

If you’re having any problems anywhere on the site, please don’t hesitate to report a bug.

Hello Beta Users,

This is my first post to the beta blog, but I’m sure not the last. I’m Ryan and I’ve been developing web stuff, designing user interfaces, and working on the much-anticipated Petentials Podcast.

One project I can pretty much call my own is the Info-Net News. The InfoNet itself is meant to be a collection of resources on any pet-related subject, but the News section just deals with current events, like the Pet Food Recalls, the discovery of new Leopard species or The Great Turtle Race. Each story gets its own page where you and other users can write and read comments, bringing the discussion here to Petentials.

The reason for this blog post is to announce that the News pages are much prettier now than when we first started out. If you specify a species to go along with your story, that shows up on the left side of the headline. You can also sort by category, those being Arts/Entertainment, Celebrity, Dating, Environment, Feats/Awards, Grooming, Health, Law/Order, Market, Offbeat, Sports and Tech. There is also an “All” link so you can sort of re-set the thing.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on this section - is it confusing? Is this something you would use? If you use other news sites, are there any features from those you’d like us to incorporate? Feedback. Please leave some in the comments on this blog post.