Due to the amazing amount of people participating in the survey (aren’t you fantastic!) we quickly reached the target we had set. To popular demand we have decided to reopen the survey so all of you who couldn’t participate can now click on the link again (in the admin_interface) and hopefully get one of the iPod shuffle we will be giving away!

You can jump there directly at my-account.
or create an account to participate! signup!

All in all the survey will be giving us a very clear picture of what you, the motigo-ers, wants to see? What product is for you the missing link to really turn motigo into a workable, practical and interesting environment. The survey will also give you some clues on what we are thinking should come next.

Indeed we know there is still quite some work to do but this is one of the many steps we will take with you. We have opened a new communication channel and we hope you will use the opportunity to reach us!

We are very happy to announce the Launch of motigo calendars! It is the first stand-alone product that we have developed ourselves from scratch, and we are more than happy with the result. If you don’t have an account yet, then sign up for a free account and give it a go.

Creating the calendar has been a great example of constrained based development. With only very little time to develop the application, we had to make vital decisions on what our new application was to do and what it was not going to do. The constraints turned out to be a blessing in that it kept our heads focused on exactly what is important for our product for it to work: it has swept the unimportant nice-to-haves away from the must-haves and secured a simple and non-bloated product.

The calendar is really an ordinary calendar application with two views: an administration area that is only accessible for the owner of the calendar (a motigo user), and a public version, which is visible to everybody. The public version of the calendar would look like this.

But it is not only a web calendar. The motigo calendar has two very intersting features:

• Import of RSS feeds
  If you have a blog, a flickr stream, or whatever kind of web content that streams as an RSS feed, you can import it into your calendar. You can also import several feeds into your calendar in order to use it as a feed reader. The possiblities are many!
• Include a small version of the calendar on your own page
  If you have a homepage on your own domain - or just another domain that motigo.com, but still want dynamic content directly inside your page’s main view, then the motigo calendar will help you out. Ad dynamic calendar content directly to your page, like you would add a banner ad.

Now - enough reading - go play around with it!

We just launched a new part of our site called motigo search. Hurray!

In the last few weeks, we have been in a steady stream of solid updates to the motigo website in general. We have come a long way since we started in March earlier this year.

This time we added search capabilities to motigo. The “motigo search”:http://motigo.com/search has been born.

Now you can search the web for pictures and video to reference in your blog posts or in your forum discussions. We feel that we by that have a superior product to many competitors. The search also allows your to search our “webstats”:http://webstats.motigo.com counter catalogue.

The future will call for a full motigo service search, but as we felt the described update in itself provided enough significant value to our users to stand on its own, we decided to push out the search capabilities as they are now in their early state.

Please go try it out and let us know what you think.

Things are really starting to get better at motigo!
We are very happy to announce the launch of the new account overview. A feature that was both widely requested, but also extremely important in bringing the motigo services together.

When we first launched motigo in the end of March this year, the most important thing for us was just to get motigo up and running. It is now - a few months later - that we can actually start to tweak motigo into being what we actually want. The new account overview and the recent “frontpage redesign”:http://devblog.motigo.com/2007/06/04/redesigning-the-frontpage-step-2/ are some of the more visual steps we have taken in this direction.

As usual, we will give you an insight into the design process.

As opposed to earlier redesigns, we actually didn’t have anything to redesign! The account overview has been non-existent until now. We wanted the new page to fulfill a list of things:

• First of all, the overview should bring all motigo services together: giving an overview
• The page should function as the natural “home page” - the page you always end up on when you want to do something new
• We wanted as much of motigo to be accessible from only one page
• We wanted to communicate the colour scheme of motigo, where each service has its own color

Our first thought was to reuse the toolboxes we have so far used for the forum/guestbook/shorturl admin pages as these had the color of the respective service in the header. The result came to look like this:

We chose to take the approach of designing everything straight and only in HTML instead of taking the usual photoshop way that many designers choose. Doing the design in HTML only gave us several benefits:

• The actual interface is at the center of the attention at first. There is no spec: the interface is the spec.
• An interface is not a wireframe that we can just slice up and magically transform into an HTML document. Neither is it a photoshop mockup.
• Creating a mock-up of the interface in photoshop will produce a design that matches the constraints of photoshop - not the constraints of HTML. We should therefore “embrace the constraints”:http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_Embrace_Constraints.php of HTML.
• When we build it only in HTML, we can actually use real and live data while building the design. This helps surfacing problems that photoshop would otherwise hide
• The interface is at life from start. You can click it, try it out, and feel it.
• You will get something that works very soon in the design process
• There is no monster integration in the end.

Although the new and colorful proposal was better than anything we had before (we didn’t have anything) - it was too much. Too colorful and tivoli like. Plus - the boxes approach to showing each service did not always line up nicely, when a user had services in one category than the other.

The next approach was to list the services in one big list and now side-by-side. We removed the colorful header of each service and give it a more settled look:

This however proved to be a little too settled. This meant that we didn’t get to indicate any of the colors of the services. So we added a little bit of color:

Again - this was too much. The final solution would be just to have a small box indicating the color of the service:

We also wanted to add several things to the overview page, so that the user would go there as a natural thing to find just the information he wanted to see. These things included basic information about the logged in user: his name and email, but also the current time in the timezone he had selected. As we have users in many different countries, setting the timezone of your account has huge importance as it will determine the time of your forums and guestbooks as well as the base time in your statistics. We also added links to often used and important documents such as FAQs, terms of service, and of course the developer blog ;-).
All this provided the necessary detail to make the Account overview feel like a real motigo home…

Along with the overview, we’ve also added a toolbox that is placed in the same spot on all admin pages, so that you can always find your way to the most important pages of motigo.com. This continuity was greatly missed in the old version of motigo, why we are relieved that we finally got it online.

We also got rid of the top bar with the list of our services, as we now have this list a more natural place: in the account overview. Instead we added a search bar that we plan on expanding to be able to do more in the near future.

We really hope that the newest updates has helped your experience of motigo.com. We are extremely happy about the release ourselves and hope that you will be as well.

Now, go enjoy the new “motigo”:http://motigo.com

After the launch of “motigo.com”:http://motigo.com on March 31st, we’ve been busy tweaking and correcting small things making sure our users are happy. Our support team has been brilliant in keeping track of the minor glitches which we’re now on top of.

All in all we’re happy about how well our launch went. With existing users in the hundreds of thousands it was only very few existing users who suffered from the minor glitches that happened in transfering them from their former services (webtropia and webstats4u).

As we are finally on top of things again, we can begin to look ahead and concentrate on many of the exciting new features and services we have in store for you. We, the developers, have created this blog to have a direct channel with which we can communicate with our users.

Regarding the future… First and foremost, we will continue to improve the existing services we have, but we’re almost more excited about the new services that are coming. You will hear about all this shortly. We can’t wait to start!

Stay tuned. 2007 is going to be a great motigo year.