Friday, November 11, 2005

That's Palo Alto for ya...

I had a quick dinner in downtown Palo Alto tonight after soccer practice, with my wife and two kids and one of my daughter's friends. We went to the California Pizza Kitchen.


To my amazement, within a 20-foot radius, also having a quick dinner with their families, was Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a popular wiki provider; David Hornik, noted VC and major investor in Six Apart; and Jeff Jordan, the President of PayPal.


And people wonder why so many amazing things happen in Silicon Valley. We could practically have put together a deal right there, over Thai Chicken pizza. Instead, of course, we all enjoyed our dinners and went on our way, spending valuable time with our families.


But who knew? Maybe the California Pizza Kitchen is the new Buck's :)

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Little Things for the customer

We've made a few little changes that you might not notice unless you were one of the folks who wrote to our Support team asking for it.


One thing is that the viewer for photographs just got better. Super-large photos are now resized automatically so they display at a good size for computer screens, and there's a navigation link to click through all the photos on a page without closing and opening the windows individually. A little thing, but a welcome improvement.


Podcast RSS feeds can now be subscribed to directly in iTunes (including videos!). This is pretty cool, actually. If you drag some audio and/or video files onto a Bubbler page and click the "RSS Feed" box in web settings, you are now podcasting, and people can subscribe to your podcast directly from iTunes (Advanced menu).


Another is that the "URL" field is no longer required when posting comments. This seemed to confuse some people who don't have blogs or web sites of their own, so now it's an optional field instead of a required field. A little thing, but important.


The Files list used to also include Photos. It doesn't now; it lists the "other" files that aren't photos.


The elves are always working here at Five Across, and although you don't always see the changes, things are always getting better, and faster.