Hi everyone.

It has been a pretty hectic summer. I moved across the country for school. I quit my job. I have been traveling a little bit. I check by every now and then to make sure that everything is still running smoothly. I am happy to see that money is still being raised and donated due to this site. I am a little behind on my donations, but plan to make good in the near future. I am having trouble accessing my email, so I haven’t been able to check messages that people have sent me. I will try to update more often to let you know about things that are going on. Unfortunately, I haven’t (and probably won’t for the foreseeable future) had time to roll out some of the features I wanted to. If someone has programming experience and would like to volunteer their time to improve the site, feel free to get in touch with me. I hope everyone has had an enjoyable summer and I hope everyone is well.

Marc

Hey everyone,

As I am sure a lot of you recognize, I haven’t been active in the past month or so. I have been extremely busy with work and graduate school endeavors. I have a lot of the new site done with, but haven’t had the time to complete it and let you guys play around with it. I am happy to see the site still alive and members still showing their support and donating to worthy charities.

I know all of the visitors to this site have kind hearts, so it goes without saying that most of you know about the horrible disasters that have struck both Myanmar and China. Now is a time to help international charities in any way you can… whether through Vote4Cause or not. I heard a story on the radio this morning about UNICEF trying to get money to rebuild schools in Myanmar. The point is that it would provide some semblance of a return to normalcy to the population that is suffering in the wake of the disaster there.

I hope everyone can take a moment to donate whatever they can. For more information, visit the Red Cross or UNICEF.

Marc

I switched servers this evening. Everything seemed fine, but there are problems with recognizing the time limit on the voting. I took down the cause pages for voting because you can currently vote as many times as you want without needing to wait. I have been trying to figure out why this is happening, but to no avail. I will try to fix it within 24 hours and if I can’t, I will switch back to the old server until I can figure it out. Sorry for the inconvenience. This move to the new server is the first big step towards improving this site, so please bear with me!

Marc

Hello everyone!

I am alive. Sorry I haven’t made any announcements recently. I have been extremely busy with non-web related things. I have signed up for a new server, but I haven’t transferred Vote4Cause over yet. I have spent what time I have learning a lot about running a web server and learning new programming languages that will allow me to create a more robust Vote4Cause site for everyone to enjoy. Of course, learning these things and providing application overhauls take time and I don’t have a bunch of that right now. However, I haven’t abandoned this and I do plan on making improvements soon.

I want to address 2 concerns that seem to come up a lot.
1) The colorful avatars: As most of you know, I removed these because they were creating a strain on the server. Without getting too technical, they won’t be feasible to bring back even with the new server without some moderate coding work. I need to make a system where you choose one and then save it to the database without having them generate on the fly (how I was doing it - very easy to implement but a huge resource hog). The new overhaul I am working on will allow you to upload your own image that will be used to identify you.

2) The voting times: The voting waiting times have changed significantly (as have many things) since the site started back in November. This has acutely been due to the server strain, but also is related to what this site really is about. I go back and forth and get different opinions on the matter (of course, you are all free to make a case for one way or the other). While I love that people spend more time on Vote4Cause with the shorter waiting times, that wasn’t my intention when I set it up that way. It sort of evolved into a site where you chat and vote. It is more fun that way, but it lends itself to having just a couple of runaway winners each round… the ones that have dedicated voters. In lieu of shorter voting times, the other option is to look at an extreme like voting once a day. Then the votes become really valuable and competition each round will be more even. Recruiting a friend to vote once will mean a lot, where now those votes carry little impact. Of course, the downside is that it is boring for the dedicated supporters. So where I am leaning right now is moving away from 5 minutes. Only because it seems to be too long for the dedicated bunch to have fun chatting, but too short where the votes still aren’t that close. I will likely make the voting period even longer. I know I will get a lot of flak for this, but the site is doing its job even with the 5 minute breaks. What I mean is that money and awareness is being raised. As of this writing, the Fistula Foundation has raised $330 from a lot of the very generous and kind visitors to this site. It is something that I appreciate and I am sure many of you reading this appreciate too. This is money that wasn’t being raised before. Of course, I would like to hear what people think about the logic behind lengthening the time.

By the way, Larkia brought up the idea of creating a chat channel that I could embed into the site. This would be a more robust chat option right out of the box and would allow you to see who is online and voting in real time.

Marc

Hi everyone,

I’m headed up to SF for the weekend. I have received a bunch of e-mails recently that I haven’t responded to yet, but I have read them all. Thank you to everyone that is supporting Vote4Cause and contributing to the Vote4Cause winners. There’s still plenty of time left in the Dian Fossey pledge drive. If you haven’t pledged, please consider doing so. It is really a great organization! Have a great weekend!

Marc