Some work in the background...

Hi everyone. This post is two-fold: 1) a little bit of news of some small changes being released to the site, and 2) a call to arms for any developers in our community.

First, the small changes

Over the past few months we've released a number of bug fixes which will have gone largely unnoticed by the general community (but have improved things in the background). Now we are starting to release some changes that you will actually see. This set is a collection of small changes, with more to come over the next couple of months. The changes today are:

- We've changed the "New" link on the menu to "New Blippers", so make it more specific what these entries are.

- We've added a "Milestones" browse page, to help you browse people's pages where they are having blipdays - not just where they appear on Popular. Pop in and say hi to someone you're not following yet!

- We've temporarily removed the "Tags" and "Places" links on the main page. Looking at the analytics, these were little used, and our intention is to improve them. The map is still available via a menu link (although we do have work still to do on this mapping functionality).

- When you use the map to tag places, you can now overlay a satellite view to more easily pin point places.

- We've made the "You already have an entry on this day" error more specific, as it's the cause of confusion in a number of support calls.

- We've added a message for non-logged in users to encourage them to join up (on journal entries, where the comment functionality would be for a logged in user).

There's more coming soon, including the new banner page with competition winner.

Secondly, a call to action for the more technical in the community

(if you're not a techie, ignore this bit!)

As you'll know if you came through the crowdfunding with us, this site is run by a small bunch of volunteers, unpaid and in their spare time. We do have access to our brilliant lead developer, but our funding is limited so our time with him is also limited. From the outset of taking over blip we've had in mind the need to OpenSource some pieces of code, so we can get more people working on them. The time's not been right before - so now we're coming out to ask the community: who wants to help code some stuff?

We're planning to start with the Android app, then move on to the iOS app and some other individual (non-phone) projects. It's a great opportunity to give back to the community, and make a real difference to some code that's live and actively used.

If you're interested in getting involved, then please contact Annie on info@blipfoto.com. If you could let me know the technologies you're able to work with, it'd be helpful. A couple of you have already been in touch separately - I'll get back in touch with you as we're gathering the groups.