Simplebucket is the most “Simple Photo Hosting” Website

It’s been quite a ride since the Release2 launch and I’m happy to announce a significant milestone in the history of Simplebucket. As of last March 31th, 8:30EST, Simplebucket officially hits 1000 photo uploads.

Another big news that I would like to share with all our users and you SEO folks is Simplebucket is the most simple photo hosting website on the “internets“! Looks like Google and Yahoo are in agreement here too.

Google search for “simple photo hosting” #1 spot (Yes!!!!!!)

Yahoo search for “simple photo hosting” #1 spot (Double Yes!!!)

Google search for “photo hosting” (Bottom on Third Page)

I know everyone loves having seeing some stats, so here’s a peek to never been revealed information (in code) … and only you get to see.

>> User.count #Number of users
=> 426
>> Image.count #Number of images
=> 1011
>> Note.count #Number of notes
=> 289
>> Comment.count #Number of comments
=> 120
>> Rating.count #Number of ratings
=> 163

Alexa’s stats were pretty interesting too and I was pleasantly surprised that Simplebucket was well loved by the international community.

What keeps the fire burning and motivates you to keep working on your startup

If you’ve been following the Simplebucket blog, you would have read that we released Simplebucket Release2 last week on March 20th. Release2 has the goodness that I’ve been working on for the past month. I won’t go much into how awesome is Release2.

But I want to specifically talked about how great it is to see what you have been working on is getting appreciated and getting all the great feedback from different sources definitely keeps the fire going.

1) The YCombinator Hacker News Community is great!

There is a little well-known hacker community known as YCombinator Hacker News. Hacker News is the community for hackers (not the type of hackers that goes around breaking into peoples website/servers) but the type that lives and breathes the excitement of turning their ideas into reality through nights of coding and maybe coolaid.

So being a reader of Hacker News for a while, I thought I tried my luck and posted an AskYC. AskYC are specific questions directed at the community, and the intend is for the poster to some answers/feedback from the community for their questions. After 24 hrs, I was getting comments from people that I did not know and they replied with really, really good feedback. They were not only feedback but also they took the time to try out Simplebucket and reported what’s wrong, what could be better. I was especially appreciative of one commenter, hoyhoy, who posted a comment with 18 different things/issues that he sees as things that can be improved.

There was a total of 6 comments and those comments definitely gave me a lot of ideas what direction to take marching towards Release3 and thanks to hoyhoy, everyone will be getting a custom profile page soon.

So my advise to other hackers out there, don’t be afraid to ask. Ask the YC Hacker News community on what you have been working on and be wonderfully surprised.

2) Emails from users.

The other great motivational factor for me was receiving emails from Simplebucket users. They start off expressing how great Simplebucket was and go on to saying what they thought like to see in future. I can only say “Thank you!” to all who’ve emailed and said “Hi, I love Simplebucket” and everyone email is well-appreciated and I keep all your suggestions in mind.

Its here. Simplebucket release2

Yes, its finally here, after nights of coding and endless css … I’m presenting Simplebucket release2.

What’s so awesome about this release? First of, yes, the admin portion now works. A lot of admin options is now built into the admin interface. You can also page through all your photo uploads with no reloads. Yes – NO RELOADS. Ajax is in the house!

The other feature that got out with release2 is the javascript embed. What’s that? Well if you run your own site, or has blogger, you can embed your photo with notes on it! Yes, it’s what we call a photo widget. Of course, you need to have notes added first on the photo page, then select and copy the code with the “Photo Widget” selection. Paste that onto your page and voila! In fact the example on the main page is a photo widget embedded there!

Now on to other features to make photo sharing more joy:

1) Notice the ShareThis button, just click on it and you can post the photo onto Mixx, Digg, Propeller, etc.

2) How about tipping us for our hard work? You can now do that easily through TipJoy! Just click on the TipJoy button, enter your email and yes, we get a $0.10 tip!

3) Add your comments, start a conversation about the photo.

4) Rate the photo if you like it or even if  you do not like it.. whatever

5) Photo page views… yes, you now will know how many page views your photo got

I think that pretty much sums up all the photo features.

What about account features?

The biggest thing is now you can password protect your account. And this is optional. If you do not password protect your account, you will still be able to access your photo admin page through the super secret url we email you with each uploads. But you may ask, so what the heck does the password protected account do? Well, if you experiencing account or email abuse, for eg, you receive emails for photos that you did not upload with your email address, which means someone else is probably abusing your email address for uploads. Don’t panic, they will not see your super duper secret url. The super duper secret url is only sent to your email address. So only you will know it.

So what’s a password protect account?
Well, it basically means that any upload using that email will required the user to login. There’s just one gotcha, you will need to login first, before you do your upload, if not, you will be redirected to the login page and then you will have to login and do your upload all over again. Once you password protect your account, you cannot unprotect it.

So to protect your account, just access your admin page using your super duper secret url and then click on “My Settings” on the top right hand corner. Type in the password you want to use and you are all set!

OK… That’s a lot of typing.. Anyway, I think release2 is going to be awesome, but I love to hear from you. What you like, what you don’t like, what you like to see in release3. By the way, since I’m the only, yes THE ONLY developer, working on Simplebucket, sometimes it really hard to make sure that everything works right in all browser species. I’ve only been using Firefox for all my browsing, so if you are having any problems with IE8, or predecessor, drop me an email, and I will try to look into it, no promises. But I would tell you to change over to Firefox, yes.. you need to but its your choice.