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.

SimpleBucket – Reviews and Surprises

The other day, I was having a chat over skype with Thomas, on how well things has been progressing with SimpleBucket and how other things are not. For eg, we got quite a few good reviews from the blogosphere, here’s two excellent reviews if you are curious:

AppScout.com -Simplebucket: Simple, Ad-Free Image Hosting – AppScout

KiilerStartups.com – SimpleBucket.com – Host photos with a good vibe

So it was a great motivation for us to see that people actually think that SimpleBucket is a great app and seeing more people using it. The hardest part is of course getting the message out to everyone out there who is just dying to find a really simple image hosting app with powerful and useful features. If you google for “simple image hosting“, guess who is on the #1, surprise surprise, Google thinks that simple image hosting is US – SimpleBucket. That comes as a great surprise to us since we’ve only launched 2 weeks ago.

Thomas, Tim and myself have great ideas in making SimpleBucket the best damn image hosting app that you will ever need, of course that is a big statement but we think we can achieve that by making little “great” improvements and features over time. As a matter of fact, we are now starting work on the next release for SimpleBucket and hopefully you will see something awesome in the next few weeks .. or maybe sooner!

SimpleBucket reviewed on KillerStartup.com

Hey everyone, finally I’m up on my two feet after 24 hrs of sleep, just kidding. The 48 hrs Rails hackathon was a blast. Sleep was not something we expected to have in the normal capacity, but hey we made it. So I tried googling for SimpleBucket, just to check if the giant indexer of the web has picked up anything about us. Not too bad, googling for simplebucket came up with quite a number of results, more than I had expected since we were only live 72hrs now. To my pleasant surprise, I saw a link to Killerstartup.com. Nice… They reviewed SimpleBucket and pretty much hit the spot in describing what our vision is with SimpleBucket.

“The site is dummy-proof with clear instructions and large readable text. The main page gives the user a few easy steps to start filling up their simple bucket.”

“This site is like a cool person with whom you want to be friends. The vibe is good and it’s a no-brainer. A very important feature is the large font, because it’s embarrassing to have to use bifocals to look at your own photos.”

As we moved on from RailsRumble, we will be taking on bugs ( we’ve found some but nothing major) and working more on features just you SimpleBucket lovers. PEACE OUT.

Launched in 48 hrs – Simplebucket.com

Yes, we did it. It was tiring, we had little sleep. But it fun, and we managed to complete 90% of what we had pen down initially. So SimpleBucket is a no hassle image hosting provider. No account registration, activation, nothing. Just a simple and hassle free way to quickly upload and share your photos. The best thing about SimpleBucket? You can add notes Flickr style. All your recent uploads can be accessed without logging in using a super top secret url, so really, there is nothing holding you back from using SimpleBucket. So here you have it, a photo hosted by no other people – SimpleBucket!

Almost 24 hours and 24 more to go for SimpleBucket

Now are we about 24 hrs toward RailsRumble. Things are going smooth and we are almost on schedule. I think it will start to pickup as we get more warmed up and sleep. We are probably going to catch a few hours of sleep and get ready for the final push tomorrow. As for updates, check out http://www.simplebucket.com

You should see real time updates as we build and update the live production server at http://www.simplebucket.com. But no real deals yet. Watch the next 24 as we try to launch our startup over this crazy weekend!

Simplebucket! Startup in 48 hours

Hey everyone. What’s Simplebucket? You may ask, we are going to code a rockass startup in 48hrs? And how? With the best thing that has ever happen to developers all over the world, Ruby on Rails. So here’s the long story short – We are taking part in the 48hrs Rails Hackathon, RailsRumble, and through the gift of the internet, friends, irc, etc… We’ve formed a team to take this idea online. Get this startup going in 48hr is not easy, but it will surely be a hell of a great time. Quite a few people have tried launching a startup in 48hrs and failed. Will we succeed, and win the coveted RailsRumble world championship belt? Find out soon.. as a matter of fact, watch this space for the next 48hrs as we update our progress, reveal what we will be working on 4 hours from now and getting things done!