News and commentary from LookContests.com

I think it’s safe to say that the waiting list has outlived its usefulness.  When we first launched LookContests.com, I wanted to make sure that the site would be reasonably fast and responsive, so the waiting list was a way of managing the number of users and ensuring that new users were added only when I was comfortable that they wouldn’t negatively impact the existing users.  So far, the site is holding up very well, so I’ve approved everyone who was currently on the waiting list, and I’m comfortable with the idea of opening it up to anyone who wants to join.  Tell your friends!

Also, the old way of creating an account was, admittedly, confusing.  You had to go to our partner-site, ContestCanada.net, and create an account there.  This has been changed.  Clicking on ‘Register’ now lets you sign up directly on LookContests.com, and your account is active as soon as you hit the ‘Submit’ button.

Lastly, you can now request a password change by going to the Login page and clicking “Password Reset”.  I’ll be adding more functionality for maintaining your account soon.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

Mike

webmaster@lookcontests.com

Carolyn Wilman (a.k.a. The Contest Queen) was nice enough to feature LookContests.com on her BlogTalkRadio show last week.  I thought she ran a very thoughtful and intelligent interview, and Dan (representing LookContests) gave a lot of background information on the ideas behind the site and our plans for the future.  Check it out if you get a chance:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/contestqueen/2009/04/07/Take-a-Look

A few of the discussion points were focused on the areas of the site that are confusing to use, so we’ll be making some changes in the next little while to simplify LookContests and make it easier for new users.  Stay tuned!

Mike

I’ve just finished moving the site to a new server.  There really shouldn’t be much change in performance, but this will allow the site to grow in the future.

If anyone’s interested in the technical details, the server is an Amazon EC2 instance, which means LookContests.com has moved into the cloud.  Being in the cload has the advantage of allowing me to start up new servers on demand when teh extra capacity is needed.

If you encounter any problems with the site as we make the transition, please let me know:  webmaster@lookcontests.com

The Contest Queen wrote a very nice post about LookContests today. If you haven’t checked out her site, please do so.  There’s a lot of great material about contests there, and she’s got a very active blog.

Here’s a link to the post:

http://www.contestqueen.com/fromthe/2008/11/29/why-now-why-not/

I’ve just implemented some changes that should make the site consistently faster than it has been.  I suspect regular users will notice a fairly decent improvement.

I’ve just updated the site with some new features which are, for the most part, geared towards power users. I’m just going to give a quick run-down of the changes here, and I’ll try to elaborate on them in the next day or two.

• On the Settings page, there is now an option to exclude ContestCanada.net contests from your listings. This if for people that like to enter all of their contests rather than using the ones that are automatically included from ContestCanada.net.
• On the Settings page, there is now an option to select which page should be used as your default start page. In the past this was always set to “new” contests. Now, you can choose any page you like.
• On the Settings page, there is now an option to change how contests are sorted. The options include Expiration Date (the current default), Contest Title, and Company Name.
• At the very bottom of the Settings page, there is a link that allows you to retrieve a file containing all of your contests. The file is a CSV (comma-separated-values), which includes the contests title, company, url, and your last entry date. You may use this file in the unlikely event that LookContests.com becomes unavailable so that you don’t fall behind in your contests.
• You may now make changes/corrections to contests that you’ve added without having them approved by me.
• I’ve also added a feature so that certain users’ changes/corrections for any contests will be automatically approved rather than going through me. If you’ve been submitting changes and I’ve noticed that your changes are usually accurate, I’ll give you the authority to make this changes instantly. For those individuals, I’ll let you know when I’ve granted you the authority.
• As you may have noticed, some contest sites take over the whole screen and mess up our nice tidy listings. If you come across a site like this, click the “correction” button and check off the checkbox that’s labelled “Contest takes full screen”. Then, when you see the same contest in the listings again, the “Open in new window” button will be highlighted in red to remind you. It’s not a great solution, but it’s the best I can come up with so far.
• The “Activity Log” button has been replaced by a “Reports” button.
• A new report has been added: Upcoming Expiration Dates. More reports are planned, and I’d hoped to include them in this release, but I just haven’t had the chance to complete them.

The biggest changes in this release are that I’ve done a lot of work to allow for even more contests to be automatically included. These won’t start showing up quite yet, but they’ll start coming in over the next couple of weeks. My hope is to double the number of contests that are available. The extra contests will be considered “Premium”. Eventually, I plan to change the site so that you have to pay in order to see the Premium contests, but in the meantime I’ll consider everyone who has signed up so far to be a Premium member for the next few months. The Premium contests will have a different icon to help differentiate them.

Anyway, those are the changes in a nutshell. I’ll post more details soon. If you have any questions or comments, be sure to let me know.

Mike

P.S.  Special thanks to Raycaster for many of the ideas in this release.  Keep the comments coming, Raycaster!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve made any changes to the site, but please rest assured that I’ve been steadily working away on some new features. In fact, now would be a great time to let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas that would improve LookContests.com.

One of the main problems that I see right now is that the site is confusing at times. To help new users, I’ve been considering recording a short video that would demonstrate the basics, and I hope to complete this very soon. An even better solution, though, would be to make the site more intuitive.

Some of you have been using it for quite a while now, so it might be difficult to remember what was confusing when you started, but if you have any feedback that might help me improve the site for new users, it would be much appreciated.

I’ve just completed an update to the site that includes a few minor changes and one fairly significant one. The minor changes are listed at the bottom of this post, but first I’d like to address the larger one.

The frequency of a contest is key to the logic for LookContests.com. We started out with fairly simple frequencies: daily, weekly, monthly, single, unlimited and unknown. However, there are some contests that don’t quite fit into these groups. For example, some contests which we’ve categorized as ‘daily’ are actually set up so that once you’ve entered it, you can’t enter again for 24 hours. It’s a subtle but important difference.

To address this, I’ve expanded the frequency filters so that the list now looks like this:

• daily: if you enter the contest any time on Monday, you can next enter it any time on Tuesday.
• daily24hr: *new* if you enter the contest at 6pm one day, you can’t enter again until 6pm the next day.
• weekly: if you enter the contest any time during the week, you can enter it again any time during the following week (LookContests considers a week to start on Sunday).
• weekly7day: *new* if you enter a contest on Monday at 9pm, you can’t enter until after 9pm on the following Monday
• monthly: you can enter the contest once per calendar month.
• monthly30day: *new* you can enter the contest once per 30 day period.
• unlimited: enter as many times as you like.
• unknown: we try not to use this very often, but some contests are difficult to classify.

I hope this makes sense to everyone. We’ll start using these to classify new contests as they’re added. However, I don’t have the time to go back through the 500 or so active contests and check it they need to be changed. If you happen to come across one that’s wrong, please take a few seconds to submit a contest correction and I’ll get it fixed-up ASAP.

Other changes included in this release, are as follows:

• Pop-up windows for Notes and Reminders have been eliminated. I didn’t really like the way these functions operated, so I’ve changed it around. I think it makes more sense now.
• You can now edit or delete notes. This was a pretty basic feature that was missing. If you enter a note that has an error, you can now change it if you like, or delete it altogether.
• User name is now displayed in the notes list. If you create a note and mark it as ‘public’, everyone will see it when they examine a contest. Now it will display your user name in the list. It’s a first step towards making the site a bit more community-oriented.
• The Search function now includes the company name. When you do a search, the site now looks for the term that you’ve entered in the following fields: Title, Description, and Company.
• Bug fixes. There were a lot of new users on the site this week, and a few bugs were uncovered as a result. Overall, though, I’ve been very pleased with the stability.

It’s been brought to my attention (thanks Alain and Ron!) that some sites will not display the validation image when you load them in LookContests.com.  For example, you may see something like this:

The problem, of course, is that you can’t see the squiggly letter that you’re supposed to type.  This seems to be a problem only for Internet Explorer.

There are, fortunately, a few ways to work around this problem.  You can:

• Right-click on the image and select “Display Image”
• or, load the contest site its own tab or window (you may need to disable your pop-up blocker to do this)
• or, use Firefox

I suspect that the first option will be good enough for most people.

For what it’s worth, I use Firefox almost all of the time, and most of my testing for LookContests is done in Firefox.  So, if you find issues with IE (or any other browser), please let me know and I’ll see if it’s something that I can fix or provide a workaround.

OK, I’ve sent and re-sent invitation to everyone who has added their email address to the waiting list over the past few days. If you’ve signed up but still haven’t receive an invitation from me, please send me an email at webmaster@lookcontests.com

Now that that’s out of the way, I can hopefully turn my attention to the list of suggestions and enhancement requests that I’ve received over the past few days. There’s been some really good ideas. If you have any feedback, now would be a great time to let me know. If all goes well, I’ll make a bunch of changes over the next couple of days and do an update of the site sometime over the weekend.

Mike