Development Update - Following Friends, Avatars, Colours & more

As promised, we’re happy to share the latest changes we've been working on to improve YayTrail.

So what's new?

Find and Follow your friends

This big update allows you to choose whose trails you wish to follow. Previously all users were subscribed to follow everyone else, and that was reflected in your inbox, where everyone's activity was recorded for every other user to see.

Now you can pick and choose who to follow, customising your inbox to reflect only the people you are interested in a big step toward the goal of helping you create a more personal web.

Your inbox now shows on the right hand side who you are following and who is following you. You can browse for more people to follow by clicking on the “Find people” link in the top right corner of the page. You'll be brought to a directory of users registered on YayTrail - click on one of the entries to go to that user's trail page.

Every user's trail page now has a button labelled 'Follow'. Clicking this will subscribe you to follow that user. Once you are subscribed to this user the button will change to 'Stop Following'. As the name implies, clicking this will unsubcribe you from this user's trail.



Every trail page now also shows who the user is following and who is following them - another way to find more users you might be interested in.

This is just the first draft of our friend-following model. Going forward we will have many more 'people management' tools and privacy options. Keep an eye out!

Some more colour

We’ve listened to what you have had to say and by popular demand we have introduced just a little more colour into your life! Every user can now customise the colour associated with their YayTrail edits through the settings page. Just click another colour and hit 'Submit Change', and all your edits will be painted in your new chosen hue.

Photo

You can further customise your presence on YayTrail and across your edits by uploading a photo or image that represents you. Just click on the Settings and use the Photo form to upload and crop your favourite image. This will then become your identity badge, so big nice smiling faces please!

Design

We're tinkering with the design as you'll probably see as you move around the site. Some pages aren't in perfect visual harmony yet. Please bear with us as we experiment with design treatments that we hope will make for a more pleasant experience.

Work in Progress

As always, this update represents a work in progress. We need your help to test and refine YayTrail as we continue to preview the service. Undoubtedly there are bugs to be found and fixed with this updated code and the new changes, so please do give YayTrail a whirl and let us know what you think. We strongly encourage you to invite your friends too - the more people you know on YayTrail, the more enjoyable it is!

If you need any help at all in using the service, don't be shy about letting us know, no matter the problem. Any questions, comments, bugs and feedback are welcome at feedback@yaytrail.com or you can just drop us a comment on this blog below or better still, an edit with Yaytrail.

Posted by Peter at 3:39 PM