Weekly Upgrade: Subscriptions, Coupons, Facebook

It was another "under-the-hood" week for FamZoo, so you won't (or shouldn't!) see any visible changes after today's upgrade.

Subscription and Coupon Work In Progress

Last week, we made more progress on billing and payment integration with Paypal as well as the mechanics of redeeming coupons and supporting free trial periods for new subscribers.

For example, here's something you should not see as Charter Members when you sign back into FamZoo since you have "magic" unlimited coupons:

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If you do see the subscription stripe across the top of your page, please contact us! (It means that your unlimited coupon has not been automatically redeemed properly and we'll fix it.)

Become a FamZoo Fan on Facebook

Come visit our page on Facebook and become a FamZoo fan to help us spread the word!

Weekly Upgrade: Meet Henry, Tweet Us, Paypal

There aren't many visible changes in the upgrade this afternoon (Monday, November 2nd) because we've been spending much of our time on behind-the-scenes work for supporting subscriptions and coupons.

Here's the quick rundown:

Meet the FamZoo Cartoonist: Henry Payne

You've seen his wonderful drawings all over our site, but we finally got around to adding an entry for Henry Payne on our Team page in the About section. Here it is:

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Some New Product and Charitable Recommendations

You've probably noticed that we show recommendations for family-friendly products as well as charitable organizations in the right hand sidebar of our site's pages. When you buy a product after clicking through one of these links on our site, FamZoo receives a small percentage of the revenue. This is known as affiliate marketing and is one of the revenue models that we're experimenting with. Right now, we just have a few products that Chris and I have recommended for testing purposes. We just added a couple more this week for some favorite books as well as two charitable "ads" for DonorsChoose and NothingButNets.

Ultimately, if we decide to pursue this model, we'll open things up for any member to nominate products that we will display at our discretion. We'll also allow members to comment and vote on products appearing on the site. Unpopular products (as judged by our members) would be dropped from the site.

All that said, we really have no intention of gumming up the site with a bunch of random advertising. That just wouldn't be in keeping with our mission of promoting sensible spending habits. So, our overwhelming preference is to buck the Internet trend and rely on modest subscription fees to build a viable business.

Subscriptions Via Paypal

We've decided to go with Paypal for handling subscription payments and have begun writing the underlying code to integrate with their services. We'll be working on the plumbing first and the screens will follow in the next few weeks.

Follow Us on Twitter

We set up a twitter account for FamZoo last week. We'll "tweet" short updates about the site there. In the near future, we'll also announce coupons and other special offers there too. Feel free to "tweet" us whenever the spirit moves you! Come follow us at: http://twitter.com/famzoo

Weekly Upgrade: More Avatars, Better Descriptions and Memos

Here are the highlights of the upgrade coming this afternoon (Tuesday, October 27):

New Batch of Avatars from Henry

Our artist, Henry Payne, sent us 12 new avatars this week, and we've added them to the gallery. Click on the Family tab and then click on an avatar next to a family member to bring up the avatar gallery. Here's what you'll see:

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Better Descriptions and Memos for FamZoo Generated Credits and Debits

Steve K mentioned that our descriptions for credits and debits created by Checklist items were pretty cryptic (thanks for passing your comments along, Steve). An example:

 Automatic debit for checked off item: "Did not make bed"

The term "automatic debit" just doesn't feel right. It's also easily confused with the Automatic Debits that you can set up for recurring charges like cell phone insurance or World of Warcraft subscriptions.

Along the way, we also cleaned up the descriptions and memos for allowance payments, interest payments, and automatic debits. Here's a screenshot that highlights the new wording:

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Doh! Cryptic Message When Try to Create First Checklist

If you tried to create your first Checklist from the "click here" message in the Checklists summary section, you may have been rudely greeted by an error page like this:

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Sorry about that! We've fixed this now (thank you for the bug report Paul E).

Miscellaneous Stuff

This week's miscellaneous items in the upgrade include:

• Backdating of allowance, interest, and auto debit payments when first creating them (or when editing them prior to first issuance). This can get a little confusing, so I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but it's at least possible now.
• More top secret security work behind the scenes. We could tell you about it, but we'd have to kill you...

Other stuff we're working on that will be apparent over time:

• Decision making and design work for our subscription model including support for coupons and gift certificates for "N months free". Not to worry, Charter Families will be automatically credited with a coupon for an "infinite" number of months free. We appreciate your ongoing help.
• Production hosting planning. Before we open the doors to the general public, we'll be beefing up our site's servers to help insure consistent performance as the number of families increases.