We're celebrating!

Our baby girl was born last week so we're all thrilled and basking in new-baby bliss!
We've decided to make membership free to everyone with no expiration for the foreseeable future, as a gift from her to you all. Enjoy!
We also know that these are tough times and we could all use a little help to see what the future holds. I hope that you can find some inspiration here and that it will propel you to a future free from concerns and filled with joy.

Happy New Year

After a long absence, we're back actively working on the site. It's amazing how many people have signed up even though we haven't been advertising! Thanks for all your support.

The main thing you'll notice about the site now, is that we've hooked up payments to the account page. This may come as a great disappointment to all (except us). We've extended the trial period until January 15th so you can get all your New Year's resolutions up and visual before deciding whether to become a full member. If you decide not to sign up as a member, you can still view all your boards, but you can't work on them. Along with that change, we have big plans to provide you with greater functionality on the site. Most of those are based around sharing: sharing images, success stories and inspirations, and a forum for exchanging inspirational tools and resources. Overall, the focus is on bringing your dreams and visions into reality. The first step in that process is bringing them out of your head and into some kind of expressed medium. The second step is to share that with others.

One thing I'm thinking through right now is the relationship between the tools we have on this site, and different learning styles. I'm a huge fan of Dawna Markova's How your child is smart. To summarize, she associates the different channels of learning (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) with the levels of attention (conscious, subconscious, unconscious). Someone who is a conscious visual learner is engaged and active when presented with visual information. When given auditory information (for example, you try to teach them something by telling them), they may appear spaced out or distant since the auditory channel is received on deeper levels of their awareness. This approach is almost magical when it comes to teaching; trying to talk AT a conscious-kinesthetic learner is kind of like herding cats. With that kind of learner, learning on-the-job is the most effective way. Work with my son if you don't believe me (-;

DigitalDreamboard.com is a visually oriented site. Since we're trying to bring deep desires and impulses to manifest levels (conscious levels), how does this relate to different people's learning styles and different ways of processing information? Can we add other tools (sound, movement) to the process of building a board to make it more effective for other types? Comments are certainly welcome. I'm a kinesthetic learner myself, so building a board helps clarify a level of my awareness which is otherwise rather hidden.

Brand new server!

We've upgraded the site as of tonight! Our main concern was that the site was slow enough to be irritating. So we've upgraded to a dedicated server with lots of horsepower. For the next day or so, you'll see the domain redirected to our new IP address, so don't be concerned about the change in URL. Keep using digitaldreamboard.com as it will be pointed properly within 24 hours. All you account information, boards and images have been preserved so it should be seamless for you. If you have any trouble, or think that some information got lost in the transfer, please email us right away and we will fix the problem.

Quick start your board!

For the overwhelmed among you, we've added an easy way to get over the blank-board-blues. Try out the quick start. Just pick a theme for your board, a few images and a layout. Then we'll make the whole thing for you, nice and easy. It's a great way to get over the hump and get going. You know, we're just trying to eliminate all the barriers for you...

New layout for the Dreamboard page

Nitya is putting together "Dreamboard parties" right now. We invite a few friends over with their laptops, talk, laugh and build boards...fun! We noticed that working on a board when on a laptop is a bit of a trial. The gallery seems to be in the way alot of the time and more time is spent working on the board itself than looking at the gallery. So I've made some changes to the Dreamboard page: the gallery is now a slide-up/slide-down control so you can get rid of it really easily and we've moved the top links down to the bottom to give you more room to work. I've also fixed some problems with Image Search and Internet Explorer 7, so that should work perfectly now. As ever, let me know if there are any problems! I hope these changes will make things much easier for everyone.

Something wonderful...

Over the New Year, we started brainstorming on things we'd like to see on the site. We all had one item at the top of the list: image search. It's a pain to have to go away from the site, download images, save them somewhere, upload images then finally add them to the board. So we're rolling out something wonderful...integrated image search. Now, when working on your board, you can use a page which wraps up google images so you can drag-and-drop images straight to your gallery. The gallery on the dreamboard page will be automatically updated once the image has been collected for you. Working on your board is much more satisfying, integrated and it's quicker to find the images you want. You can use the image search any time [even if you're not working on your board]. It's up right now, so give it a try and let me know how it goes!

Happy Holidays!

I hope the holiday season brings you everything you've been wishing for and more. We're spreading the word about digitaldreamboard.com to close friends for the holiday season. Give it a try instead of using pen-and-paper New Year's Resolutions!