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!

The joys of diversity

I finally got a Mac from our good friend Nadia and I was chagrined to see the havoc wreaked by Safari. The major problems have now been fixed and the site works well now. There are some minor formatting annoyances remaining which I'll work on if time permits. Since many Dreamboarders are probably 'Mac' types, I'm glad to have tested this. Nice to have you on board!

Updates are up and running!

Thanks to heroic efforts by Dan, the site is now running using Ruby on Rails. So what? you might ask. The site should be faster and a little smoother to use. There may still be little problems here and there, so please tell us about any issues. The new site will let us roll things out to a wider audience and feel confident that everything is solid for you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope that you can find at least one thing to be thankful for...put it on your board to remind yourself that things really can be great!
We're working on some improvements to the site right now, including converting the back-end to Ruby. We're hoping to make the site more responsive and easier to maintain. All you boards and galleries will be unchanged of course, so the upgrade should be seamless for you all. We're off on a roadtrip...Enjoy your weekend!

How I'm using my board

Now that the blog is integrated into the site, I wanted to share with you how I'm using my board.

When I first set up the site, only your most current board was public (could be seen by others). So I made a nice board and felt good about it. But then I was reluctant to make another one since I liked my old one so much. This experience made me change the whole public/private feature so you can publish any number of boards in your history, so you don't need to be protective of any one board.

My first board was all about inspiration. At the time I was working on a knotty problem in Complex Adaptive Systems, and needed something to keep my spirits up. Having images of the greats around me gave me hope that my brain might be able to achieve something this lifetime. I subsequently made great progress on the problem, and managed to get some insights into the simple systems I was interested in.

Now I'm on to the next challenge in that area, and I've cleared off my board and started again. My new board is rather rough so I haven't shared it yet, but it's much more technical; immersing me in the details and richness of a new domain so I can feel comfortable there.

Many people use Dreamboards as a kind of shopping list; a series of images of the things they want. Since I'm not much into 'stuff', that kind of board doesn't work for me too well. So I use my board for more of a 'context'. That is, what are the ideas/influences which I want to encourage in my life? This kind of board puts me in the right frame of mind to direct my life the way I want it. I'll let you know how it goes!

DigitalDreamboard.com is up and running

After a few months of fiddling and fixing, I finally feel like the site is usable. I know of a few issues with board building and I'm working on those as we speak. But basically, the site seems to be working, so we're now spreading the word out to close friends. Anyone registering in the next month or so will become a Permanent User, so you'll never have to pay for membership!

Please tell me about any problems you encounter by emailing me at support@digitaldreamboard.com . I'm particularly interested in the experience on a Mac, since I haven't done any testing on Safari at all. If it really doesn't work, i'll have to work harder to track down a new Mac.

I'll be posting every week or so. I'm using my board quite often now so I'll let you know the results. Thanks for being a real live tester...I'm really keen to hear about your experiences and suggestions, so don't be shy...