Digital Dreamboard Blogging

We're celebrating!

2009-10-19T10:03:00.001-07:00

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

2008-12-26T16:02:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-03-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-02-24T21:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T23:18:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-01-22T16:58:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-12-24T14:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-12-05T21:32:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-11-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-10T21:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-10T14:53:00.000-08:00

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...