OnePage Blog

One service at a time: Forrst

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:09:00 -0700

For a while now you’ve been requesting more services to be supported by OnePage. With our “One service at a time” series of posts, we are quickly adding support for services you want to add to your OnePage by adding one new service each and every week.

Now you can add your Forrst

This week, we’ve added support for Forrst. So you can log in now and add Forrst to your OnePage card right away. Forrst lets you share snippets of your development and design work with others and get feedback quickly. We're actually revealing some of our future developments early using Forrst.

Get involved, help us out

Each week, we will be integrating a new service, and you can influence which service will be added each week. We need you to let us know what you need, so get in touch!

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One service at a time: Foursquare

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:56:00 -0700

Now you can add your Foursquare

This week, we’ve added support for Foursquare. So you can log in now and add Foursquare to your OnePage card right away. Foursquare lets you check in at various locations whilst you’re out and about and is a great way to let people know where you are and find friends who are nearby.

Get involved, help us out

Each week, we will be integrating a new service, and you can influence which service will be added each week. We need you to let us know what you need, so get in touch!

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One service at a time: edocr

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 06:59:00 -0700

For a while now, you've been asking for more services to add to your OnePage. Today, I'm very happy to announce that over the course of the next few months, we'll be integrating many of your favourite services.

A little about edocr

What edocr provides is document publishing to document intelligence and sales lead generation. If you have tens, hundreds or thousands of non confidential documents including brochures, leaflets, white papers, case studies, press releases, data sheets, specifications, operating manuals, annual reports, certificates and more and others would find the content of these documents useful then edocr is a great platform to take advantage of.

Not only am I delighted to have edocr integrated since it's providing a great service for people, but also because it is a fellow UK startup run by my good friend Manoj Ranaweera and I am glad that there are great ambitious people out there and that we can collaborate together.

Get involved, help us out

Each week, we will be integrating a new service, and you can influence which service will be added each week. We need you to let us know what you need, so get in touch!

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OnePage mentioned in the Guardian today!

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:08:00 -0700

“Other competitors include OnePage, which is beautifully designed”

via guardian.co.uk

Hi everyone! We'd just like to let you know that we're mentioned in the Guardian today. Thanks for all your support so far, we are working hard to make OnePage better for you one step at a time. Not only are we delighted to be in the Guardian, but we are also excited to be mentioned alongside multi-million dollar funded startups.

Remember to get in touch with us if you have any questions, suggestions, or simply to say hi :)

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OnePage featured in .net magazine!

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:22:03 -0700

When I was starting out with web design and development around 10 years ago I used to subscribe to a magazine called .net. I used to read it each month and follow their tutorials. After a while I stopped subscribing in favour for finding the same content online. It's a great magazine though and it's nice to read something printed even if the news can be a little outdated with the speed things move at now as a result of things like Twitter.

I'm delighted to let you all know that OnePage is featured this month in that very same magazine that I used to read many years ago. We've been featured in the "beta meter" section - check it out below:

This is great for OnePage and it seems we're getting noticed in a few places now. If you'd like to write about us, check out our press page and feel free to get in touch directly. As for that 48% chance of survival? We will enjoy proving them wrong, and they must be unaware of the awesome features we have planned to improve your OnePage and help you manage your contacts.

Stay up to date with OnePage by following our updates on Twitter and Facebook.

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Oo leaves OnePage after 1 year of passionate work

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:23:00 -0700

Many of you will be aware of the energy and enthusiasm Oo puts into what he truly believes in, and OnePage was no different. Oo put his passion behind OnePage to drive it forward as co-founder dealing with business, marketing and shaping the experience of the service. We recently agreed that it would be better for OnePage if one of us were to take it forward and Oo is kindly stepping down from the day-to-day runnings of OnePage. I am delighted to say we will both be supporting each other in current and future ventures. Oo has played an important role in shaping the start of the process and I hope that he will continue to be a great ambassador for the service.

So, what happens next?

I am now taking things forward by myself and am prepared for a tough but exciting journey ahead. There are many requests which have been coming in through our UserVoice forum and there are also many enhancements I have in mind myself. I'm happy to say that growth has never been better than it is right now and you are choosing to use OnePage from all over the planet. Remember, we are still in the early stages and your input will make a real difference, so get in touch and be part of something big. Thanks for all your support so far, and I look forward to being in touch with you all. Joel

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You can now embed and add OnePage cards

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:59:00 -0700

We have been missing because we have been busy creating the product you want. I am happy to announce the following features

Embed

You can now embed your (and any OnePage) on your blog, or website. Yes, go ahead and kiss the contact form on your about page goodbye :). All you need to do is click the embed tab and it displays a link which you can put where you want to embed it. The card below is a live embed:)

Storing contacts

People have asked what they should do if they come, across a OnePage they want to take note of. Well that's simple, store the card with a click.

Multiple Sign in

We know you are tired of remembering those pesky email addresses and passwords which is why we have created multiple was to sign in. So no more excuses. Go ahead, and create your OnePage and share the love, it takes only a few seconds.

Please let us have a feedback. Yes, you can contact me through my OnePage

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First! To implement the new Facebook OAuth 2.0!

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:21:00 -0700

We are pleased to announce OnePage is the first statup (we know of) that has implemented the new Facebook OAuth login which was announced by Mark Zuckerberg a few hours ago at the ongoing f8 conference. What this means for our existing users is that you can login to your OnePage with your Facebook account* automatically. New users can get a complete OnePage in about 3 clicks and 30 seconds.

Of course Joel was the one that did the implementation and talks about it below. I leave you with one quote from Joel

“Facebook's new login is so easy, I feel I have not done anything"

Thanks Zuck, you can have a beer on us.

*As long as you previously added Facebook to OnePage. If not, login normally and add Facebook and it will work for you.

The implementation

If you saw the f8 keynote earlier, you might have noticed how easy Mark Zuckerberg and Brett Taylor made it sound to implement Facebook into your website now. I am very happy to say that it is in fact as easy as they said. In the process of developing OnePage we inherently deal with many social APIs, Twitter and LinkedIn being the others which use OAuth. With OAuth 2.0, the use of signatures is eliminated and instead HTTPS is used to get the access token used for API calls. Implementing the authorisation process is as simple as sending the user to a link, getting a code passed back to your page and then accessing a URL with that code in order to get the access token. Once you've got the access token you can use the new Facebook Graph API to obtain JSON data objects for various information stored within Facebook.

For OnePage, this means we've been able to easily facilitate a process where users can sign up using Facebook and we can grab their Name, Photo, About me, Email and Birthday to add to their OnePage profile. This means the signup process is now shorter than ever before.

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Product Update: Sharing and much more

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:23:00 -0700

Your OnePage becomes more useful if more people know about it. Towards this end, we have put in a little feature that will help you in spreading your OnePage. Share. With a click you can tell people on Facebook and Twitter how awesome your page is. You can even change your ‘website’ on Twitter to your OnePage address. We made a little screencast to show you how it works. Let us know your thoughts in the comments

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OnePage is ready for primetime!

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:27:00 -0700

It has been about eight months since Joel and I launched the first version of OnePage, which was created in response to our scattered identities and contact points in various places on the web, we wanted to bring order to that space. In the past months, we have made several changes to our product, logo (yet again), design and even the web url. It was all in a bid to find the right direction as regards to what our users have told us. We moved very slowly as we had several commitments (school, work, etc). Eventually, we decided if we really wanted to make this happen, we had to take the plunge and go full time. This meant being in the same place (I was in Coventry and Joel in Sheffield). We decided to move to Birmingham and luckily, got into the BSEEN program almost immediately. We are happy to say we are now ready for primetime.

Opening up means people can sign up to OnePage without waiting for an invite and more frightening is the fact that we do not have any control over growth :)! In the coming weeks, we have some interesting features we hope will make your OnePage more useful. Please just keep giving us feedback. If you have not signed up, please do and tell your friends to do so too.

Thank you for all the support!

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OnePage Has Been Seen By The BSEEN Programme

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:33:08 -0700

We are pleased to announce that OnePage has been chosen to be a part of the BSEEN Programme.

The BSEEN (Birmingham Skills for Enterprise and Employability Network) programme aims to offer graduates and students a diverse package of support at a time when many will see business start-up and self employment as an attractive career option. With incubator support, training, mentoring and career guidance, the programme will give participants the tools they need to succeed. A city-wide network of entrepreneurs will give much-needed peer support and access to the regional economy.

Asides the mentorship and training that will be provided, we get a FREE office space for 6 months at the Birmingham Science Park Aston (pictured below), in addition to a little monthly stipend. It is a really exciting milestone for us, as for once, we would now have some form of stability almost one year after starting OnePage. You will certainly notice our pace pick up exponentially as we will dedicate as much time possible to OnePage.

We are being joined by a group of other young entrepreneurs who were chosen alongside ourselves. What is more exciting is that we will be sharing the same space with about 18 other startups from the e4f programme most of which are digital technology companies. We will blog about our new neighbours in a subsequent post.

We are very grateful to the Birmingham City council, Aston University, everybody involved, most especially Simon Jenner, who alerted me to this great opportunity.

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Four updates for OnePage

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:43:21 -0800

We want let you know of some new features we have added to OnePage based on Feedback

Reorganisation of services: You are now able to position any of your services anyway you want.

Auto population of your card with LinkedIn. When someone signs up newly, the person can half fill his/her card by just signing into LinkedIn. This feature is enabled for new users only.

Cropping of Pictures. When you upload a picture, you can now select the part of the picture you want to be the profile picture. We recommend choosing your face though ;)
We have added a bunch of services to stay abreast with the unending number of contact points we have everyday. They are Gowalla, SlideShare and WordPress.

Hurry along and play with the additions. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. If there are particular services you will like to see next, let us know in the comments. As I said on my personal blog, Joel will join me in Birmingham so we can move at the required speed. Thank you for keeping faith in us.

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OnePage: a new beginning

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:30:46 -0800

Creating a startup is hard, really hard, and it has been for us here at OnePage. Quite a lot of twists and turns have occurred since we launched and even since our last post. The only thing that has not changed is our determination to see OnePage become a success. We actually had to make a lot of changes under the hood which is why it seemed we had abandoned the site. We will explain all the “behind the scenes” stories and causes for delay on a later date. For now this post is about the changes that have been made to the OnePage product. The reoccurring feedback (aside bugs) we received since our initial release was that our product was not well defined: it seemed we could be anything or everything, thereby being nothing. Someone actually thought we wanted to create something like Tweetdeck! Our vagueness limited the amount of useful feedback we could get since people were suggesting things in completely different directions. We take the blame for this mix up which we will throw more light on this in a subsequent post. Let us now clearly define what OnePage is supposed to be:

OnePage is a digital platform for creating, sharing and storing business/contact cards.

For OnePage to be complete, you should be able to create, share (especially with mobile phones) and store business cards. As students of the lean startup, we are focusing on the first part: create. We want to be sure you can create your card in the easiest possible way and like it enough to be willing to share it, i.e. use it as your default email signature, ‘website’ on Twitter and Facebook, etc. One great thing about the new OnePage is that you do not need to be on many social networks to find it useful. See my card below:

And if you have several contact points, you will also love and find OnePage very useful. See Joel’s card below:

You may notice that we have removed several features (for now) to simplify our offering. The reason being we are not sure we know what you find useful so we have decided to put out the minimum feature set. Changes made include: Addition: The card is much more like a business card compared to what we had before. You can add multiple contacts of the same service (RSS, Twitter) and even label it too. Subtraction: The stream does not exist anymore (is that a good move?). We have also removed the various backgrounds. Other: The landing page has also changed to communicate what OnePage is in the shortest possible time. Is it clear enough? We also sorted a lot of the issues raised in Uservoice. We want your OnePage to be your primary url/website, the single thing you need give people so they can then connect with you in the one million other places you exist (Skype, Twitter, email, Blog, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn etc). An excellent use case is your Twitter account which has only one entry field for ‘Website’; you can safely put your OnePage there and people can connect with you everywhere. Another good use is as a better alternative for your email signature. see picture below.

You may notice that we do not use Posterous for our blog anymore. It is not that we do not like Posterous (we think it is a very lovely product) but Wordpress is much more extensible and better suited for what we envisage out company blog to be like. We want to use this blog to talk about our product and more importantly document our journey launching our startup. Our role model blog is the 37Signals blog. We believe that if we teach what we are learning, we will learn and benefit more. I hope you visit more frequently (you can subscribe to our RSS feed, Fan us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter). Thank you for all your support. Welcome to the journey! Please let us know what you think.

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What has been up at OnePage?

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:38:00 -0800

A lot of people have been asking that question since it seems no activity has been taking place on the site. We really appreciate your concern therefore we have decided to update you on what we have been up to. One of the challenges we have had was making people understand the primary function of OnePage. This confusion was brought about since it looked like it could do quite a number of things. This might have been because we follow the lean startup here which suggests you put out the minimum viable product. The risk of that means you might have your customer requests deviate from what your product is supposed to be since the minimum viable product might not be self explanatory enough. Therefore we have decided be much clearer when we do our next iteration.

Our plan for OnePage is to change the way we network by revolutionizing the contact/ business card, we decided to take important steps therefore we are taking the following steps in our new iteration

Standardization: If you read the last post on semantic markup by our wonderful Chief Designer Laura, you would realize the importance of interoperability and seamless integration with various standards of the web and mobile

Scalability: Since we are certain that with your help OnePage will grow, OnePage CTO Joel has taken some steps to ensure that the architecture of OnePage will be allergic to fail whales. The refactoring of some of the code has meant that we had to slow down a bit.

Structure: At the moment, we work on OnePage part time so we can pay the bills, which meant that we have to be conscious in managing our growth. We have had lots of wonderful requests from you our users and we want to ensure the time between working on an issue you have raised is done in the barest minimum time therefore we have undergone some behind the scene restructuring.

All we want to do is just to let you know we are listening and we really appreciate the support you are giving us. Please keep flooding the Uservoice with your awesome suggestions. We will soon (really soonJ) be bringing out a new version and what OnePage is about will be clear in 4 seconds, Deal?

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OnePage, semantic markup and accessibility

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:02:00 -0700

Joel asked me to write a blog post about why we want to do things properly for our next big release at OnePage. What I mean by "do things properly" is write our markup and code like we give a damn about our users, using clean, semantic markup and accessible methods so that we can really be a truly useful service for any and every possible user.

Why

At the moment, OnePage isn't perfect. During initial development of a web application, you're in a big hurry to get your ideas down and working. I didn't even turn up with my lofty ideas til around beta launch anyway. Whilst Joel and Dan had done a great job with a lot of the points I'm going to touch on in this post, we've decided to go for a fresh start for our next big release for a few reasons:

It'll make it much quicker to add new functions in the future (or rapid development, if you will.) The markup and code will be clean, we just need to slot in our extra functions, any extra styles if necessary, and we'll be good to go. Right now, we have a CSS style sheet that's got more repetition and class names than anything I've ever seen, any changes requires wading through CSS soup.
It'll make the application much faster. It's not bad now, but if we can trim our code into modular blocks, our CSS into a neat, non-repetitive sheet, and minimise on the images, let alone all the clever server and PHP stuff I don't understand, we're going to have a quick little app rather than a Facebookesque lurching monster.
It'll be easier to test and fix bugs. If we're not battling the monster every time we have an issue, pinpointing the layout glitch or typo will be simple.

Internet Explorer 6

We're going to support Internet Explorer 6, which makes us akin to the nerdy prefects of the web development world. Everybody wants to give up IE6. It's old and doesn't behave in a reliable or predictable way. It's a total pain to make designs and funky functions work in IE6. But loads of people use it. And we don't think it's their fault.

Why should these users suffer just because they don't know any better? There's many different reasons why you might use IE6, but I don't think "to spite web developers" is one of them, so why should we spite them in return? It's as simple as that!

Unobtrusive Javascript and Progressively-enhanced CSS

In a similar way, we'll be using unobtrusive Javascript and progress-enhancement methods for applying our CSS. We don't want to leave some browsers and users out in the cold, so we're making sure that our application works without javascript enabled, which is a real biggy for mobile access. We want to use fancy CSS, who wouldn't want the latest trendy rounded corners and transparency?! Instead of making something that wouldn't work, and as a result look ugly, in the older browsers, we'll only use those techniques in the browsers that can do it, and keep it clean and simple for the rest.

Clean, semantically-juicy HTML

We're also going to have mega-clean, handwritten, semantically-juicy HTML, from the beginning. It's a terrible shame that so many web applications out there has badly-written HTML. HTML is the foundation that screenreaders use to understand web sites and applications and if it's not clear and well-structured, somebody using a screenreader is going to leave the app pretty sharpish.

This is a really high percentage of users, one we definitely can't ignore, and not just those that are blind. Twice this year I've been lucky enough to experience a talk by Robin Christopherson of AbilityNet where he's shown what it's like to experience a site using a screenreader. It's pretty shocking stuff and if that doesn't convince you of the importance of clean HTML, nothing will.

Not only that, but mobile devices will have an easier time of using OnePage. If we've written awesome xHTML that doesn't rely on CSS or Javascript to make sense, then the simplest of the mobile browser should be able to have a stab at understanding the pages. And mobile is only going to get bigger!

Semantic HTML, using all the optimum and most-descriptive HTML elements when we're writing our markup, helps in many different ways. For a start, it helps other systems understand our web pages:

It helps users understand and read our content more easily if we use lists when we've got a list of items, quotes when we're quoting somebody else and headings to describe our content. You wouldn't put
tags around a link and expect a user to copy and paste it into their address bar, so why wouldn't you use the other appropriate HTML tags?
It helps Google understand what the focus of our page is about when we use appropriate and descriptive headings.
It makes writing CSS a hell of a lot easier. If everything is made of
tags, then we're going to have to give every
a unique and descriptive id name. If we have well-structured HTML with a variety of tags, we might even be able to do away with id and classes altogether, and wouldn't that make it easier to trace the cause of that CSS bug?!

We can even make our pages *even more* semantic using super-juicy awesomeness like Microformats. We already use microformats for vCards, so that another application (either desktop or web-based) can pick out our users' contact details easily from OnePage without any copy-and-pasting effort on a user's behalf. This will make OnePage tastier for Google, as it can use microformats to find even more relevant search results for its users, and other applications can use them to share the data from OnePage, potentially promoting a wider awareness of our app.

I hope that's an interesting little insight. I've tried to touch on everything without going into mad detail. I hope it hasn't left anyone screaming and running away or thinking I'm a masochistic individual. If anybody wants to discuss any of this stuff further Joel and me (Laura) are always up for talking about this kind of stuff. Any recommendations or warnings are also appreciated. We'd love to hear if anybody else has put this much effort into their web app!

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OnePage wins 3rd place for Social Networking at Webstock Awards 2009

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:04:00 -0700

We're delighted to let you all know that OnePage was awarded 3rd place for the Social Networking category of the Webstock awards in Bucharest on Friday!

It came as quite a surprise to us, and we feel we have plenty to do yet before we deserve to win awards such as this, but it does give us a little reward for the hard work we've put in so far and gives us great motivation to keep doing what we're doing.

I'd like to thank all of you for your support so far. It's you early adopters who are really going to shape OnePage to become a useful application. We still have a long way to go and be assured we have received your suggestions and are very thankful for them!

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Integrating Tarzan Amazon Web Services PHP Toolkit as a CodeIgniter Library

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 03:10:00 -0700

At OnePage, we are building our startup based on agility using lean startup techniques and customer development. Some of our influencers are Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Timothy Fitz.

Into this goal comes Amazon Web Services, which enables us to do without the need of a sysadmin, saving costs and improving speeding time to deployment. It also helps us with scalability and flexibility.

The great thing about right now is that there are so many great people out there coding things and making them open source. So when we chose to make use of Amazon Web Services, it did not take us long to find the fantastic Tarzan Amazon Web Services PHP Toolkit (which I think will soon be renamed to CloudFusion). This toolkit makes using the AWS API for S3 and SimpleDB amongst other services much easier.

In addition to making use of Amazon Web Services to leverage cloud computing, we also use CodeIgniter as our PHP Framework as choice. I won't get into the debate of why we do and why we chose it over other frameworks, as that is a topic for another post, but I'll go with their description: it "helps you write kick-ass PHP programs".

Today I came across a post in the Tarzan Google Group where someone was asking how the Tarzaon toolkit can be integrated as a CodeIgniter library. We've done this at OnePage so I thought I'd share. Credit for this goes to Dan, our lead developer :)

It's quite simple really:

First, put the contents of Tarzan in a directory titled "tarzan" in your Application Libraries directory in CodeIgniter.
Add the required constants from the config-sample.inc.php file in tarzan to the CodeIgniter config/constants.php file to set up your AWS Access Identifiers.
Write a CodeIgniter Library to utilise the Tarzan toolkit which you now have placed in the libraries directory.
Use Tarzan AWS Toolkit as you would normally.

Code sample for step 3 (File named "Aws.php" placed in application/libraries):

Code sample for Step 4:



 $this->load->library("aws");
 
 $sdb = new AmazonSDB();
 $del = $sdb->delete_attributes("your_domain", $itemName);
 $success = ($del->isOk());
 

I hope that helps someone!

If you find our posts useful check out our OnePage and keep up with us on Twitter and Facebook. As always, we'd love your comments!


	


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We have launched OnePage!
Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:10:33 -0700

	






Welcome to OnePage! Thank you very much for
your patience. We have been as excited as you in waiting for the launch. 

You may have noticed that the domain now reads
myOnePage.com. It was a tough choice choosing the name OnePage and getting the
appropriate domain address available. getOnePage.com was a good address but we
think  myOnePage.com is much better as it
reflects the personal nature of your OnePage.

OnePage grew from Joel’s laziness to update his
blog; he wanted to pull together all his activities on the web without having
to do anything extra. It has grown much more since then, and we plan to
revolutionize the way contacts are shared in the world.

We have gradually started rolling out the
invites to those that have signed up for the beta. If you have signed up and
eager to use OnePage, shoot us a tweet or an email, better still...call me +447552501471


We are also trying hard to ensure it works well
with internet explorer (phew!), but for now, we recommend you use Chrome, Firefox,
or Safari to get the best experience.

The success of OnePage is wholly dependent on
you the users as this is a private beta and we have loads of work to do. Your
feedback and suggestions would be very invaluable to us as we try to develop
what you want. Please inform us of any bugs you might come across.

So hurry now and get that username you
deserve before someone gets hold of it!


	


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The Countdown has begun!
Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:19:00 -0700

	We are as tired as you in waiting for OnePage to launch! Therefore we have now committed ourselves to countdown. No more “we are launching soon”. In less than 2 weeks, we would have remove most of the nasty bugs to make OnePage a pleasurable experience! I hope you like our new homepage.
 




Thanks for your patience and support !
 
Oo




	


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Let us reveal a little more about OnePage!
Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:23:42 -0700

	Hello friends!
We'd like to put out this short video to give you more of an idea of what OnePage will do for you. This is the first time we're revealing OnePage to everyone so check it out:

OnePage is the one place someone can go to in order to find out everything you're doing on the web :)

Thanks for the continued support from all of you!
Joel
	


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