The Gift Hat Blog

I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! It’s been another great year here at the Gift Hat thanks to all of you. I hope you all get exactly what you asked for this year. If not, there is always next year

See you next year!

Filed by Tom at 12:49 pm under General
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As you may have noticed, over the last week or so the GiftHat.com has been occasionally slow or non-responsive. This is due to a hardware issue with our web host which is outside of our control.

The good news is they have identified this issue and are taking steps to correct it. They are scheduled to roll out some new hardware for our server next Friday, December 14th. I will update this post with more details as they become available.

I apologize for the slowness and thank you for your patience.

Thanks,
Tom

UPDATE: The site has been much more responsive since I posted about this issue thanks to some configuration changes our hosting provider has been making as needed. In addition, we are still scheduled for a hardware upgrade which should totally get rid of any slowdowns. The upgrade is scheduled for this Saturday December 15th at 3am Eastern Standard Time and may result in up to two hours of down time. During this time this blog and the GiftHat.com will not be available.

UPDATE 2: The hardware upgrade was pushed back a day so they will be performing it on Sunday December 16th at 3am EST. I will post another update when it is complete.

UPDATE 3: Sorry for the delay in updating you but the hardware upgrade is complete.

Filed by Tom at 5:08 pm under News and Updates
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A shiny new version of the Gift Hat was just released which includes:

Keep It A Surprise

By popular request, you may now keep which gifts are reserved for you a surprise. Simply visit Your Account Settings and select the Keep It A Surprise checkbox to enable it:

Your reservations will then be hidden to you like so:

Your guests and friends will still be able to see your reservations if they are logged in.

Reservations Enhancements

The Manage Reservations section has received a make-over. You can access it under the Things You Can Do section of your wish list:

This section now includes the images and description of each gift reservation. You can view both the incoming reservations for your wish list and the items you have reserved for others.

Images in RSS feeds

The RSS feeds for Popular, Recent and Your Wishlist all now contain the image for the items.

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Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions.

Happy Wishing!
Tom

Filed by Tom at 12:26 am under Releases
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I will be attempting the migration to the new server shortly. It took a little longer than expected to make the migration due to some minor configuration issues on the new environment. I believe these have been resolved so I don’t anticipate any further issues. I will post an update to this entry when the migration is complete.

UPDATE
The migration is complete! Please let me know if you run into any issues via this post or this contact form.

Filed by Tom at 10:09 pm under News and Updates
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It’s been a little while since we’ve had some Gift Hat updates.

As we approach the gift-giving season, I will be rolling out a series of site improvements. The first release will include a new “Keep It A Surprise” feature that will allow you to optionally keep which gifts are reserved hidden from you. I will post a full write-up with the release.

In addition, we are moving the site to a newer and faster server to allow us more room to grow. This should happen sometime next week if all goes well. I will post a quick message to this blog on the progress before and after the migration. There should be minimal downtime and nothing to do on your end.

- Tom

Filed by Tom at 7:06 pm under News and Updates
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This is the first in a series of site updates based on user feedback. Thanks to all of you who have contributed suggestions and feedback. If your suggestion did not make it into this release, stay tuned because it should follow in a future update. And now for the details:

Publish Enhancements

The publish your wishlist widget received a makeover:

• You can now choose a sort order for the published gifts. This includes a new sort of Random so you can randomly display gifts from your wishlist.
• You can also optionally choose to include the: Description, Rating, Price and Image for each of your gifts.
• For the advanced user, I also modified the html format to include CSS classes to make it easier for you to add your own styling. The easiest way to see them is to just view the source of the preview page in the publish your wishlist section but here is a shortlist of the classes used: .ghWishlist, .ghGift, .ghPrice, .ghDesc, .ghImage, .ghRating.

  Also, by default the html sent down in the widget includes some basic CSS formatting. If you want to disable that altogether simply add: css=0 to the publish url.

Thanks to Kevin and Kevin (two different people) for the suggestions.

Page Links

The page links throughout the site also received a makeover:

The links are much easier to click on now and the Next and Previous buttons should make it easier to navigate from page to page. Thanks to Stanley and Chad for the suggestion.

Gifts Per Page

You can now display more gifts per page on your wishlist. Just choose from the Per Page drop down from your wishlist and that setting will be remembered for any wishlist you view on the site:

Thanks to Max for this suggestion.

RSS feeds

The price is now included in the RSS feeds for recent, popular and your wishlist. Thanks to Adrienne for the suggestion.

Filed by Tom at 9:07 am under Releases
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The Gift Hat had an incredible amount of activity this past holiday season.

A few stats:

1. There are now over 15000 gifts stored in Gift Hat wishlists
2. There have been over 20000 gifts added since the site was started
3. There are now almost 1000 Gift Hat members

Thanks for making the Gift Hat a big success last year.

As a small way to say thanks, the next release of the Gift Hat will be 100% inspired by member feedback. We have received a lot of great suggestions and will try to implement as many as possible. I will post a more detailed list with the release which should go out by the end of January or beginning of February.

Filed by Tom at 9:38 am under News and Updates
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I just rolled in a small update related to tag case.

Previously, the first person to add a tag would set the case for everyone. So, if someone added a gift and labeled it with the tag ‘DVD‘ and you tried to add the tag ‘dvd‘, your tag would get converted to ‘DVD‘.

You can now store any tag case to your heart’s content. Thanks to Adrienne and Jason for pointing this out.

Filed by Tom at 9:24 am under News and Updates
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Sometime yesterday the 10000th gift was added to the Gift Hat. That is an impressive number of gifts. Keep them coming.

Since the holidays are almost upon us, we are going to hold off on making any more site updates except to fix an occasional issue. I will post an updated list of new features we are working on after the first of the year.

I hope you each receive exactly what you want this year. Happy Holidays!

Filed by Tom at 10:47 am under News and Updates
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Searching is back online with a shiny new searching implementation.

The new searching technique is slightly different than the old one. Here are a few highlights of some of the differences:

1. Search words must be at least 4 characters long. So, if you search for wii you will not get any results.
2. You can surround your searches with double quotes (”) to group words. So, to search for that wii above you could try searching for “Nintendo Wii”.
3. Wildcard searches are supported by adding a * in your query. So if you want to find Calvin and Hobbes but are feeling lazy you could search for calv*.

Happy searching!

Filed by Tom at 8:11 am under News and Updates
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