The Krop Blog has moved

Our blog has moved to it’s permanent home: Krop.com/blog
(please update your bookmarks)

Now that we’re on the topic of a new Krop.com….

Yes! Krop.com is getting a big big upgrade this week.  We’ll introduce new features when it’s time, but for now what’s important is the Krop job board and Creative Database will now be under one roof.

What this means to you is that if you are currently a Pro account holder, you can expect the floodgates to open up on updates to your service. To share a few of our immediate priorities:

• New themes
• Video embedding
• Optional Blog / RSS importer
• Private / password protected sets
• Performance improvements & Content Delivery Network integration (things will just get faster)
• And, of course we’ve kept a few suprises to ourselves…

If you have any features that you would like to see on this list.  Perhaps you’re a Pro account holder and would love to see us add ____________ to the list, please let us know. or, perhaps your a basic account holder and if we added a _________ feature to the Pro account, it would convince you to upgrade, we’d love to hear it.

A quick note on logging in.

If you have a Creative Database account, until we launch the new Krop site (FEB 26th, this week) you must login to your account here.  The ‘login’ page at www.krop.com is temporarily only for Krop.com’s job posting customers.

Pushing the launch of the Creative Database ahead of the the new Krop website had the unfortunate consequence of splitting Krop.com into two sites - New, and Old. Technically, everything is working just fine during this transition, however, some of you have discovered that we now have separate login screens, creating some login confusion.

Expect this issue to be resolved in the next 48 hours.  thanks for your patience.

Keeps getting better.

As we expected (and you can probably relate with) the two weeks immediately following releasing a new web application like the CDB are filled with a few surprises.  Bug fixes, IE problems, questions that need answers, IE problems, etc..   We’d hoped to be showing off a few cool new features by now, but that wasn’t in the cards.

The good news is that the roar of the bug report hotline has turned to a whisper, and we can now shift focus back to pushing new features, and launching Krop 2 - code name “Washington” (ok, i just made that up - although if you ever do call us and ask to discuss “the Washington project” we’ll probably take you very seriously regardless).

Thousands of you have created profiles, and we can’t believe the level of talent that is emerging.  We are truly humbled that so many of you have allowed our application to host your work.

Here are a few favorites that we couldn’t wait to share:

From left to right:

Buff Monster: Fine Art, Los Angeles
Evan Lane: Photographer, Los Angeles
Ruth Ishbel Munro: Illustrator, Brighton, UK

Screencast!

We’ve thrown together a quick introduction to the new app.  Even with screenshots and sample accounts, some of our favorite featres took too much digging to find, so we thought we’d make our own informercial demo. Enjoy!

The Creative Database is alive - Here we go!

Allow me to introduce the Krop Creative Database! We’re excited to be able to open the application up to the public today.

We are very proud to be launching our portfolio hosting platform that is completely advertisement free! Before we get into details - you’ll notice we’ve split things into two accounts - The Basic, and the Pro:

The Basic Account: Free, with no ads - but a 10 image limit and lacks some cool features.  If your permanent portfolio is hosted elsewhere, it’s a great way to gain exposure within the creative database with a resume and a snapshot of some of your work.

The Creative Pro Account: $9.99 /mo (or $99/yr) Unrestricted image uploads, style switching, domain mapping, and a few more goodies.  This account is the permanent home of your new portfolio.

We’re excited to see what everyone thinks, so please let us know.  We’ll be back here with details on completed features as we roll them out over the next few days.

Thanks again for everyone that helped us beta test!

Happy New Year! - quick updates

First, I want to thank everyone that’s been trying the Beta!  The response was a bit overwhelming, and within an hour or so we had to shut down the invites for fear of breaking the staging server.

You’ll notice that many bugs effecting the public displays have been worked out, along with the horizontal scrolling, click-for-next, etc.

Soon to come: We are currently swapping graphic libraries for better image handling (uploading & cropping).  And a bunch of quirky UI things have been brought to our attention that we’ll be addressing in our next update as well.

Note: the sIFR (big flash text) was broken yesterday during an update, sorry if your profile looked weird for a few hours…

But that’s why we call it Beta - cause when you call things beta, nothing really needs to work… right? … like my beta six-pack-abs… or Jason’s beta new years resolution to drink less.

Welcome early Beta testers

A very short list of you have been invited to give us your thoughts on our new application - the Creative Database.  Bug reports are welcomed, but what were more interested in your general impressions of application itself.  Design, workflow, UI, etc.  We can’t thank you enough for your time, and your patience while we prepare for a more official beta release.

What to expect:

We’re calling it a Beta, which is cheesy enough, but in reality, as I write this, you are looking at what would more accurately be described as Alpha software.  We have a big list of bugs and known issues - Here are a few biggies:

• Performance, we have some scripts running to catch bugs, which are slowing all things down considerably.

• Documentation is currently non-existant.

• Internet Explorer currently doesn’t work, but it is at the top of our list of things to address.

I hope I didn’t just scare anyone away, we’re still very happy with where we’re at.  Most core features are complete, and we look forward to some feedback while we continue to get things ready for release!

Thanks Again!
QBN