It has been a long while since my last post and update. The truth is that we haven’t really changed much with the site but we have been busy promoting the site hard and trying to get the rendeznew name and service out there. It has been successful with a most recent posting on makeuseof.com:

Rendeznew: Find A Midpoint Between Two Addresses

Thanks to everyone for spreading the word about the site and all the kind praise and suggestions. Check back soon for more rendeznew features as they come up.

It has been a while since I have blogged lately (though I am keeping up with tweeting) about what is going on with rendeznew. Right now, we are trying to push the site. Get the rendeznew name out there and get people using our service for all those opportunities that they need to meet in the middle. On that note, there isn’t much to update about on the technical side, as I have been focusing all my time on making tshirts, tweeting, and just getting the word out there about rendeznew.

We are asking everyone out there that uses rendeznew to tell all your friends, family, and coworkers about our service (ok, maybe not all, but how about a couple… maybe just tweet about it or send an email to a few friends). Spread the word! Things will only get bigger and better as more people use the service. There are big plans on the technical side, but right now we need to get people using the site. We feel we provide an awesome service to you and want your feedback about how we can improve or what we are doing that you can’t live without. Now please go out there and spread the word, and like I said look for a post in the future about how you can win a free rendeznew tshirt!

Last night (March 1st) I was fortunate enough to use the help of a friend of mine to fix up the UI for rendeznew and get the new release out there. The new interface and functionality should prove useful for all sorts of meetings.

• “Anything” Search - There were a large number of requests for this aspect of the site. We used to restrict users to HAVE to enter a search string. Now the default value is “anything” which will just try to find anything between the points entered. Something nice if you are just looking to meet somewhere (say with craigslist) quickly and easily.
• Category Search - This idea came about from a few people using Match.com that said they weren’t sure of the place they wanted to meet in the middle and just had a couple types of restaurants in mind. What came from this was the tabs you see across the top and the categories that arose from it. With a few simple clicks, you should be able to find a lot of choices (of different types of places too) with one search.

As always, we have other features in the works, one of which is to “save” your results to be able to have an eat, drink and play choice all saved into one view to then send off to your friends that use rendeznew also. As always keep checking back to the site, this blog, and our twitter account for updates.

In summary, the “new” rendeznew is up and running. Let us know via email, comment, or twitter if there are any bugs or improvements you would like to see and I will do my best to get things out as quickly as possible. Thanks for letting us help you meet in the middle and we really hope our service can help you now or sometime in the future.

I am sorry to inform all our fans/readers that the new version of rendeznew is still delayed. Life and other things have “gotten in the way” the past few weeks and it has been tough to carve away some time to really get things working. Hopefully, this weekend I get some time to really hack things together and get the User Interface up and running well. All of the backend processing is done and checked out, I am just having some issues with the User Interface, which I have requested the help from a few of my extremely smart friends. You never know if I have a break through in the next day or so, maybe I will make my original estimate of the end of the month. It doesn’t seem fair that February has only 28 days… if only it were a leap year.

Stay tuned for when the release happens, and I plan to start a few incentives to use the site coming up in the near future…

I mentioned in my last post that we would be rolling out some new features (hopefully by tomorrow), but to be honest, we aren’t quite there yet. Some things have taken longer than expected, for those that are following us on twitter you may have seen that coming.

Right now we are testing the new features and enhancements internally and hope to have things up and running by the end of the month. (We want to get the bugs out before you see them). Thanks for all the suggestions for those who gave them and keep on using rendeznew to meet in the middle.

Also, I am going take this chance to say - Happy Valentine’s Day - to everyone out there (a day early). Hopefully you are using the site to meet in the middle for those dates, and if you aren’t already, give it a shot.

Now that February has officially begun there were a couple events this last weekend that made it difficult to get things going with development. The UFC fights on Saturday and Superbowl XLIII was the other. Both were events that took me away from development (due to preparation for watching and watching the events) of the new features I wrote about in my last post. A couple of those things are search by category and the “no search” option as I call it sometimes.

The User Interface for rendeznew is a bit crowded at times already and with adding these new features I have been exploring different ways to maximize space for you, the users. I have ventured down the path of making a tabbed interface for input using MooTools, a compact javascript framework. Hopefully, it will add some appealing new looks and effects to rendeznew that will wow some of you.

Back to the main point of this post. With those two events this weekend I was unable to get some serious development done on those two things. Hopefully, with the upcoming weeks ahead I can make things happen. The user interface seems to be in place, now it is just getting the functionality on the back end working… stay tuned for better ways to meet in the middle, and please let us know if you can think of a better way to maximize the user interface for users.

This post is a follow up to one of our tweets from a week or so ago. What are you using rendeznew for? Send us an email or post a comment to let us know. We have so many thoughts and visions about how rendeznew can be used to meet in the middle (we mention them on the about us page, but maybe there are other uses that we never thought of that we can incorporate into the site. A few we have had in the past couple weeks which we plan to look into incorporating into meeting in the middle service are:

• Not needing to enter a search term and just looking for the top yelp ranked places near the midpoint.
• Search based on categories to be able to aggregate multiple search sets into one set (for example burgers or italian)
• Integrate free wifi spots into the search results for those looking to meet in the middle to get work done and not just have a meal.

Please don’t hesitate to comment or email us about anything that you think will help you rendeznew and meet in the middle for dates, work meetings, family gatherings, or something else that we never thought about (please let us know what it is).

This past week, I purchased myself a second hand macbook. It is not the best one around, nor is it in the best condition, but it has the requirements necessary to start on one of the next steps into 2009 for rendeznew. Really, what that means is the start of development on an iPhone application. Stay tuned as I learn the Apple iPhone SDK and how we at rendeznew can make meeting in the middle that much easier while on the go.

We have successfully transferred rendeznew to a new hosting provider. Before today, our site was on webhostingpad and have since moved to dreamhost. From what we have read on the web, dreamhost is one of the best providers around and they will suit our needs until we grow larger (hint, hint, tell your friends about rendeznew). It just shows that with somethings you get what you pay for and web hosting is definitely one of them. The process did take us a few days to get everything all linked up correctly, but everything seems to be up and running great. If there are any intermittent errors, please bear with us, and send us an email if you can.

Let us take this time to also apologize to any users that may have been using our site during the downtime we had while on webhostingpad. We were out of service for a couple days while they had issues, which was our reason for switching providers. Hopefully, the downtime doesn’t deter you from using or spreading the word about out site.

With the successful transfer out of the way, we at rendeznew can start working towards improving our site in so many ways (thanks for all the suggestions), in addition to always helping you meet in the middle.