After reviewing how you all are actually using the site as well as the feedback and suggestions we receive, we’ve added one new category and renamed another.

Home & Garden replaces “Home & Office” – there were actually very few office type items and most of these would be fine in a pure “home” category.  We’ve appended “Garden” since spring is coming and to emphasize that the category is for more than inside stuff.

Skills & Knowledge is new and reflects a lot of feedback we’ve received from lenders that wanted to lend more than just their stuff, so this category allows you to post your human capital to share with others.

Enjoy the new categories!

LendList.org is now on a shiny-new cloud hosting environment powered by Mosso (Enter referral code REF – JKLASSEN for $100 off your 2nd month of cloud hosting). This means near-limitless scalability and better fault tolerance. Translation: Even if something goes wrong or a ton of people visit the site everything will be fine.

If you notice any bugs that crept in during the move, let us know and we’ll get them fixed asap.

LendList now works with more regions worldwide.  Specifically, it now supports addresses and city names that contain accents or none ascii characters.  Welcome residents of Montréal, Québec!

Facebook today launched their developer toolset Facebook Platform for integrating applications into the site.  Watch for a LendList application that lets you share possessions amongst your facebook network of friends and groups.  All the benefits of LendList but with your existing Facebook Network.  Sign up for LendList and you’ll get an email when the integration option is complete.

Our hosting company upgraded us this morning to a newer, faster and more reliable server. However, they did so during the weekly LendList.org update, so the update was sent from both the old and new servers. I apologize if you received the update twice.

The weekly update went out Friday and Saturday, instead of just Friday. Sorry about the doubling up. This shouldn’t happen again.

The friend functionality I discussed in my previous post is now in place. Add a profile picture and import your contacts to see if they are members, then invite the ones that aren’t. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments or via the suggestion form.

We’ve had a number of requests related to adding and managing friends and will be adding some features to address this:

Importing Friends
We should soon have in place a page that will allow you to check your web-based email’s address book for existing members of the site and allow you to add these members to your friends list. It will also allow you to build a list of email addresses of non-members that you can then copy and paste into your email client to tell them about your list.

List Pictures
Some of the list names people have chosen are a little cryptic even for close friends to recognize since for privacy reasons people shouldn’t use their full names. As such we will soon allow people to also post a picture, so that their friends and group members can tell who belongs to what list name.

Stay tuned! We’re working hard to so you won’t have to.

On Saturday we sent out the weekly update email of all the new items, friends and group members in your network. There was an error in the script that sent it out that meant a considerable amount of duplication for some users. We noticed it immediately and re-sent a new email. Please ignore the first and read the second. We apologize for the two messages and the long, confusing first message. It should be pretty smooth from here on out

With some of the groups exceeding 500 items and many members wanting to sift through multiple groups and dozens of friends, we’ve had to make a number of improvements to the application.

Searching and browsing:
You can filter searches of all your groups and friends by category now. Further, if you leave the search field blank and just select a category, you can see a list of all the items in a category you have available to you across all your friends and groups.

Category Stacking:
Categories within groups can now be expanded and collapsed for easier browsing. The page load time is still a bit high for some of the bigger groups but we plan to address that by not loading the items for a collapsed category until that category is expanded. Stay tuned!