First I would like to thank everyone for making this such a great year for Pelotonics. We have been growing like gangbusters and have really enjoyed getting to know our user base more deeply. If you didn’t already notice, we have recently upgraded the look and feel of Pelotonics under the direction of our esteemed advisor, Gina Trapani.

All I can say is, “what a great move!”. We recieved numerous positive comments from you, our users regarding the change. The re-design was focused on making things easier to access and manipulate. Aside from making it look more modern, Daniel added AJAX capabilities to the numerous filters that exist throughout the application. If you want to just see Tasks on the calendar for instance, just click the box and it happens immediately. No clicking on another button to perform that task! I hope you enjoy the new streamlined nature of the application.

Now, with that having been said, we are studying out the possibility of including an enterprise wiki into Pelotonics. This wiki could be used as a standard intranet for a company or organization as well as tie in directly to Pelotonics. Imagine being able to add wiki pages to your projects. This capability would give you the ability to store information and enhance communications with your project members. We want your feedback.

Are you using a wiki today? Do you have your eye on a wiki in the near future? The integration that we are contemplating would provide you with a simple wiki as part of the standard subscription packages with Pelotonics. We would also offer an upgraded wiki option that would provide enterprise features like LDAP connectivity and many other connectors to databases within your organization.

Pelotonics is evolving into a tremendous tool. I was just up at Warner Brothers last week and I was truly amazed at how many projects they are managing on Pelotonics! We feel that migrating to a more enterprise option is something that we would like to explore. I am interested in your take! Let us know what you think…

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Just this week Google took their new to-do list application, Gmail Tasks, out of its experimental Labs area and made it available to all users. Gmail Tasks offers two key features: email and calendar integration (for Gmail and Google Calendar users). However, beyond that and hierarchical subtasks, it’s pretty sparse in the features department. In my review yesterday at Lifehacker, I said it was too simple for power users. Several readers in the comments and on Twitter disagreed with me, saying that Gmail Tasks’ simplicity was exactly what they liked about it.

After years of reviewing task managers (and even building one of my own), it’s clear to me that you can’t please everyone all the time, especially when it comes to task managers. For example, Pelotonics offers a to-do list feature that Basecamp does not (in the name of simplicity): due dates. Beyond that, we’ve been discussing how to make Pelotonics’ in-app to-do lists easier and more fun to use. Gmail Tasks’ slick interface and keyboard shortcuts is something we’d do well to study closely, as is their hierarchical task support. If Google makes a Gmail Tasks API available, integration with Pelotonics is a strong possibility.

What’s your make-or-break task manager feature? Tell us in the comments here or in our community forum.

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In June, Prem Sundaram of TSG Consulting came up with a simple (we love that!) yet very helpful feature related to our Evernote integration. As many of you know, Evernote is a great tool for taking web clippings. These web pages display rather nicely in Evernote, but the API does not give us the ability to duplicate the display correctly on the Pelotonics side.

As a result, if you take a clip of a web page in Evernote and then transfer it over to Pelotonics, we will take the text from the clipping and process it indepent of the images. The images are all attached to the element within Pelotonics that you are creating. ie. Task, message, etc.

If you clip a page that includes 50 images for instance, you will create a message within Pelotonics that includes 50 attachments! That’s not a good thing and adds to clutter and distraction within Pelotonics.

Until we can get more API functionality that will help us with this issue, we are now giving you the ability to include or not include the images from webpages. This was a recommenation that Prem made to us in June. It is now implemented and ready for you! Try it out and let us know what you think.

Thanks Prem for such a great suggestion. Simple, yet solves a big problem.

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According to the Sitelinks help page,

“At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.”

I thought that answer was ridiculous; and since I’m a programmer by trade, I realized if I reverse engineer top tiered websites that have sitelinks, I’ll find a pattern and do the same for Pelotonics. This is what I found…

THE FIRST OR SECOND THING ON YOUR WEBSITE, HAVE A <UL><LI> LIST OF THE TOP LEVEL LINKS FOR YOUR WEBSITE.

That’s what I did, and within 2 weeks, we had sitelinks! Take that Google for not hiring me 5 years ago! haha, just playing…

I think Google should at least give webmasters a best practices guide so the Google Bot can read your site better.

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In the 3rd Quarter of the year, we’re going to be focused on the usability and reliability of Pelotonics. Right now Pelotonics is a good application, we are going to turn it into a GREAT application. Once you use Pelotonics, you’ll realize that it’s a necessary tool in your day-to-day life when managing your business or organization. Though, we want you to be excited every time you log into Pelotonics! We’ve started to introduce jQuery into the application, we’re going to be making things faster (less page refreshes with AJAX calls), removing ALL of the bugs, and we’re going to to be giving the application a “face lift”! Here’s a rough mock-up…







Remember, we love our customers!!! So pipe-in on the forums, watch PeloTV and interact with us LIVE, or email us at support@pelotonics.com.

Happy 4th of July this weekend!

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Many of our users tell us they love the Task Report! If you don’t know what the Task Report is, it’s a report under the Reports Tab in the Pelotonics System that allows you to see all of your Tasks (or any other user that you would have access to within one of your Projects) across all of your Projects.

So what’s the big deal?

Well if you add Due Dates to your Tasks, there’s a quick filter on top of the report where you can filter what’s late, what’s due today, or what’s due within the next five days. It’s the ultimate check list!

Also, if you’re a manager trying to figure out how much one of your employees has on their plate (either late or this week), just change the filter over to them and find out!

Watch the video below to find out about a quick little tool to help you get to the Task Report even Faster! Just enter “/createreports.aspx?login=reports” to the end of your login URL.

Example: if your URL is “http://designfirm.pelowork.com” just change your bookmark to, “http://designfirm.pelowork.com/createreports.aspx?login=reports” it’s that easy!

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In the beginning of May, we deployed the newly designed index page for pelotonics.com.

During the redesign process, we decided that we need a better tool to pop-up images to their full size, as well as be able to pop-up video’s for the customer interviews and an overview video from Troy about Pelotonics and our philosophy on group productivity. We found a JQuery version of FancyZoom where you can embed any HTML within the pop-up. Everything was working great! Until we decided to rewrite all of the HTML on our website to be XHTML.

Watch a Screencast of me finding a bug on the FancyZoom webpage (in IE) a code demo on how to fix it.

When you copy an embed code from YouTube or Vimeo, there’s an HTML tag in there “embed”. Here’s the base structure:


<object width="x" height="y">
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="movie" value="pathToMovie" />
<embed src="pathToMovie" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="x" height="y"></embed>
</object>


Though after doing some research (and trying to validate your website on W3C), you’ll realize that the “embed” tag isn’t recognized in XHTML. The way around this is to put a “data” attribute in the “object” tag, like this:


<object data="pathToMovie" width="x" height="y" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="movie" value="pathToMovie" />
</object>


So, you test your movie in IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc., you run it through the W3C validation service, it works! Good job!!!

Now comes the fun part… you want to embed your movie in the FancyZoom pop-up. If you copy in your new XHTML code into the DIV tag for the FancyZoom pop-up, it should work in every browser BUT Internet Explorer. This is where I ran into a major road block. I searched Google, read the FancyZoom forums, and I couldn’t find anything! So I figured I would just roll up the sleeves and figure it out myself. Here’s what I found…

Internet Explorer doesn’t play well with the “data” attribute in the “object” tag. Though if you change “data” to “codebase” it works like a charm! The only problem now is your Flash object will only play in Internet Explorer. So you have to detect which browser the client is using to determine which object code to use. If it’s Internet Explorer, use the “codebase” attribute in the “object” tag. If it’s anything else, use the “data” attribute in the “object” tag.

Using this technique, you’ll be able to embed Flash objects into a FancyZoom pop-up.

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Last night I was up late adding in some cool Javascript accordion effects in Pelotonics on all of the expandable/collapsible menu bars throughout the application. And around 1am it hit me, I had the Gary Vaynerchuk DNA epiphany. I’ve always loved what I “do” at Pelotonics, though I realized I haven’t left my desk all day and it didn’t even matter, I was 100% happy that I’ve been working all day and making my product better for the users it helps everyday.

Before Pelotonics, I was a database specialist at one of the leading online colleges in the world, Rio Salado College. While in some cases it was a just another mindless job working for someone else, I really loved when I connected to a student and helped make their day better. And that love for a connection in helping someone still holds true at Pelotonics. I know the people that use Pelotonics and follow our philosophy on Group Productivity and Online Project Management are truly thankful for the tool that we’ve provided them.

“While everyone thinks I’m crazy for working 80-100 hours a week. I think they’re crazy sitting around watching mindless TV. I’m creating the future, and NOTHING will stop me.”

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I was recently having a discussion with one of our users Aaron West about the File Storage Configuation option in Pelotonics. If you’re on Plan 1 or higher in Pelotonics, you can configure your own FTP server to store your files rather than letting us store them. Many of our customers like this feature because they’re in control of their own files. In some cases, they also have to comply with certain standards so they have to store “their files” on “their servers”. If you choose to host your own files you’ll notice that we’ve renamed them to weird names like:

“18369ffd-ea5c-4a25-99e7-065bcb971471.doc”

The name of the file is a GUID. We renamed the uploaded file to eliminate the chance of a file name collision between all of our user’s files (there is a 1 in 2¹²⁸ chance of collision). Though, when someone is logged into Pelotonics and they click on one of the files, it will download as the original file name because in the Pelotonics Database, we’ve mapped the physical file name to the original file name.

Imagine this… I upload a file “daniel.jpg” then one week later someone unknowingly uploads a different file, but with the same name “daniel.jpg”. If you were to do this in a folder on your computer, it would ask you if you want to overwrite the original file. Though that doesn’t make sense in Pelotonics, so we needed to make sure that people could upload the same file name more than once. In my discussion with Aaron, he asks, “Why not just rename the file from daniel.jpg to daniel-1.jpg when there’s a name collision?” He makes a good point for the ease of readability of the file names if you have the files on your own server and you’re looking at them through an FTP client. Though on top of the complication of figuring out if there’s a file already named “daniel.jpg” in the database (or even “daniel-1.jpg”), what if someone truly wanted to save a file, “daniel-1.jpg” would we rename it to “daniel-1-1.jpg”? To me, it seems like the likelihood of a file name collision would be much higher then just using the GUID.

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Our program provides for generous commissions for our partners. Our partners will earn 50% of the first month’s payment plus 15% of the ongoing monthly payments of their referred Peltonics users! We thought it was important to offer the most attractive package on the market to our partners from the beginning.

We are also offering second tier commissions of 3% of each monthly payment.

Check out the program at http://affiliate.pelotonics.com for complete information and get signed up! We look forward to working with you.

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