March 29, 2005

Welcome to the EVDB beta preview!

Welcome to EVDB, the Events and Venues Database. I'm Brian Dear, founder and CEO of EVDB, Inc., and on behalf of the whole EVDB team, welcome, and thank you for your interest in our company and our service.

We're opening the website and this blog early -- "early" to us, that is. "Finally" to some, no doubt. :-)

Things to Keep in Mind
The EVDB service is launching in a very early beta stage. Lots of stuff doesn't work yet. We've tried to hide/disable all the inoperable stuff until it works. Performance on some features may be slower than expected. You will find bugs. You will find holes. You will find stuff that's confusing. You'll find things that aren't very well documented. You might not find very many events on the first day (or the second).

A beta test, particularly an early one, is a thrill for some users, and not such a thrill for others. If you enjoy trying out freshly-baked code, and want to help us make this stuff work, reporting bugs, identifying problems or inconsistencies on the site, suggesting ways to make it better, then this beta test is for you. If you are looking for something more complete and polished, I suggest you try back in a month. Or two. Or three . . .

What to Do If You Suspect You've Found a Bug
If something seems wrong, broken, not responding, etc., please report the bug on the Feedback Form. Thanks!

Some minor items.

one - how do you add an image? I didn't see any place to do it.

two - how do (and can) you edit an event once posted? I see you can edit links, but don't see how you can edit the event itself

three - while posting the event (using IE latest patches on XP service pack 2) I got a garbled screen when adding a venue - text overlayed on itself, was able to hit the "add venue" button and move on - but may have missed some options, and it was not clear how to search for a venue (what I think was on the top of the garbled text)

Looks good so far however!

Shannon

marf?

I'll chime in with some minor issues I've noticed as well:

1. Editing an event would be nice. Not sure if you limit this to the original poster or not. In Wiki style, you might just open it up to all members.

2. Do a search for Iron And Wine. Both events are identical, and posted by myself. It'd be nice, to cut down on clutter, to somehow be able to flag duplicate events, and then perhaps delete them upon reaching a certain amount of flags. Also, allow people to indicate the other identical event so that you can replace the removed event in people's calandars who would have previously added the to-be-deleted event.

3. Clicking on a user name returns an error page indicating that /user is not available.

4. If an event has links, and you click to the permalink, the links do not appear.

5. You need to indicate the trackback URL so people can use that when writing blog entries.

All in all though, this looks very exciting. Congratulations on getting it out the door, and I look forward to seeing improvements as time passes. I've done my part to spread the word, by posting to my weblog at backdrifter.com.

OMG is this lame. THIS is what you guys have been working on all this time? This is the return on hype?

Another item - I posted a multi-day event, however I can't see to see how to see the full time - all I see is the start date.

And it shows the start time as 12:00am which is not actually accurate.

Rather, I would prefer to be able to show the times over a period of days - or at least a start time and an end time, which might happen to spread over multiple days.

(and going forward it might be nice to be able to list sub-events of a main event, perhaps you can do this as a calendar, but for example it would be great as an event organizer to be able to publish the schedule of the event - but also the full conference as a single entity.

Just some more thoughts,

Good luck,

Shannon

hi,
looks very good, even it*s beta ;-) I*m very looking forward for your improvements :-)
Daniel

Brian,

So far it looks good. You may want some more hand holding along the right side column. I would put an example even for each are. It would tell the person what you are looking for in the way of info. That way the persons wonâ™t type that dates and time in the description.

âœAlways design a product or a set of instructions like a Marine will use itâ
-Troy Christopher

Did you guys receive $2.5MM in venture financing?
I dont see any press release, but I read this on another site. Could you confirm?