Blog

There’s been a lot going on with Famiva.com. We’ve moved to a robust new infrastructure that will help us grow beyond our 330K user base. We’ve also made tons of enhancements. Here’s a summary of what’s new and exciting:

• Brand new site creation process:

  Our new site creation process is dead simple! We call it “Instant Gratification at Zero Risk”. We no longer require your real email address to try us out. Simply name your site, create a temporary login, and your site is ready for use. Our new landing page is much simpler too.
  

• New site tour:

  We have a brand new quick feature tour. Learn about the key features and capabilities of your free Famiva site with our clean and simple guided tour.
  

• New front page:

  The new and simplified front page focuses on the most relevant content. Get updates across your entire extended family right on the front page. You can see comments, reminders, new content, and more, at a glance. You can get email digests of the updates as well. There are links for quickly creating new content, such as uploading new photos or writing a new story. There’s also a “getting started” guide that helps you get the most out of your Famiva site.
  

• Enhanced photo browser:

  The photo explorer has also been restructured to focus on content. There’s a new scroller that lets you navigate to next and previous photo. Our smart “who’s in photo” helps you quickly tag people in the photo. We still have our beautiful full-screen and 3d photo slideshows, in case you haven’t tried it out. Also, we now support Media RSS format for photos.

• Stories, events, family tree and more:

  There are many other enhancements across the sites. Stories, events, calendar, family tree, etc. have all been improved, with more to come.
  

We hope you like what we’ve done with Famiva. Our team is growing and there is much more to come, including several of your requested features.

Thanks!
- Famiva Team

Dear users,

We hope you’re enjoying the new Famiva.com. We’ve added a new feature that will allow you to search for members from anywhere on the site. On the header, you’ll see a new search box. Start typing the name of the person to jump right to their profile.

We think this feature is particularly useful when you’re looking for someone’s contact information on a large family site. We hope you’ll find it useful as well.

- Famiva Team

Some of you may have experienced a delay in receiving mail from our new Famiva.com server. This was due to pending network changes. This problem should now be resolved. Let us know if you experience problems verifying your email address, using “forgot password”, or inviting relatives.

- Famiva Team

We are live with the new Famiva! All data and content has been migrated successfully. It’s time for you to enjoy it, and for us to get some sleep.

Just go to http://famiva.com as usual. We hope you like it. This was a major upgrade so it may have some rough edges. Let us know about any problems you encounter by leaving a comment here.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation.

- Famiva Team

The pre-upgrade tasks are going well. We have kept the live site up and running through the deployment window (2-6AM EST). It will remain up for the most part of the day, and will only be taken down during actual migration. The migration will only last a few minutes.

So enjoy your Famiva site as we setup the new one. Expect the switch over to occur later today.

- Famiva Team

The upgrade to the new Famiva also marks a change in legal ownership. The new site is owned by Famiva LLC, A Deleware, USA company. The team behind Famiva.com is exactly the same, with Zak Mandhro as CEO. This is just a legal change to better align the product ownership with our physical base.

Questions are welcome on the blog or as email to legal @ famiva.net.

We’re moving to a new infrastructure on Sunday, Nov 2nd. This move includes tons of updates to Famiva.com and new servers that will help us meet growing demand. To do that, we will need to shut down the current Famiva.com for a few hours on Sunday.

What to expect

Expect the site to be unavailable between 2AM to 6AM EST (that’s 7AM to 11AM UTC) on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008. This is a major upgrade, so things could be a little bumpy on Monday. All your data is secure and will be migrated without a hitch. Watch this blog post for updates.

On the upside, expect several nice enhancements to the site. Here’s a sneak peek at the new homepage:

If you have any questions or concerns, drop us a note here.

We are pleased to announce the release of slideshows. Now you can enjoy your family photos in beautiful full-screen slideshows. You can even view them in breathtaking 3D by installing a simple plugin.

Simply click on the “Slideshow” link under photos page to start the slideshow.

Slideshows are context aware, so you can view slideshows of specific albums, photos you’ve missed, by uploader, etc.

Enjoy!
- Famiva Team

If you’re having trouble signing into Famiva after upgrading to Firefox 3.0, it may be because your session information is not compatible with the new browser. Simply logout and log back in using the following URL:

http://famiva.com/login/logout

Let us know if this doesn’t resolve the issue.

- Famiva Team

You asked for it, we built it. You can now enter a middle name for any member. Thanks for taking the time to suggest this simple yet useful little feature.

- Famiva Team