We realise that a lot of the hosts or hostee listings are probably out of date, so we’ve been thinking long and hard about clearing Pick-Me/Hostee.net over the past few months.

We thought we could e-mail all users and get them to reply to keep their listing on the website, but this would mean a lot of administration work for us to flag accounts as active, a feature which we don’t have.

Unfortunately, we’ve come up with  the best solution to our troubles, why unfortunately? this is because we have decided to delete EVERYONE from the hosts/hostee databases, to effectively start over from scratch.

We know that this might be of inconvenience to our newer users who has just signed up with Pick-Me, but in order to refresh the database to clean out the inactive users, this is the only solution that will work the most effectively.

When will we be purging the database, is unknown as yet, however all registered users will be informed of our ideal date before we purge the database so that they have time to copy any information from their listing if they require.  We’ll also be informing all users once the database has been purged  that they are welcome to re-signup if they wish to.

We do apologise for making this decision, but as part of keeping our listings up-to-date this is something that we may think of doing on a yearly basis, however, having said that, we are working on a solution to whereby users can delete their listings manually.

More details will be available in the coming days.

YOU CAN DISCUSS THIS ANNOUNCEMENT AT OUR FORUMS

ttp://mb.pick-me.net/showthread.php?t=195

If you are an avid designer and have some old website layouts that are surplus to requirements, or if you have some free time on your hands and would like to donate a few layouts, we’d much appreciate it!

We’re looking for any sort of layouts, ranging from iframes, div layouts, table layouts to wordpress themes or any other blogging/CMS platform you can think of.

In return to anyone donating layouts to the new Pick-Me Layouts section, we will add your name and website to a list of contributors which will shortly be added to the Pick-Me layouts section once everything is up and running.

Remember, that this is also a chance for you to advertise your work and your website within your layouts, as there is the potential that your layout could be chosen to be downloaded by anyone worldwide!

For further details, please visit  www.pick-me.net/layouts

If you’d like to contact us directly about this, or anything else you’d like to mention to us, you can contact us by going to  www.pick-me.net/contact.php

We look forward to seeing your layouts!

We were thinking of deleting both HOSTS and HOSTEE listings from the database and allow you to sign up again if you are still either looking for hosting or offering hosting, as we think that most of our listings on Pick-Me are outdated and irrelevant.

Because deleting everything from the database has a HUGE impact on our website, we wanted to see what you think we should do.

We’ve thought of a fewoptions we could take:

To delete all listing HOSTS and HOSTEES
To delete HOSTS listings
to delete HOSTEE listings
Mass email all HOSTS and HOSTEES listed on the database asking if they want to stay listed. Any who has not replied within a certain timeframe will be deleted and notified of this.
You can have your say in our online poll at http://pick-me.net/poll/
Hurry though, the online poll closes at 00:00 on January 10 2010 !

As you can see from the picture to the left of this email, we’re having a well deserved cup of tea, as we’ve just uploaded the new design version of Pick-Me.net!!

We could have cracked open a nice bottle of bubbily, but someone forgot to buy some from the store, so we’ve settled for a nice cup of tea (and a few biscuits – not pictured!!)

The new design of Pick-Me includes some cosmetic fixes, and we’ve also re-worked some coding, for example, the hostee listings have been reworked to include some coding that previously wasn’t included on the site. The Hosts listings have also been recoded too.

If you have not already been to visit Pick-Me since we uploaded the new design today (Sunday 20 September) then we thoroughly suggest that you head on over to Pick-Me today to see what you’re missing out on!! www.pick-me.net

The Future of Pick-Me!

The current Pick-Me site (the newly designed one) we are calling internally as “PM v2.0″. We’re already planning the release of “PM v3.0″ which will be entirely recoded and additional features adding. Some of the features in the pipeline are:

• improved listing criterias
• ability to search certain criterias from hosts/hostee listings
• ability to message host/hostee via the website
• ability to easily remove listings
• integrated login with the forums and listing edits
• and much more ideas in the pipeline

The features above are all planned, and we’ll be working hard over the next coming months to make ‘PM v3.0″ the bestest Pick-Me version for miles around.

If you have any suggestions that you’d live to see in version 3.0 of Pick-Me, please let us know either by contacting us, or leaving a thread on the message boards in the Bright-Sparks forum.

Message Boards

The Message boards are still feeling a bit lonely, If you want to meet up with other users of Pick-Me then head over to the boards now! mb.pick-me.net The boards are currently feeling unloved and all alone, so please do come along, signup and give us some loving!

Pick-Me! Exchange

The exchange allows you to generate hits to your website from our exchange members sites, so it’s a bonus of Pick-Me that we help you to generate hits to your website, ALL FOR FREE!! Head on over to pick-me.net/exchange to sign up and get started.

Pick-Me! Plugboard

The Pick-Me! plugboards are overly popular with people returning to re-plug their sites. Head along to the Plugboards to plug your site for FREE!

pick-me.net/plugboard

Pick-Me! on Facebook!

Pick-Me! is now officially on facebook, please do add us to your profile, Click below to go directly to the facebook fan page

www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52615691567

Now Tweeting on Twitter

As well as joining in the Facebook wagon, Pick-Me! has also joined the Twitter network, where we hope to be issuing site updates to our followers, so please follow pickmeNET on twitter.

www.twitter.com/pickmeNET

You can also see all our latest twitter updates on our newly designed webiste too!

That’s all we wanted to mention to you this time, hopefully we’ll see you on Pick-Me! soon, If not, we’ll cry!!

Kind Regards,

The Pick-Me! Team ]]> http://pick-me.net/blog/2009/09/20/31/feed/ 0 http://pick-me.net/blog/2009/07/31/pick-me-survey-ends/ http://pick-me.net/blog/2009/07/31/pick-me-survey-ends/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:12:16 +0000 Chris http://pick-me.net/blog/?p=28 Today marks the end of our month long survey to get your views on our website and what you are happy with, but also where we can improve.

Some of the suggestions and comments so far has certainly been an eye opener and we will be reviewing the results during the next few days.

Please check back in the next few days to find out about our gift voucher winners!

We’re planning on making some major changes to Pick-Me soon, but before we go ahead and change anything we’d like to grab your opinions on your Pick-Me experience. If you could take the time to answer a few questions in our survey, we’d much appreciate it and to thank you for your time, we are giving two lucky people a chance to win a $20 iTunes or Amazon.com gift voucher! The Gift Voucher giveaway ends on Friday 31 July, and the usual terms and conditions apply.

http://www.pick-me.net/survey

I can remember when I first released the site to the public that I had the grand job of adding all the information submitted by my visitors to the pages manually; it wasn’t until the 18 June 2007 when Hostee.net went automatic!! The days of having to input entries manually were gone and I could just sit back and watch the site grow.

But now, Hostee.net has turned a new corner, into a new era with the acquirement of Pick-Me.net.
For those of you who remember Pick-Me in the olden days, it was run by Dru and Shadow – two great people and I have to thank them for giving me the inspiration to start Hostee.net.

When the original Pick-Me went down just before Christmas 2005 with a famous “Website Suspended” screen we all thought the worse, however Dru and Shadow were still out where when finally early 2006 this message appeared:

I’d previously bought the domain Hostee.net with the intention of creating my own Pick-Me site – there was a blank space and someone had to come to the rescue to make a site where hosts and hostees could get together to find one another.

And so; as mentioned Hostee.net was released on 22 April 2007.

With Pick-Me still down by the time Hostee.net opened, I really wanted to try and gain ownership of the Pick-Me domain, after attempting to contact the registered owner without any luck I had to wait to see if the domain would get renewed, thankfully it wasn’t and on 12 April 2008 my backorder attempts were successful and I was now the proud owner of pick-me.net.

Obviously, things took its time to get everything swapped over to the new domain – Pick-Me.net but the main thing on my mind was to iron out a few of the bugs within the existing hostee.net coding – I managed to do this with help from Heather and Nadiyya and I thank them for their help in the past few months.

Testing done, everything installed, we’re ready to go..

Ladies and Gentlemen…
Welcome to Pick-Me.net – The new generation of Hostee.net