We are looking for people who can speak English and another language fluently and would be willing to help translate the upcoming version of ClearCheckbook.
The main languages we are hoping to have at first are:
-Spanish
-Portuguese
-Italian
-German
Based on the number of people who use ClearCheckbook outside of the US, those languages will be the most useful at launch.
If you would like to help and translate the site, please let us know. We have made it easy and will provide you a document with all of the text that needs to be translated. As an estimate, you're probably looking at about 400 different lines of translations (ranging from one word to a few sentences in length).
Please use the Contact Us link at the bottom of this and every page to let us know if you're interested, what language(s) you speak and some background information.
Thanks!
The company that is currently hosting ClearCheckbook was down for about 2 hours this afternoon. Something brought their entire datacenter down, including our server.
We are extremely sorry for this inconvenience and we're currently looking for a new company to host our server. We have been having other issues with them for quite some time and this is the final straw.
If you know of any reliable server coloation services in the Los Angeles or Las Vegas area, please let us know.
Again, sorry for the issues. It was completely out of our hands.
Some time last night we surpassed 4,000,000 transactions stored in our database. It has been 4 months since we hit the 3 million transaction mark.
ClearCheckbook v3 is still in beta testing right now. We have most of the bugs worked out of the site and are currently working on the iPhone webapp version. We should have this done by the end of the week and release it to beta testers at that time.
There was a question about the server upgrade that was canceled earlier in the month. We still plan on upgrading the server (We bought the new hard drives and ram), we are just waiting until we are closer to launch to do this.
We're getting close, just hang tight a little longer.
Due to some issues with our host, we will not be taking the site down today. In the unlikely event that things do work out and we are able to take the site down for upgrades, we will let you know.
We had originally stated that the site would go down on Saturday to make upgrades to the server running ClearCheckbook, but our host told us we could only do it this Friday from 2:00-4:00pm PST.
During this time, the entire site will not be accessible and CheckBot will be down.
We are upgrading the RAM in our server from 4 GB to 12 GB and will be replacing each of our 80 gig hard drives with 640 gig drives. This is all in preparation for launching ClearCheckbook v3.
Please make your plans accordingly and know that we will be working as hard as possible to get the site up as quickly as possible.
We're getting really close to having ClearCheckbook V3 wrapped up. Before we can make it live though, we need to do two things. 1) We will need to upgrade the ram and hard drives in our server. 2) Go through about 2 weeks of beta testing to ensure all the bugs are worked out.
Server Upgrade
In an effort to greatly increase the speed of ClearCheckbook after the V3 upgrade, we are going to upgrade the RAM to 12 gigs (up from the current 4). In addition to the RAM upgrade, we will also be putting in dual 640 gig hard drives (up from the current dual 80 gigs). Our current plan is to take the site down for a few hours on Saturday October 18th to make these hardware upgrades. We will post more about this when the time is closer.
These upgrades are going to cost us $420 in parts. If you have been thinking about possibly donating a few dollars to the site, now would be a great time!
Beta Testers
As we have previously mentioned, we will need some people to help beta test the site. To start off the testing, we are looking for 25 people who are willing to go through and use the new site and provide us with feedback, bugs, etc.
In an effort to try and get the best people to test the site, we will be looking at a few factors for the beta testers:
1) How long have you been a member of ClearCheckbook
2) What kind of technical experience do you have with web development
3) Have you ever beta tested a site or software before
If you are interested in helping test, please use the Contact Us form at the bottom of every page and let us know. Please provide any additional information that will help us understand your level of knowledge about the items mentioned above.
One other thing to keep in mind for people interested in beta testing... any information you enter during beta testing will not carry over after the site is launched. The testing period is for testing only, even if we ask you to use it like you normally would to get as much of a "real world" test as possible.
We are planning on starting beta testing on Monday October 20th (after the upgrades have been completed).
Thank you all for your patience while we finish up V3 development.
At about 2:00am MST this morning, ClearCheckbook started to experience some issues connecting to our database. After struggling to figure out what was happening, we finally tracked it down to some DNS issues with the server.
No data was lost during this time and everything is back up and running now.
Sorry for the unexpected downtime.
It has been a little while since we gave an update to the progress of ClearCheckbook version 3. Over the past few months we've been working very hard to get everything updated and added to the new version of the site. As of now, we only have two more features to rebuild for the new site (Reminders and Reports) plus a few more smaller additions and general cleanup.
We are looking to launch our private beta testing of the site in about 2 weeks and will use that time to fix any bugs and finalize the layout and other things like that.
We're sorry for the slight delay in launching the new version, but we want to make sure everything is there and working smoothly before the launch.
In a couple weeks I will post more information about the beta testing and how to sign up for it if you're interested.
General ClearCheckbook News:
July has been another great month for ClearCheckbook. We had over 310,000 transactions added this month with around 2,100 new members sign up for the site. We also broke the 3,000,000 transaction mark in July!
Donations:
We were about $60 short of our donation goal, but it's still great to see so many people donating.
V3 Development Update:
Many more hours have been poured into the development of V3. A lot of the new ideas are starting to take shape on the site, but we still have a few more to start on. These next few weeks will be very busy for the development of V3.
We also announced in July that we are developing a native iPhone app and plan on launching that along side V3.
There will be some more news about V3 as the launch date gets closer. The estimated launch is still September with beta testing opening up at the end of August.
Just a few minutes ago we passed the 3,000,000 stored transactions mark. It has been less than 4 months since we hit the 2 million transaction mark.
During the course of July, we've had an average of 11,000 transactions added each day.
It's great to see the site growing so quick! Thanks to everyone who has been telling friends and family and helping to spread the word of the site.
We hear you. Development is underway and the native ClearCheckbook iPhone application release will coincide with the V3 launch.
For the time being, check out our iPhone / iPod Touch Webapp.
That's all for now. Stay tuned for more.
In yet another milestone for ClearCheckbook, we're proud to announce that we're now managing over 2,000,000 transactions for over 17,800 active users.
Over the last month, the site has seen an average of around 9,000 new transactions and 125 new user registrations each day.
In other news, we also met our donation goal for the month of March with a few days to spare. This is great news! A huge thanks to everyone who took the time to donate this month.
As always, please send in any feature requests or ways to make the site better!
First off, I would like to say that I'm truly amazed at how many people donate to the site each month. Your donations are greatly appreciated and are helping make this site even better.
As you may know, running a site has several costs associated with it (servers, hosting, etc) and these costs start to add up quickly. In fact, this year alone we're spending around $3,600 to keep the site up and running.
In an effort to try and make the site self sustaining, we have put a small image at the bottom of every page that shows the percentage of our donation goal for the current month.
Please remember though, even if we don't receive any donations, the site will continue to be funded out of my own checkbook. While I have no problem with this, it is nice to be able to have some of that cost taken care of by the site itself.
Thanks again for everyone who has donated to the site!
I'm proud to announce the release of ClearCheckbook Mobile today. ClearCheckbook Mobile is a version of ClearCheckbook developed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch. All elements of the site (minus a few that are still in the works) have been ported over to the new layout.
Over the next week or so, the remaining elements of ClearCheckbook will be ported over to the mobile site and it will be complete. I will make another blog post when that time comes.
Until then, please try out the new mobile site and everything it has to offer! IT's completely self sustaining now (meaning you can do everything from registering new accounts to changing your date and currency settings). Try it out and let us know what you think of it by sending us an email or posting in the comments of this blog entry!
For more information on ClearCheckbook Mobile, click here.
Update (March 8, 2008):
Reminders / Recurring Transactions and the "Lost Password" features have been added to the mobile site.
Also, ClearCheckbook Mobile has been added to the list of WebApps on the Apple website.
If you're using Internet Explorer 6, we would like to strongly encourage you to either upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or more preferably, download and start using Mozilla Firefox.
It seems like more and more of the emails coming into us about login issues or data not getting updated (because it's getting cached by IE when it shouldn't) all revolve around the fact that Internet Explorer 6 is an extremely outdated browser and should not be used.
If you're forced to use IE6 and cannot upgrade for some ungodly reason, please try the following instructions if you're having the following issues:
Trouble Logging In
-Click this link to ensure cookies are cleared: https://www.clearcheckbook.com/logout.php
-Refresh the page about 10 times in a row really quick (sounds strange, but it helps clear things out from memory)
-Clear your cache (instructions here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/howto/customizing/clearcache.mspx)
-Close your browser and start it again
-Try logging in
Pages not updating when you add transactions... or accounts are showing up empty:
-Refresh the page about 10 times in a row really quick (sounds strange, but it helps clear things out from memory)
-Clear your cache (instructions here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/howto/customizing/clearcache.mspx)
If you are still having issues and have tried the above instructions, please send us an email and let us know. Please strongly consider upgrading to a new browser if you're able to.
