Saturday, February 17, 2007

Tell your friends!

Hello to new visitors, we recently added a link to this blog from Sheet Exchange's main page.

We have added a little page to Tell your friends about this community and help us expand the number of sheets.

Update: Now you can also email a specific sheet.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Keep track of your favorite users and requests!

Today two cool new features have been added that will help you "keep track"!

When you visit a user's profile (if you're logged in to the site), you will see an option to add the user to your favorites right next to the username. When you click the user will be added to your favorites. There is a new "Favorite Users" item in the user menu which shows you the list of your favorites. On that page you can visit an individual user's page when you click on the username, delete favorites and best of all, see the sheets from all of your favorites in a single page.

Another little new feature is "Sent Messages". This behaves slightly differently from a usual "Sent Mail" folder: If a message is in bold, it means the recipient hasn't read it yet (that is not quite true since they might have read the email notification which includes your message and not the actual message on the site -- but nevertheless it's better that nothing as there's no way to tell if they have read the email or not). Also if they delete the message, it will also be deleted from your sent folder.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Say goodbye to Leechers...

You are now required to add sheets to the site before you can contact users and request sheets.

This is a feature to reduce Leechers who only ask for sheets and don't contribute anything to the community.

We do not require a 1 on 1 exchange. Of course you may not necessarily need any of the sheets that the user who asks for one of your sheets has added to the site, however, this new feature simply helps reduce those unwanted emails from people asking you for a sheet and provide nothing in return.

P.S. The user profile page is also slightly changed to show user's sheets by default.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

The better way to find new sheets!

Sheet Exchange's Latest Sheets Live Feed (if you haven't used it yet) lets you find out about the latest additions to the site faster.

Today this feed was upgraded to a brand new system. You can now have the live feed in the language of the site. Just make sure the site in the language of your choice before you click on the little feed icon (it's the little orange icon at the bottom left corner).

For those who have no idea what this is, a live feed (or a Web Feed) is a format that lets you add content to a feed reader.

As fancy as this may sound, a feed reader is simply something like My Yahoo!, Google's Personalized Home Page, etc. that lets you add news, etc. from different sources.

My own favorite feed reader is Google Reader. Blog readers will find is extremely cool.

If like me Firefox is your favorite browser, when you click on the little orange feed button it will ask you to pick your favorite reader. Both Google home page and Google Reader are there.

* Firefox itself has a feature called live bookmarks which lets you add feeds as bookmarks, but I don't like it much myself.

Welcome!

As you may know Sheet Exchange is a community site for sharing sheet music. For now it is available in English and Persian and I have only advertised it in the Iranian community for two reasons:

1. That's what I play myself :-)
2. It is in beta and don't want too much attention yet

Like the web site itself this blog will have a informal and friendly theme. Don't expect two many updates, so you might want to add it to your new reader.

While my main intention is to post updates to the site and to the engine, there is not restriction and I will anything that site members will find useful (hopefully even some sheet music)!

Stay tuned!