D'OH!

A configuration error on the signupahead.com site prevented pretty much any access to the site for the past 24 hours. This has been corrected and the site is working normally again.

Email confirmations

The signup sheet now sports a checkbox to send an email confirmation of the slots you signed up for. Yay!

Fixing "recent"

User feedback pointed out that the "my sheets" and "my slots" pages / emails were less than helpful, in that they listed items based on when the item was created, rather than the more intuitive last update. Plus, "my slots" was sorted by sheet rather than by slot.

This has been corrected; all three "my" pages / emails now use the update time to select and sort items in the list. So now when you ask for recent slots, you get a list of recent slots.

"Publish Sheet" is no more

The "Publish" feature was intended to prevent volunteers from signing up for slots before the owner had finished setting up the sheet. But unlike craigslist.org (on which the feature was modeled), sheets are never publicly available; the owner has to give the signup link to each volunteer. Thus there is no need to prevent untimely signups, and so publish is no more. The sheet is ready to go as soon as it is created.

You can still close a sheet to prevent volunteers from signing up, and re-open it later if you change your mind.

Show and hide slot details

A new feature of SignupAhead is that you can select which slot details are shown on the signup link. From the Create or Manage page select "Show slot details" to pick whether you want to show

• Name, Time, and Description
• Just Name
• Name and Description
• Name and Time

Name, Time, and Description show all the slot details. Use this for sheets like booth duty where you need to specify both a shift time and location.

Just Name only asks for the volunteer's name and email. This is perfect for when you just need a list of names, like people attending a seminar.

Name and Description is useful for potlucks and barbecues, where you want people to sign up to bring something, but everyone will be arriving at the same time.

Name and Time works well for classroom volunteers or preparing meals for a family with a newborn, when you need people to cover specific dates or times.

CSV import!

The second-most requested feature for Signup Ahead is a way to create sheets and slots using a spreadsheet. Good news! Now you can import slots for a sheet from a CSV file! Details can be found here: http://signupahead.com/import.html

(The first most-requested feature is re-ordering slots. That's next on the to-do list.)

Signup Ahead downtime

SignupAhead.com was offline from Friday August 8 thought Tuesday August 18 due to hardware failure. OUCH! My apologies to all for the extended outage.

Note to self: Netgear "Pro" switches aren't.