You can listen to this post or you can read on.  Comon’, you know you’d rather listen.

1. Statistics - We’ve been online for 2 months now and have had over 2,000 visits and 5,000 page views from 60 countries and all 50 of the United States. Woo ha!
2. Updates - The iPad contest is in full swing.  It is based on a 7-day rolling score system.  Find out more on the contest page.  The Facebook audio player have been removed and replaced with a link to the post’s page on the GabbiCat site.
3. Upcoming - I’m looking into developing audio replies, directed audio posts, and user tagging in audio posts and hoping to spend some time on those features this week.  iPhone/iPad and Android apps are still planned but I’ve re-prioritized them a bit.  Longer term, I’m hoping to promote GabbiCat from an alpha product (i.e. still being developed) to a beta product (i.e. mostly done and being tested) by this Fall.

Have you joined GabbiCat yet?  No?  Then join now for a chance to win an iPad!

GabbiCat

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Hi all,

You can listen to this post here, or you can read on…

Yesterday was a HUGE TRAFFIC DAY!  We broke our previous record traffic day by over 400%, with nearly 800 visits.  If you have posts on GabbiCat, check out your play counts.  Many of them have been played several hundred times!  We’ve now been visited by all 50 of the United States and over 70 countries around the world!  For those of you that have been tweeting about and promoting GabbiCat, thank you SO MUCH!  I appreciate anything you can do to spread the word about GabbiCat as I have very little money for advertising.

I deployed some minor enhancements to the site last night.  They are as follows:

1. Played count notifications - You will now receive notifications when any of your posts are played 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, etc. times.  This helps keep you aware of posts that are trending or possibly going viral…handy.  If you have email notifications enabled, you will also receive an email each time these events occur.
2. Extended and clickable captions - You can now enter up to 500 characters in the caption field of your posts rather than 140.  Also, any hyperlinks that you include in your caption will now appear as clickable links that will open a new browser window.
3. Changed anonymous home page back to “Everything” feed - After reviewing the traffic numbers from yesterday, it became clear that making the “Trending” feed the home page caused many of the latest posts to be ignored.  It might make sense to use the “Trending” feed as the home page at some point in the future when there’s a constant flow of new posts coming in, but for now I think it makes more sense to use the “Everything” feed.  We’ll see.
4. Contest coming soon - I’m still working on the specifics of the contest.  Expect an announcement soon!

I think that’s about it for now.  Thanks again to everyone for your help.  Please continue to help promote GabbiCat on Facebook and Twitter.  All help is VERY appreciated!

Oh yeah, have you joined GabbiCat and started posting yet?  No?  Then join now and make my day!

GabbiCat

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Hey Peeps,

You can listen to this post here, or you can read on…

Well, things have been a bit quiet here at GabbiCat as I was on vacation last week, but now I’m back and ready to roll.  Here’s the latest updates:

1. New Trending Audio Feed - This replaces the “Most-Liked” audio feed and is also the default audio feed presented to anonymous and signed-out users.  It displays those posts which are currently the most popular by analyzing a combination of play counts, likes, shares, etc.  Check it out and see if any of your posts are trending!
2. Upcoming Contest - I’m still sorting out the specifics, but I will be announcing a weekly contest soon.  The general idea is that the user with the most popular post each week will win a cash prize.  We’re eager to have more posting activity on GabbiCat from all of you and thought that dangling a few bucks out there will get you all talking! :)  More details to follow.
3. Phone Client - If you haven’t registered your phone number with your account yet, please do.  The phone client allows you to post to GabbiCat directly from your phone without the need to use a web browser.  I used it extensively last week while on vacation and it worked like a champ.

I think that’s about it for now.  Stay tuned for more info!

Oh yeah, have you signed up for GabbiCat yet?  No?  Then join now and start gabbing!

GabbiCat

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Hi Peeps,

Yep, as always you can listen to this post here on GabbiCat.com (comon, do it) or you can keep on reading…

Yesterday was another record-breaking traffic day for GabbiCat.com!  We had 158 visitors, compared to the previous day, which was 102 (which was the previous record).  This represents 55% growth in traffic.  At this point, we have now received visitors from 49 countries and 39 of the 50 US states!  So, a huge thanks to all of you for your contributions to this growth!

For those of you looking for ways to improve the quality of the audio that you post, you might want to try out a few tools and techniques that I’ve been using for recording these GabbiCat Today posts.  First of all, the record from browser feature uses a lower fidelity technology for recording your voice.  So, while it’s definitely convenient, it isn’t the best option if audio quality is really important.  Secondly, the built-in mics on most laptops also produce lower quality audio, resulting in a speakerphone-ish quality that can sometimes be difficult to understand during playback.

What I recommend (and do) is to use a headset mic along with a free audio recording tool called Audacity and the LAME MP3 encoder which enables you to export your recording to MP3 format (the format used by GabbiCat.com).  Audacity also has some nice features for amplifying the audio, reducing noise, and even adding background audio tracks (like background music, etc.) to give you a really high quality recording.  Once you’ve exported your recording to MP3, you can use the upload button on GabbiCat’s Create Post page to upload, caption, and post your recording.  Audacity is completely free and available on all PC platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).  Of course, there are other tools out there that do the same thing, but this is the one with which I’m most familiar.

Anyway, today is Friday and most of us are heading into a three day weekend  (at least here in the US), so I expect we’ll see reduced activity on GabbiCat over the next few days, which is how it should be so that we can enjoy quality time with our friends/families/pets, etc.  Nevertheless, GabbiCat will still be here waiting for you in case you need to share something exciting during your weekend!

Oh yeah…have you signed up for GabbiCat yet?  No?  Then join now, Superstar!

GabbiCat

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Yo yo (not yoyo),

I’ve started using GabbiCat for voice blogging the same information that I’m capturing on this boring text blog (seems like an obvious thing to do).  So, if you’d like to use GabbiCat to stay up-to-date on GabbiCat, go here.

If you’re still reading this boring written form of communication, here’s what you’re missing on the GabbiCat audio feed:

1. I’ve deployed a few updates to the site over the last few days, primarily related to Facebook integration.  For those of you listening to posts from within Facebook, you’ll notice that we now have a “pre-roll” audio clip that plays at the start of each post from the voice of our very own Gabbi Cat…shameless self-promotion.
2. There are new “embed” and “share” buttons on audio posts played from within Facebook.  You can use these to embed posts on your own webpage or to share posts on other social networks.  Have at it!
3. There was a bug that caused some of the posts to not play in Facebook.  Doh!  It’s been fixed and the developer (me) has been properly punished.
4. I started work on the dial-in feature that will allow you to record your posts from your phone.  It’s not available yet, but I’m working on it.
5. A few people have asked if it’s possible to get a link for a post.  The answer is yes.  Aside from the new features in #2 above, which allow you to share a post, you can also click the “View” link on any post while on the GabbiCat site, which will take you to a page for that specific post.  On that page, copy the URL from your browser’s address bar and you’re golden.  Boo ya!

That’s it for now.  Oh yeah, have you signed up for GabbiCat and posted your voice yet?  No?  Then join now and stop being such a punk!  :)

GabbiCat

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