I am happy to announce that Memberkit 1.0 Beta is finally here!

Memberkit has probably been the biggest project we have ever completed for everyone in our team. We have been working on it for more than three years. Most people don’t know this but actually JotForm was a byproduct of Memberkit. We needed a really good form builder to make customizations easier and there came out JotForm. Today it is a very successful web service with over 100,000 users.

Memberkit has taken such a long time to complete because we really wanted to create something that is powerful but at the same time easy to use. Memberkit is on the low level a web development framework for non-programmers. Yes, you have read it correctly. It is a web framework. It is similar to web frameworks such as ruby on rails, but it does not require programming.

We are not advertising it in such a way though. Instead of attacking such a generic problem and creating something that might not be perfect for anybody, we have built something great for membership sites. We will not think about the future for the time being and just focus on making Memberkit a kickass product for social networking and subscription based sites.

Memberkit started small as an idea, grow into cool but unreachable spec, and after a very long and harsh development became an exciting product. We don’t know how successful it will be, but no matter what, we have created something we can be proud of rest of our lives.

So, what makes Memberkit such a killer application?

1. It is a web development framework for non-programmers

We think we have created an innovative solution for webmasters and web designers. Most people who create web sites are not programmers. If you are one of them, you have two options. You can either create simple static web sites or you can download and install web applications produced by commercial or open source programmers. Usually these applications are difficult to install and more importantly impossible to customize according to your needs. What if there was another option? What if you could write your own custom web applications without needing programmers or being a programmer? We think we have a product that makes this possible. Watch this video if you would like to see it with your eyes.

2. Growing number of social applications on the Memberkit App Gallery

One of the things we really wanted to make sure was to make it dead easy to share a web application you created and install an existing application from the App Gallery. They are both very easy now. You can share an application with a single click. You can also install an application with a single click.

3. Strong Subscriptions Features

We have worked with thousands of membership sites over the last decade. So, we are pretty familiar with their needs and changes happening in the industry. One of the most important reasons for the growth of the membership sites today is because people are increasingly getting used to paying for good content and features. You usually get what you pay for. So, Memberkit has built in recurring subscription payment features.

We are also strong believer of growing a product with user feedback. We would love to hear your questions and comments. Please take a look at our tour and demo. Feel free to explore Memberkit and let us know what you think.

Today, I was surprised to discover that I already have 74 Google Docs documents and pretty much stopped using Microsoft Office for the last year. It certainly did not happen intentionally. I think I’ve first started using Google Docs in 2006. I have been using more and more Google Docs since then. Today I have no need for Microsoft Office and I am surprisingly pretty happy about it.
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I am always fascinated with good writing. Maybe because it has many things in common with good software. A good user interface just flows. It is invisible. You get the task done without confusion. It might even be fun. Good writing has that quality as well. It captures the reader’s attention. Writing becomes invisible and the story becomes the reality. Both good writing and good software flows with the user. They provide a sense of accomplishment.

When I was in school, it took me all weekend to write a paper with couple of pages. Some people could write that in an hour. It was tough for me. Especially since English was my second language. But here is the interesting part. I always liked writing. It was tough but I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed every minute of it. My ideas were probably not that great. My writing was pretty bad. But it felt great to put things on paper.

In software, you start with a zero byte file. It is like an empty sheet of paper. Then you put things on it. Sometimes work on it for months. You get ideas and put them there. Instead of words, you code the ideas. Suddenly those ideas become reality for the user. If you are lucky, millions of people might even run the code you created.

A good writing is usually simple. Short sentences are good. Being to the point is good. Same applies to software. It is very hard work to make a user interfaces simple. The first draft you create is usually a very complex peace of mess. Then you work on it and refine it. You Keep it Simple, Stupid. KISS principle applies both to writing and software.

[Some thoughts I have had while reading a book called “On Writing Well” by Williaam Zinsser.]

Keane Angle made a nice video tutorial about JotForm. We liked it so much that we are planning to add it to our Tutorials page.

Keane writes a blog called Appify which in his words “sifts through the crap to bring you the crunchiest reviews of productivity, trendiness and efficiency in Web 2.0 apps and sites”.

He also has a review of JotForm.

User registration was relatively quick and simple. And within a few clicks I had a form completed that I wanted to use. To be honest, the longest part of creating this form was figuring out what I wanted to call each field.

Thanks Keane.

It is 2008. What do you do when you need to create a new web site?

There are many Content Management Systems but they are still very difficult to install, use and customize. Only a tiny number of sites would like to have a 3-column phpNuke look, but still pretty much all CMSes assume that is what you want.

If you are a programmer, maybe you can spend hours, mess with lots of php files and come up with a hack theme that would make it barely look like the kind of design you would like, but you are an exception. Most of the people who build sites are not programmers.

We have been hard at work for the last year to create a new kind of membership software. Our main goal was to keep things easy to use and easy to customize. So we developed a new kind of templating system that is both simple and flexible.

Basically, you can create any kind of design and our Memberkit templating system will just accept and work with it.

You can create a new page and upload it into your dev folder and it will just become part of your site with the design you created.

Stay tuned for more news about Memberkit. We will be releasing it on October 29th.

We have just started using DropBox here at Interlogy offices and we are really excited about it. The Mac application works like a charm but they also support Windows and Linux versions.

Basically you have Dropbox folder on your computer and whatever you put there, it also shows up on other users you are sharing the folder with. It is fast and easy to use. We will probably start using it instead of email attachments. Since you can also send comments using the tool.
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Podcasts are great to listen whether you are lying on the beach or stuck on the rush hour traffic. This episode of BizTech Podcast features JotForm. Check it out. BizTech Podcast is bi-weekly show designed to inform the small business and small business owner about targeted web sites and other technology.

We were also featured on the EdTech Weekly previously. EdTech is a pretty popular podcast for educators.

We have introduced a new product called “Full Membership Site Solution” last month and I am quite impressed with the amount of interest it received. We develop membership software that power thousands of web sites. So, we have been regularly receiving requests from our clients to not only provide the software but also to develop whole site for them.
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It is amazing how time passes by so quickly. It has been almost 8 years since the first version of Profile Manager Premium came out. At that time, I was still a computer science student. It all started with some free web site development I was doing for a non-profit organization. I was only doing it for fun but I also believed in the organization. I shared the scripts I developed on the web. Which lead to some small consulting gigs which lead me to post some more free scripts on the web. Two of the scripts I posted in 1999 became pretty popular among small websites. One was called “Netcard” and the other one was “Profile Manager”. They were both simple scripts which made it possible for small sites to easily let visitors create profiles on their sites. There was no term called “social networking” at that time. The biggest profile site was “Yahoo! Profiles” so most of the users wanted something similar to that.
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When we design software our goal is to make complex things easy for webmasters. So, we have to constantly think about the user interface. We sometimes redesign same functionality many times until we find a way that is easy to use but still flexible.

Today, we had another breakthrough idea on the new product we are working on. I define a breakthrough idea as one that make you say “how in the world I didn’t think of that before”. They are simple and elegant solutions to seemingly complex problems. Before we come up with an idea like that, we usually have a big mess. We are stuck and cannot find a good way out. We are almost ready to assume that there are no good solutions. We have thought of everything but the ideas we have are at best acceptable. They are not great. We don’t get excited when we think about implementing them. I think this is an important point. If we are not excited about what we are doing, we are probably doing it wrong.

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Just came back from my two weeks in Bodrum. I like doing some light reading on vacation. Business novels are especially go well under the sun since they are both enjoyable easy-reads and still can help you learn and grow.

The first business novel I read was The Goal couple of years ago. It was a great read and very thought provocative. After that I tried to find and read as many business novels as I can. Unfortunately, there are not many in this genre. I also did not find any web resources on business novels. So, today I am sharing the best business novels I have read. If you know any good ones missing below please feel free to post on the comments section.
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I am excited to announce that we have finally released JotForm 2.0. Since its first release more than a year ago, we have been constantly getting great feedback from hundreds of users. It seamed that JotForm really solved a need for webmasters: Creating web forms easily.

JotForm user base has been growing with an increasing rate and we now have about 28,000 users. More than 500,000 form submissions has been made and about 100,000 forms have been created. When I developed first version of JotForm, I had no idea it would be this popular. Basically, I developed it for our other product Profile Manager. Releasing it as a separate web based product was an afterthought. It was a lot of fun though. We even have made the final design on a ski trip in Killington, Vermont. We were skiing and snowboarding in the morning, and making the graphics and final design on the afternoon to the night. It was tiring like hell. But we had lots of fun.

JotForm 2.0 wasn’t that easy. My plan was to introduce a paid Premium version. However, I didn’t want to do this the easy way by restricting existing free features. Instead I preferred to develop an improved free version and create additional great features that would be worth paying for. I have been also too much occupied with other projects and customer support, and I couldn’t spend a great deal of time on this. So, the new version has been developed mainly by our talented developer Serkan. He has been very creative. He has come up with a web based Wizard UI that made things much easier for users to perform tasks without leaving the form builder. I don’t think anything like that has been done before. He also has developed a special JavaScript debugger called Tracer that makes JavaScript development easier and faster.

Here is a sample screenshot tour of our new wizard interface. On this sample, we will be creating PayPal Subscriptions integration to our form:

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Terri was a PM Premium user. She passed away in a car accident in 2003. She was a very passionate and warm person. She even once wrote a case study about PM Premium here. Her husband who took over their Wisconsin Dog Rescue site has sent me this announcement…
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Since JotForm has been released one of remarks I received often has been why we don’t have a regular homepage. You know, the common wisdom supposed to say a homepage should give some introduction. It is supposed to talk about what is the service is all about, why do you need it, how great it is. Things like that. Well, I don’t think there is much truth about this assumption. In fact, I think this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about the web users.

I see this mistake all over web all the time. Long registration forms to try some basic functionality, software products with no screenshots, community forums you can’t even read without registration. You expect the web users to trust you and invest their time. But, why should they do that? They just met you, and they are in rush. They are always in rush because they have been burned many times before by spending hours on sites like yours without getting anything accomplished. They are one second away from clicking that back button and you are expecting them to read your long mumbo jumbo and fill up that required occupation question and figure out those messed up CAPTCHA characters. Thank you very much!

If we look at the most successful sites today, there is something very common on all of them. They let you accomplish things.
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Until couple years ago, doing anything more than simple form validations or image mouseovers with JavaScript was considered drudging work. Not many people understood or appreciated this small but very powerful language that run on our browsers. It wasn’t even seen as a serious programming language. Fast forward to today suddenly it is the new cool thing. People are writing Drag and Drop User Interfaces that can edit graphics and save your data on the background.

So, what happened? This is very amazing. Today almost nothing has changed about the underlying technology but suddenly our thinking has shifted. JavaScript is not seen as a hack any more. People are now making very complex applications with it. JavaScript is not ugly any more. There are beautifully written libraries that can do powerful things. JavaScript is not a light language any more. The most exciting web applications written today use it extensively.
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Dennis Daniels is a teacher who believes teachers should stop pushing papers and start using web forms instead. He produced couple of training screencasts for teachers showing how to use JotForm. In these movies he creates questionnaires for students and shows how to collect data.

When technology becomes easier, everybody starts using it. A good example to this is the blogs. It is now very easy to have a blog. If you can manage sending and receiving emails, you can probably manage a blog as well. With services like JotForm, anyone can now create forms and collect data over the web. You don’t need to know HTML. You don’t even need a web site. If you have blog or email, you can create surveys or feedback forms and just post a link.

Launching a new site is always fun and exciting. You put a lot of hard work on something and have that great feeling of accomplishment. At the same time there is that scary feeling that something might go terribly wrong. And it sometimes really does happen.

My worst war story was TheCounter launch on the post bubble days. The site had over 2 million free users and our company, mostly depending on advertising model, was bleeding for cash. We had to turn it into a paid site. However the code was impossible to change. Written on pre-PHP days, it was implemented as an Apache C module and had HTML code all over the web server code. If you wanted to make a word bold on a page, you had to recompile Apache and restart web servers on three machines.
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I am very excited to announce that the first web based WYSIWYG form builder JotForm BETA is now released. Try it yourself.

Completely Free!
JotForm is currently completely free. It will stay this way during BETA period. I must admit I have not decided on a business model yet. The most possible outcome will be a Pro version where users will get more benefits. At this point I am more interested in seeing the interest in this tool, collecting feedback from users and weeding out all the bugs.

Easy Try Out!
You can try it out without creating an account. Hey, if you only want a tool to create form source code for you, just create your form, get its source without even creating an account on the JotForm site. You will not even leave the homepage! It is probably one of the easiest ways to create forms.

But Can It Collect Data?
Although implementing the first real web WYSIWYG form editor was a very interesting task by itself, it is not that useful. All form building tools on the web provide data collection and access. So does JotForm. It is really easy to see results on the my forms section and you can even export them as Excel, CVS or some other delimited format. You can also receive notification emails.

Tools, tools, tools
JotForm is built on top of two super cool JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us. The server end is built using PHP and Mysql. Currently completely empty and lonely Forum runs on phpBB. Please if you are reading this go post a feature request or an angry bug report. The graphics are done on Photoshop and tour movies made with Camtasia Studio.

I have been looking and looking for a good intiutive solution for form building. There are tens of form builder sites and products on the web and they are all crappy. I am guilty as well. I made my share of ugly form builders. But I believe I finally solved the problem. It was so exciting that it will soon be available as a stand alone product.
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I know I promised to talk about the new product I am working on. But I will have to wait couple more days for that. Today I will describe how I setup a backup system for my sites. I have always found that backing up sites in a some CD or DVD very useful. It feels more reliable when you can keep a hard copy with you. Let’s review the other options:
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