We used to maintain our own personal blog system prior to wordpress. You can read all the posts from there. Have fun reading 
Hundred Thousand Hits and counting
04-07-2006
Yes, hard to believe, but true. We have got 100,000 hits to our site since the day of inception. The problem has been that we shifted our statistics engine from Webstat to Google Analytics, and we never really viewed the cumulative statistics of both of them combined. Our review of stats has always been with respect to daily traffic and the daily count of hits, visitors , pages etc. We have a standard shape of the stats curve over a week. The maximum number of hits we receive are on Monday when people come into their workplace, colleges etc. The enthusiasm continues but gradually decreases though the week and a take a downward plunge towards the weekend. We prefer not to check stats over the weekend ( totally depressing), we wait till Monday for that. On an average we get about 200 to 300 visitors/users a day(AVERAGE) , our maximum on visitors has been about 500 unique on one special day. On a hit basis we get close to 3000-4000 hits a day(Average). There was one special day we reached about 7500 hits but missed the round figure by a couple of hits. There have been downsides also where the page hits have been close to 1000(especially on weekends). But come Monday and our graph begins to rise. We are still hoping to see the day we get 1000 visitors and 10,000 hits and we wish that you will support / promote us to achieve this figure.
Cheers
Samparkh Team
Happy Moment No 2 ( New Feature)
29-06-2006
Another good news folks! But first, thanks to all those who confirmed their email ids. We did not let your hard work (one click) go to waste. The good news is that Email Notifications for scribbles have started working. So now when you scribble on somebody?s book they will get a mail provided they have confirmed their email ids. We will soon release notifications for friend requests, messages and other notify-able actions. Thank you Reshma,Chander(read previous post) and Sam, we have kept your request in mind and have given you a privacy option for your email ids. You can select between showing your email to your friends (direct friends), everyone or No one (only myself). Please do give us your feedback and suggestions.Regards
Samparkh Team
Update Your Email Ids
26-06-2006Our first month anniversary will see the release of our most awaited feature INSTANT CHAT which will be released sooner than we thought. We will release a Beta version just to check how Chat will hold up on our servers. We have also got a lot of people writing to us, asking us to provide notifications by mail about activity on Samparkh, we are happy to announce that the notification by email will soon be available for all users. Like promised before, we are going to send out confirmation emails to your email ids to authenticate the existence of your email ids. We have scanned our database and found a lot of a@b.c’s and xyz@abc.com’s. We are also making it compulsory for every Samparkh user to be associated with a valid email id. Supposing you have not given your right email id we will still allow you to update your emails and then resend you the confirmation mail. After confirming you can continue with using Samparkh. Users who wish to use a different email id for correspondence please change your email id in the edit profile page. All samparkh accounts without valid email ids will be deleted after a month from when we start the confirmation process. So hurry , update your emails.Samparkh Team
Our very first Hall of Fame
05-06-2006
The very first Samparkh Hall of Fame is out and for all to see at Hall of Fame. Congratulations to all the well deserved winners? We hope to see more exciting results next month : -) That reminds me We have a brand new competition coming up.. The most creative Testimonial. Testimonials have been the age old way of saying something (preferably nice ;-)) about someone you know. Some people come right out and say it. Some choose to be discrete. We also have some people using funny quotations, romantic descriptions, diagrams and a million other things to express themselves. We encourage all of you to nominate what you feel is the most creative testimonial that you come across in Samparkh. It could be one given to you or one you stumble upon in someone elses profile. Nevertheless, write to us at adm@samparkh.com with the subject line Testimonial and let us know. We are also introducing notifications, reminders and Info by mail for which we will be sending out verification emails to authenticate emails of users. If you wish to use a different email id for correspondence then please go to Edit profile in your home page and change it accordingly. We will also introduce a privacy option for personal information , wherein you can choose to show or hide your personal information to users of Samparkh. Rest assured the verification emails will be sent only after the privacy option is in place. All accounts that do not verify a month after the verification emails are sent, will be invalidated. We shall inform you about the verification process later on.Peace
Samparkh Team. One more zero added to the benchmark
31-05-2006If you have read our previous blogs you will remember the 100 user benchmark.Well, today we just added a zero to that to reach a new benchmark. Yes, today we officially have 1000 signups and users. Our next benchmark will be when we add another zero to that figure.
Thank you so much for the support. To celebrate this benchmark we finally have mails going out from our site. The first immediate impact you will see is that the invite link on your home page has now been replaced by the mail invite link. You can now invite all your friends to Samparkh by just sending them invites from the site itself. We will also be sending out events, reminders and other announcements to users by mail. For that to happen, we need a mail id that we can use for correspondence. The trend we have seen is that since lots of people have seen lots of such networks, nobody has really taken the time to complete their profile or provide actual email ids. We have email ids like a@b.c and com@com.com , these dont help our cause. We will be sending a confirmation mail shortly to ascertain the existence of user accounts. We further assure you that we will provide a privacy setting, where you can choose the people(if any), to whom you want your contact information disclosed. Please co-operate in this effort of ours.As for the complaints, we know the GUI needs rework and that people are seeing dual screen and ridiculously out of place images. GUI will definitely be our priority, but at present we are busy perfecting the Instant Chat framework, and if all works out well, you will be able to see a working model of the same in another ten days.A special mention to TCS from where we are getting lots of users. Please make sure your system administrators dont get a whiff of Samparkh
or else we will reach the same fate as others. Dont stop writing to us.Samparkh Team( not SamTeam)
Why dont thou writheth to us ?
29-05-2006Its been an eventful week after our successful re-release. We are really happy with the response that we are getting from the users. But still very few people actually write to us about what they think. We thank Ravi, Scotty, Nitin, Ramasyam and others who pointed out some initial bugs in the system. There have also been lots of fan mails which we are proudly showing off to our near and dear ones
Our stats for the first week were out of the roof and our stats engine gave up on us after the 20,000 hits on the site( Thats the limit on their free service). There have also been a lot of queries regarding the gui and its similarity to Samparkhs existing counterparts. We would like to make it clear that the gui was intentionally made to look like what it is. Providing a radically new GUI wouldnt have been tough but would have left the users confused. By providing a similar GUI, we knew that users knew their way around the system and were not left dazed. Providing a new GUI usually turns a lot of people off. We call it maintaining standards As again, our only complaint is that , users dont write to us. We need to hear from you as much as we can to improve upon our service. Please please please write to us. This fortnight will see some tweeks and also a couple of new features, keep watching this space for announcements and latest info.(SamTeam)Samparkh Team Mission only half accomplished.
24-05-2006
We are very happy with the tremendous response that the site is getting in terms of sign ups, but are slightly disappointed at the actual usage of the site. Our new user count is amazingly large but the no of visitors who return after they sign up are comparatively less in number… I think, its because nobody knows about the Samparkh hall of fame. To keep up the spirits of regular users, we unveil the Samparkh hall of fame. Once a month we will survey our database and find out the people who are very active on Samparkh and reward them by putting them in our Samparkh Hall of Fame. Categories for the awards are yet to be finalized but we will include Mr Popular and Ms Popular ( users with most friends ), Most Scribbled and Most Scribbling ( don?t tell me u are looking for an explanation),Most testimonials.. Any more bright ideas for the hall of fame are welcome. Also the site is aimed at making you the users more involved in our activities, so please do write back on our blogs. We want to know what you think, what you want, what errors you face etc. We also got lots of complaints about the friends count being higher than actual number of friends. We are working to solve that problem and will fix it at the earliest. Keep watching this spaceCheersSamparkh Team
Benchmark Reached in Record Time
22-05-2006
It was hard for us to believe but because of your overwhelming response we reached our first benchmark, 100 users, in less than three days. This was supposed to be achieved in the first month of our release. Thank you all for the tremendous support that you have shown us. Its time I thank a few people responsible for Samparkh. The most important factor why Samparkh is on , undoubtedly is Mr Nandan. If you have noticed Samparkh gets redirected to a different host and Nandan is responsible for it. Samparkh would have been out earlier if it wasn?t for our hosting providers giving us a tough time. Every minute either the Server, the database or (the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard) the power would be down. When all seemed lost, along came Nandan and offered us space to host our site on his domain. And that?s where we are currently, living on his domain. Please do check out his site horizontaleight, its got some really cool cars to check out. We owe more than just thanks to him. This was the deployment part. Now we go back to the time when we were developing Samparkh. I thank Prabhat my pal, who solved my first bug with JSP. I definitely cannot forget Mr Manjunadha Reddy, who sits behind me and taught me so much about the technology, deployment and other things which would have taken me years to learn. Last on my thanks list would be Mr Tarence. Tarence gave me pointers and quick tips on User Interface. The result is a neat looking GUI that you see before you. He threatened to charge me 8k for it but we worked out a deal in the end ;-).Regards
RiteshHi. I have a huge list of people to thank but will try and keep it short, provided we have an understanding here, that each and every one of you deserve to be on that list. First of all, my parents. They have been completely amazing.. Not only did they volunteer to fund the whole venture, but also gave us a continuous flow of inputs and opinions, helping us understand how this looks to a layman. Then I have to thank lots of my friends? Ajay Venkatesan, Vinay V,Jyotsna c,Swetha Ranganathan and Dhruv Saxena to name a few? While some of them put great efforts into marketing the product, the others stayed up nights testing it (ps:literally..) Last but definitely not the least my professor, Prof K.V Dinesha for being a pillar of support?. and the whole institution of iiitb (coz thats how it started off. as a college project :-))
Regards
Prateeksha
We thank all the people who reported the initial bugs in the system and for being patient enough when we were fixing it. Few tweaks were made in the past three days, we leave it up to you to figure out what they are. ( Hint : scribbles page title bar) Thank you all once again and yes, please don?t stop sending out those invites. Samparkh Team
In 5..4..3..2..1..And we are on..
14-05-2006
Aaahhh…!!its alive!! thats what we in team Samparkh felt when we finally had our site online. Its been a hard 4 months developing and perfecting our idea , but finally our first release is done and is out for all to see and enjoy. Lets first talk about why Samparkh. Firstly, we have been trying to fit into networks that weren’t meant for us. In any friends network Indians have been the minority. Secondly, though these networks are put up, there are no more improvements or enhancements. We feel the generation has moved way beyond mails and slow communication. We strive for things to be more real time and compact. Then why don’t we demand the same innovation in the softwares we use?? The third and final reason, insulation of users from the developers. Lots of times, developers deliver features that aren’t used by users or prove to be more of a bane than a boon to the users. Samparkh brings the two worlds closer by interacting with users and delivering useful features. There are bound to be problems initially, but with time we are hoping that our service and our hosting provider stabilize for the better. Every other day our server goes down or the database blocks us and we are fighting every minute with our hosting providers to find a permanent solution and I am sure they will. We will be releasing our best feature Instant Messaging very soon and will keep you posted on its progress. Other features, that couldn?t fit the first release, will also be released as and when we perfect it. Till then we hope for your support and encouragement. Please feel free to write to us at admin@samparkh.com.You can also comment on this blog by signing up and logging in. If you are already a member you will see a Post a Comment link below this blog. Get invited and get connected.
We have just moved to a more stable server. Users who have bookmarked the page. please open www.samparkh.com and then re-bookmark us. We will make the old link redirect back to the new page, but till then please use the mail url. Cheers
Samparkh Team
