Facebook deleted us! Those bastards. Apparently we were in violation of their user agreement by promoting a website with our profile. 
It’s not like we were going around spamming everyone - we just had a nice quiet presence and only contacted our “friends” once in a great while. Oh well… I’ll go and make a less-obvious Naperthrill profile and hopefully they won’t catch on this time!
It was a great year for Naperthrill.com! We had our share of setbacks in 2007 but in the end we got a lot of core features built, went live in July, made key improvements to our homepage and Yellow Pages, and started to make a name for ourselves by running around town with a camera and a cheesy-looking sign. Our most recent project, the New Year’s Eve Guide, has been a great success with over 1,000 page views over a two-week span. Next year we’ll be shooting for 5x that amount!
2008 is going to be awesome. We have more seasonal guides planned starting with Valentine’s Day, and we’ll be working hard to draw lots of attention to our new-and-improved Event Calendar. We’ll also be opening up our Yellow Pages to businesses that want to get an edge over their competition and that means better content for our users.
As we close the year out, we’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has given us a look, and thanks to all of you who have told your friends about us! Our success depends entirely on your support, and so far I’d say things are looking pretty good.
Happy New Year!!
I’ve spent most of this week making calls to bars, clubs, and restaurants around town to get them onboard with our first-ever New Year’s Eve Guide. We’re putting this together on kind of short notice (didn’t even think to do it until about 10 days ago), so it won’t be very fancy. It will, however, clue you in to what’s happening at various spots around town on the biggest party night of the year.
It’s free for businesses to be listed in our guide and most of them are taking advantage of the offer (it’s free advertising, why not!). Our list of venues is only about halfway there right now but it already includes something for just about everyone and every budget. Here’s a sneak peak at our list so far:
Not bad, huh?! The Naperville New Year’s Eve Guide will be available at http://www.naperthrill.com/nye. Right now all you’ll see there is our page template, but we’re hoping to have it filled in by this weekend.
EDIT: The NYE Guide is live! We’ve got a total of 20 venues listed which is about what we were looking for as it’s our first time doing this kind of content. Hope it helps you figure out where to spend the last night of 2007!
Dang, two whole months without a post. Well we’re back - hooray for us! I know, try to contain your excitement 
So here’s the latest update…
You can now edit & delete classified ads and events… FINALLY! This might seem like a small thing, but if you were one of the people who posted classified ads on our site and couldn’t make changes, it’ll be a welcome feature to have around the next time you put up an ad. Editing Napertube videos will be possible later on down the road, but that’s a much lower priority thing than some other stuff we have up our sleeve.
Also, if you think the Last Fling pictures on our homepage look out of place, you’re not alone. I headed downtown with my camera a couple weeks ago… it was the day after Thanksgiving and I was expecting to be dodging manic shoppers but it was actually kind of dead! Huh? It was pretty cold - in the 30s - so maybe everyone went to Fox Valley instead. Too bad for them since I made a fancy new “I (heart) Naperthrill.com” sign for people to pose with! It looks kind of cheesy, but it took me a long time to make and don’t even get me started on the mess from all the glitter that I used on the letters
More recently, as in last weekend, my brother Pat and I drove around town and dropped small stacks of flyers wherever local businesses would let us. Good idea right? Yeah, it was, but it would have been a great idea if there hadn’t been a huge ice storm that blew through town! Ugh. The snow/sleet mixture started falling around midday and within a couple of hours Naperville had become an icy hell! Cars were sliding all over the place and just walking in and out of stores was risky business. We literally couldn’t have picked worse weather for this mission, but in the end I think it was worth it. A lot of businesses very graciously allowed us to leave our flyers with them which was pretty cool.
As I was running around Naperville’s Last Fling with my crappy little digital camera last weekend, I was taking down email addresses so that I could let people know when their picture went live on the Naperthrill.com homepage. If you’re one of those people, I haven’t emailed you yet because we’re about to implement a major site improvement and I want to make sure that it works before sending 40 emails asking people to come visit us!
The improvement that we’re testing right now is Edit/Delete. This feature will allow you to edit your classified ads, video posts, and events. See, if I email 40 people, and then each one of those people tells 2 friends, and so on and so on… you’ve seen that old ’70s Faberge shampoo commercial, right? Well, the point is that we just want to make sure that our new feature works right before drawing a crowd.
Sorry if you’ve been waiting with bated breath! Emails will be going out as soon as our testing is done. Let’s end this post with one of my favorite pics from Last Fling 2007:
Chillin’ with Ma at Rosebud
It’s no secret that we’re a small operation, and being small is both good and bad. The upside is that we can make decisions quickly and we have the freedom to do absolutely anything we want. This freedom has allowed us to build a very good site and, going forward, it will allow us to shape it into something really kickass.
The downside of being small is that we don’t have tons of cash. Like any small business, we have to take advantage of every opportunity to raise public awareness that we exist, especially when those opportunities don’t cost money. Bootstrapping our way up isn’t easy, but that’s the situation for now. We’re telling people about Naperthrill.com through Facebook and MySpace, we’ll be spreading the word by running around at The Last Fling with cameras (just like we did at Ribfest)… and we’re also asking Naperville-area craigslist users to post their wares on our site.
If getting an occasional email from me via your craigslist ads is unpleasant, please accept my apologies. You have NOT been placed on any email lists, and you’re only getting the email because you’re advertising something *right now*. I do try to avoid sending multiple emails to the same person by looking for patterns in the ad text and/or location, but craigslist’s anonymous email addresses make this extremely difficult.
I know we’re kind of breaking some rules here, but it’s a very temporary phase and we’re really not trying to stuff your inbox with crap! Quite the contrary. So please don’t be mad at us, ok? 
I was at Starbuck’s in downtown Naperville yesterday. Didn’t need to pull out the laptop while I was there, but I know they charge for wifi access.
After leaving Starbucks, I stopped for lunch at BD’s Mongolian BBQ. Free wifi! Yeah, you don’t go to BD’s to drink coffee and read the Sun, but it’s the principle here that counts.
If you’ve posted classified ads on Naperthrill and can’t figure out how to edit or delete your stuff, fear not: that functionality is coming soon!! In fact, it’s been under development for a little while now and we hope to have it available by the end of August. But wait! There’s more! Not only are we building edit/delete tools, but we’re also going to have a “repost” feature available so that your ad doesn’t get lost in the shuffle when other ads push yours down the list. Cool, huh?
In the meantime, if you need to make changes or just kill an ad entirely, you can email us through the Contact Us form on our site and we’ll get it taken care of right away.
Social networking is starting to look like it really is the wave of the future, so if you’re on Facebook or MySpace please find us and add us to your friends list! Here’s how:
Facebook: Just search for “naperthrill.com” - we’re in the Chicago, IL network
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/naperthrilldotcom
Add us now! DO IT!! 
So the other night I was feeling industrious and I fired off at least 150 emails to craigslist users who were selling stuff in Naperville. I was asking them to repost their ads on Naperthrill.com and on Monday I woke up to a bunch of replies saying that our classifieds wasn’t working!! Aaaarrrrgh.
The problem was caused by some other work that had been done on the site over the weekend, and we didn’t know that it had affected stuff the way it did. Kudos to Patrick, our engineer, for fixing the problem quickly! Whew. We’ll never know how many people tried to post ads and just never said anything when they couldn’t, but the good news is that the people who did email me back seemed pretty understanding of the fact that we’re just getting started and still working through some issues.
The moral of this story for us is that we gotta be more careful and do a lot more testing when there are major code changes. The moral of this story for our users is that if you have a problem with our site, you gotta tell us about it!! (pretty please?!) If those people hadn’t emailed me about the problem with classifieds, it might still be busted. So… to all those who brought the problem to our attention… thank you!!
Email sucks. This blog gives us a way to have an ongoing dialogue with our users. So speak up!
