I distinctly remember a number of visits to the local 31 Flavors ice cream shop as a youngster. I mean right there in the name of the place, it shouts: “Sure, you’re stuck with your school/ job/ life, but here we have more choices for you than you have whims.”

Going through a box of keepsakes this summer, I stumbled upon a coupon to the old haunt. It looked crisp, but was slightly expired: 1983. Such a loss.

Back to the namesake: THIRTY ONE FLAVORS. The extravagance of choice. Now, choice can also be a daily source of unnecessary mental strain. That flip-side belongs in a blog post for another day, but I’ll say one more thing about it. When it came to soft-serve, I was always the “chocolate-vanilla swirl” guy because I was, to put it plainly, indecisive in such matters.

But what do distant memories of frozen sugar-milk puffed with air have to do with bebepool? Fair enough.

So bebepool.com just got a lot more choice built in. From the beginning you could craft your own introduction and change the title of your pool, but all those burning questions that make up the friendly contest: DOB, boy or girl, length, weight … nine in all – those were written in stone and required upon participants submitting a guess.

Now you decide. The administrator of each pool can, via the control panel, turn on/off any combination of these available pool elements:

 
Here’s an example pool using a custom selection of components.

The cherry on top (or maybe you’re all about the chocolate sprinkles) is you can now Lock your pool if that’s helpful at any point. You can unlock it just as easily. Previously, you could only prevent further guess entries if you completed the pool which means putting in the actual results, at which point it’s all over (well, until next time). Now just Lock/Unlock your pool at will via the control panel. Handy, right? That’s the hope.

Technically, the upgrade to bebepool has been operational for three days now. And though the sample size is small, this statistic really speaks to how much demand there was for this level of customization:

73% of new pools opted to change the default settings via the new Select Pool Components feature

If you have used or are currently using bebepool.com as a fun way to engage your family and friends with the joy of expecting a new daughter or son: Thank you. It was at least 30 hours of work (late-night programming time mostly) and worth every minute knowing that the most requested change to bebepool was materializing.

So, bebepool community, what’s next on the list, what change to bebepool.com would most useful to you? Please let me know (leave a blog comment below or use the Contact form).

Micah
bebepool.com creator / administrator

PS. Incidentally, the ice cream cone was more or less popularized in North America because someone had a crazy idea on how the ice cream guy and the penny waffle guy could together fashion a concession treat that would fetch a handsome 10 cents. See, they were busy innovating and whatnot—who had time to worry about enforcing silly expiry dates. But no bitterness here, no sir.

Dear Bebepool Community,

Thanks
I want to start by extending my thanks to you for being part of bebepool.com, by using it to add that extra bit of fun for all your family and friends excited with you for the new child entering your life.

Trouble in the Engine Room
If you’ve stopped for a visit at the site either last Friday or Monday this week, you probably noticed some bold, red typeface status message saying the site is “Offline for Maintenance.”

Initially, the technical problem began and was resolved Friday. There was an application performance issue that boiled down to one database query seriously lacking optimization. All pool accounts were being selected yet only one record truly needed to be. With the sustained growth of bebepool.com, memory consumption reached a point whereby the inefficient code became a noticeable problem. I made the necessary code changes and it was back online within about two hours. There’s been little to no downtime in the four plus years bebepool.com has been live and kicking, but even so I do everything I can to keep the ship constantly on course so everyone can enjoy the ride.

So Monday rolls around and there’s a problem again. But this time it’s really a human to human communications issue – there was an incorrect assumption between me and the the bebepool.com hosting service provider regarding file permissions and moving files around. That was sorted out soon enough. The only thing left before returning to normalcy was to rewrite some code which, upon a deeper look, was impacting the User Sign-up / Create a Pool function. That was ironed out by late evening Monday.

Stay Aware and Informed
For future reference, you can visit:

• The Blog: http://wittman.org/tag/bebepoolcom/ (using the bebepoolcom tag) for site status updates.
• @bebepool – follow on twitter for important updates.

Once Again…
Thank you again for choosing bebepool.com to celebrate your kids. I had so much fun building this technology for the birth of my own sons, I simply had to share it with others.

Please feel free to leave comments or questions at the bottom of this blog post. Your feedback really is valuable to me and the success of this resource.

Micah
bebepool.com creator / administrator

Some bebepool.com stats (courtesy of Google Analytics):

Visits

• First half of 2008 compared to same in 2009: +181%

Pageviews

• First half of 2008 compared to same in 2009: +195%

Traffic Source (referrer): Change in % of Visits

• Google (organic search): -21%
• MySpace: -16%
• Facebook: +231%

Custom filtered, linkable gallery listings of your SmugMug photo and video collection.

EDIT 2009-02-28: The beta is now here: SmugScope.

Actually there were no externally visible changes made. At this point I haven’t burdened pool entry participants with any new hoops to jump through (such as CAPTCHAS). However, if more advanced spamming crops up, a new strategy may incorporate a verification step. We shall see.

Also made a couple small improvements including PDF (printer friendly version) rendering. If you were logged in as admin when you clicked the Printer Friendly link and printed a hard copy of your pool, then please check it out again. There were superfluous elements that cluttered up the appearance in the PDF which are gone now.

And a brand new feature was added recently: “friendfeed support” (see FAQ – Share Flickr/Picasa Photos, Facebook Status Updates. I’ll devote an entire blog post in due course. As a pool administrator you can go into your control panel to start using it, if that is you’re interested in displaying your own blog posts, status updates, photos, etc directly in your bebepool page. Any feedback from you early adopters is greatly valued (please leave a comment below).

It’s been an exciting year as discovery and usage of bebepool.com has continually grown. It’s extremely heart warming to see that expectant families seem to be having a fun, interactive experience.

Happiest holidays and may you and your family have a fine new year in 2009.

Exciting stuff, I know.

But, it does make a difference particularly to citizens of the web starting new baby pools. The old login/user management mechanisms were a bit of a retrofit in the first place, at times causing confusion and hindering pool admin logins.

Things are different now.

For one, the new signup procedure does not require the email confirmation dance, which 1) Drives some people nuts just on principle and 2) Said email confirmations nose-diving into spam folders certainly bodes not well.

A CAPTCHA (contorted text images) was added in lieu of email confirmations – still drives some people batty, but something has to get wheeled out to keep back the visigoth spammers at the gates. So there’s that.

Your friend in time of need, the “Reset Password” feature, is straight-forward now (was, at best, user-unfriendly). There’s still room for improvement yet, but a healthy stride was made here.

Besides user/login changes, a few minor improvements were done to the Send Email feature (pool invites and messages to existing participants). There’s always been a preview of your email message about to be sent out, but now there’s an “Edit” button to go back and fine-tune the text which means you don’t have to re-type anything as you did before if you simply stepped back using your browser’s Back button (please don’t use the Back button).

So there you have it. Bebepool: Same great taste, just a little more filling.

First, introductions: I’m Micah Wittman, the creator and administrator of bebepool.com.

Here’s the story of bebepool.com: it came to be leading up to the birth of our first son. This would be the year 2000, or in Internet Years: about the Iron Age (I wasn’t on Bronze-Age dialup any more!).

I was inspired by my good friend, Dana, who wrote a simple baby pool application (built with Active Server Pages—”Classic ASP”) for his “baby website” (also for his first son, as it turned out).

My first implementation was no more than a form-to-email ASP script. I’d receive a guess by email, then manually update the static html in the ASP file.

“Guess Table” – the Proto-Bebepool

It was an exhilarating experience—taking the <spoken with Grand Canyon reverb> world wide web into my own hands, and helping my family and friends come together online to celebrate and anticipate the birth of our first child. You could feel the power of the internet as communications tool chipping away at the geographic barriers between us and our immediate families, which in our case is thousands of kilometers (sorry, don’t have the conversion to furlongs for those desperate for imperial units of measure).

Message on original “Guess Table”

This page was designed to give our family and friends–you–an opportunity to take your best guess at some soon to be discovered statistics about our baby. Everyone’s predictions will be shown in the table below. I must mention that this page is inspired by the Aldom’s site (friends of ours).

A snippet of information that might be helpful: The due date is November 17th.

(For those with a competitive bent, stay posted for an official guess analysis. The person with the highest score* will be appropriately credited on this page).

*The panel of judges, I and Laura, will calculate the score based on the following rules: each question is worth one point; each question is in the form “Multiple Choice” or “Closest Answer Takes All”. The nature of the “Closest Answer” form is that only one person per question can score the point–the answer nearest to reality (at the discretion of the panel) takes it. Exciting stuff, eh!

While this was great and all, there was manual work to transcribe and update, but more than that I wished it could be real-time: you make a guess, you see it on the web page moments later.

The Late Iron Age

During the months before our second son’s birth, in 2003, I discovered and utilized an open source web application called, at the time, phpSurveyor (apparently, now LimeSurvey). It worked not badly – it was a full-fledged system that allowed one to build custom online surveys. It did the job, and even provided basic statistics for you; it was also not hard to hack in a few simple customizations. I even setup a couple surveys/pools for friends who were expectant parents at that time.

This got me thinking about building something from scratch, putting in features I thought important, but not available elsewhere (like ‘comments’) or only available if you pay (‘PDF printing’). I imagined it to be a multi-user, self-serve application dedicated to running baby pools. And so, the coding began (in PHP).

The Roman Era

When son number three was on the horizon, in 2005, I had a working bebepool.com and put it to good use. I opened it to the public—every bit of it free, and still is— and it’s been going ever since.

If you like statistics, read the next part, if not, please feel free to stretch you legs and retrieve a cold beverage to enjoy – we’ll be right back.

Rate of New Pools Starting

# of New Pools – Year to Year Comparison
2007 compared to 2006	⇧ 43%
Jan–Jul 2008 compared to 2007	⇧ 131%

We’re only half-way through 2008, and activity on the site has never been more bustling.

Wrap This Bebe Up

The phrase It’s a privilege can sound trite, but I’ll risk it here: It is a privilege to help others create a social web experience surrounding such a profound event as welcoming a new son or daughter into one’s family.

Thank you to everyone who gave bebepool.com a spin, and certainly those who stuck around to really made it your own micro-community for a time. I hope you’ll be back as you’re family tree grows.

Your feedback is absolutely welcome—comment (below) on the content of this post, and/or any points of discussion on aspects of the site you like/don’t like. Ideas on how to make bebepool.com a better place?—would love to hear from you.