News & Updates
We pledged to build you a better Blinksale, and yesterday we started pushing code to do just that. We moved to some new (faster! zimzow!) hardware and pushed a big code update. Basically a rewrite of the app to make it ready for the new features we want to implement.
Along the way, we broke some things, and we're sorry for any inconvenience you had in trying to invoice yesterday. We will say that you guys are pretty awesome in helping us fix things fast. Please keep using the page at http://getsatisfaction.com/blinksale or emailing us at support@blinksale.com. Super helpful. And we appreciate your timely input.
We had a handful of you have login problems after the update, and here's a simple fix:
Clear your cookies in your browser.
Close the browser.
Reopen the browser and log back in.
Start your engines.
Now, to the good stuff. We've talked to lots of you over the past six weeks or so, and it's clear what type of things you want to see Blinksale do.
First, we're going to extend and deepen the partnerships we have with apps like Basecamp, Tempo and other awesome partners who work in tandem with us to make your business life simpler. Not only will we work on designing better interactions with these partners, we'll be updating our API to give partners more options. We are big believers in pieces of the Web working together to create great moments.
Then, we need to add light versions of features you want to extend the Blinksale experience through the entire invoicing cycle: estimates, expenses, time tracking, additional payment options.
And don't worry. We hear you loud & clear that you don't want Blinksale to add a ton of features & get crufty. We know why you're here, and any feature we ship will have to keep the Blinksale mojo working: simple, easy, get you right back to creating great work.
Finally, there are 'everyday' things that just need to work better. Simpler, more beautiful. So we'll be doing some redesign that you hopefully won't even notice because it will just make things flow better. Plus, we need to update some of the design options you have. Blinksale made its name originally because of the beautiful design work you could use as your own, and it's time to revisit that a bit.
And, yes, we know you want an iPhone app. We do, too, and it's in the cards.
If you have ideas or feedback on these priorities, you can let us know via email or the Get Satisfaction page. It's going to get a lot more interesting around here.
Posted by Brian Oberkirch
2009 Jun 30 in News & Updates
Praise & Props
Heads up, folks. We'll be working on some upgrades and maintenance for Blinksale on Sunday, June 21st from 7 to 8 AM EST. So, have some coffee and read the paper, and you'll be able to get right back to creating invoices after that.
Posted by Brian Brasher
2009 Jun 19 in Praise & Props
News & Updates
We hate downtime. Just like you, it makes us a little nuts when the Web apps we run our lives with aren't available right now. Because that's when you need them, right?
We're reviewing all the ways we can make Blinksale better, including minimizing any inconvenience to you, the folks who use Blinksale to get paid. We know it's vital to your business. We get it. And we're going to address it as aggressively as it makes sense.
Sometimes things will happen. The weekend before last, the data center which hosts Blinksale had a network issue that kept you from doing your work on this site for far too many hours. While we can't prevent this type of thing, we can talk to you about it. And we will.
You can follow @blinksale on Twitter for all the latest news, including any status updates about the service. (Yes, we get the irony of using Twitter to talk about downtime.) We'll also use our Get Satisfaction page in the same way, and it also lets us go deeper into issues you want to talk about. Finally, you can always call me (214.580.2002) or email me (brian@blinksale.com) to ask questions.
Posted by Brian Oberkirch
2009 May 27 in News & Updates
Praise & Props
Well, hello there. I'm Brian Oberkirch, the new Managing Director of Blinksale. I'm new because Doublewide Labs has acquired Blinksale. What does this mean for you? It means you have the chance to help us build a better Blinksale, starting now.
I was one of the first users of Blinksale when it launched back in the day. I've used it since then to run my own consultancy, and, like you, I appreciate how simple it is to just get down to business. But, I've got ideas! I'm sure you do, too. I want to hear them. Together, we can build on the great work Josh, Scott and the great team at Firewheel did to make Blinksale so loved.
So, let's get started. Feel free to shoot me ideas at brian@blinksale.com, or give me a call at 214.580.2002. You can still always use support@blinksale.com for an everyday support issue. And see that little feedback tab over there at the right? It goes right to our page at Get Satisfaction, where we are going to be gathering all the know how from our community of Blinksale users. We think it's going to be a great place for all of us to share ideas about making Blinksale even more awesome. Oh, and I'll be pumping out more frequent updates at our Twitter page.
Posted by Brian Oberkirch
2009 May 26 in Praise & Props
Tips & Tricks
While Blinksale does a killer job at creating, managing and sending your invoices, it doesn't yet have a built-in time tracking feature. We've preferred to leave that to task to a few other remarkable services.
One unique new time tracking service you might not be aware of is Tempo. Tempo is a simple and flexible, but one of its more compelling features is the ability it gives you to enter your time away from your desktop web browser via mobile phone, SMS, email or Twitter.
And after you're done tracking your time you can use Tempo to create a Blinksale invoice in no time at all. We think this is pretty cool. Give Tempo a look.
Posted by Josh Williams
2008 Jun 03 in Tips & Tricks
News & Updates
Today we're adding support for OpenID in Blinksale. OpenID is a standard for single sign-on — allowing you to log in to any supported site without remembering a separate username and password for each one. Blinksale is just the latest among many OpenID-enabled sites, including 37Signals' Basecamp and Highrise, and our own IconBuffet.
To start using OpenID with Blinksale, the first step is to get your own OpenID address. In fact, you probably already have one: any AIM screen name is an OpenID (like openid.aol.com/screenname) and a TypeKey account can be used, too (like profile.typekey.com/username). There are dozens of other free OpenID providers; two that we recommend are MyOpenID and Verisign. Choose a provider, and you'll get an identity URL that can be used at any OpenID-enabled site.
Then simply link your OpenID to your Blinksale account. To do that, click the "People" tab in your Blinksale account, then click the "Edit" link next to your name. Enter your OpenID address on the right side of the screen, and you'll be off.
Once your OpenID is linked to Blinksale, you'll be able to use it every time you log in to Blinksale. At the login form, just click "Login with an OpenID" and enter your OpenID.
Posted by Scott Raymond
2007 Jul 09 in News & Updates
Praise & Props
For starters, a big thank you to everyone who voted in CNET's Webware 100 competition. Today CNET announced that Blinksale received one of the Webware 100 awards for the Productivity and Business category.
We're thrilled to be a part of this inaugural group of companies alongside Google, Ebay, Microsoft, PayPal, Amazon, and 37signals. Thank you for helping us make Blinksale the easiest way to send invoices online. We're looking forward to the future as we continue to improve our remarkable service, If you're looking for a press release, you can find one here.
Also, if you take the time to watch the video here, you'll find Rafe Needleman also notes Blinksale as one of this Editor's Choice sites. Thanks again everyone.
Posted by Josh Williams
2007 Jun 18 in Praise & Props
Praise & Props
Blinksale has been selected as a finalist for 2007's Webware 100, a competition sponsored by CNET. If Blinksale helps you save time invoicing your clients and keeping your cash flowing, we'd appreciate your vote in the Productivity category.
We're very excited about the new couple of months here. We have a handful of new and oft-requested features, UI improvements, and some secret sauce coming down the pipe in the near future. Stay tuned as we continue to make Blinksale the easiest way to send invoices online.
Go vote for Blinksale!
Posted by Josh Williams
2007 May 23 in Praise & Props
News & Updates
One of the oft-requested features for Blinksale is now a reality. Today we are pleased to announce that you can now send PDF invoices by email in addition to our standard HTML-formatted invoices.
Many of you have told us about your picky clients who must have their invoices as PDFs "or else", and honestly we know what you're talking about. We have a couple of clients like that as well. We hope this will prove to be a very valuable addition for those who need a little PDF oomph with your billing.
PDF invoicing is available on all Gold and Platinum level Blinksale accounts. If you use the coupon code INEEDPDF2007 when you upgrade your account, you'll receive $10 off your first month's subscription for your new plan.
To send a PDF invoice, you simply need to create an invoice as you normally would, only now when you send it you simply check the Send As PDF box. Pretty easy, eh? We hope you enjoy. Thanks for using Blinksale!
Posted by Josh Williams
2007 Apr 24 in News & Updates
News & Updates
Hello friends! This is a simple reminder to let you know that Blinksale will be offline tonight (Friday, Dec 8) starting at 10pm CST. The downtime may last as long as 4 hours, but in reality we anticipate that this update will go much faster. All the same, it's a Friday night. You shouldn't be invoicing your clients anyhow... go have some fun.
And just so you know, if your account has automated recurring invoices scheduled to be sent during the downtime, no worries. They will simply be sent a couple hours later than normal. They will still be sent though.
We're grateful for your flexibility and understanding as we continue to improve the easiest way to send invoices online. Have fun tonight!
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Dec 08 in News & Updates
News & Updates
We know that many Blinksale subscribers also use the popular Basecamp project management software from 37signals. In fact, we use Basecamp ourselves. We also know that it can be frustrating to enter identical client contact information into multiple web-based applications like Blinksale or Basecamp. In fact, it's a real drag.
Today we're pleased to announce the first round of Basecamp integration for Blinksale. Now it's super-easy to import client names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses directly from Basecamp in your Blinksale account for painless invoicing. Simply add your Basecamp account details to your Blinksale Settings page, and we take care of the rest.
Now, when you create a new invoice in Blinksale, you can quickly import a client from Basecamp (and even synchronize that client with an existing record in Blinksale). Invoicing your Basecamp clients couldn't be easier.
Soon, we'll be adding support for Basecamp projects and time-tracking, creating the ultimate one-two punch: Get your job done—and get paid.
Update: Use the coupon code IHEARTBASECAMP and receive $10 off your first monthly charge when you create a new Blinksale account or upgrade your current Blinksale account to new plan. The coupon is only good for new paid accounts and upgrades, and can only be used once.
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Nov 09 in News & Updates
News & Updates
A handful of Blinksale accounts have been experiencing some very slow load times on the Invoices page as of late. Saving invoices has also been problematic for folks with lots of invoices in their account as well. We're aware of both of these issues, and the root cause is basically older servers in need of an upgrade.
We've been planning said server upgrade since July, but a delay in the shipment of our desired hardware has backed us off longer than we had hoped. The good news is that the new hardware is finally on order. The bad news is that it's still backordered a couple more weeks. We're terribly excited about the upgrade because it's going to dramatically improve performance. We just wish we could've made this move earlier.
The growth is a wonderful problem, but we're anxious to get this resolved. We've been working on software fixes as well to help smooth things along, but the bulk of the improvements will be coming in a couple weeks. Thanks to everyone for your patience in the interim.
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Oct 30 in News & Updates
Praise & Props
Designing the Obvious, a new book by Robert Hoekman, Jr., proclaims itself as "a common sense approach to web application design." The book aims to help designers and developers build web-applications that are intuitive and easy-to-use.
Blinksale is featured prominently in the book, offering some insight into how we crafted and designed Blinksale to be the easiest way to send invoices online. The book also praises the design approaches from our Getting Real friends Basecamp and Backpack, as well as offering plenty of real world examples from applications like Gmail and Squidoo. It's always a pleasure to receive outside praise for the results of many sleepless nights designing Blinksale, and we're grateful Robert took notice of our work (a photo from the book).
Designing the Obvious seems to be the perfect companion for Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and if you're designing web applications you should definitely pick up a copy.
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Oct 18 in Praise & Props
Tips & Tricks
Free time-tracking service Time.onrails.org wins the prize for the first third-party time-tracking implementation for Blinksale. If you've been looking for a way to quickly add your time sheet data to Blinksale in order to invoice a client, your ship may have just come in.
We're excited about the future with Blinksale's easy to use API, and Time.onrails.org's time tracking implementation is just the beginning of the great Blinksale solutions that will be coming down the pipe. Great work guys!
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Oct 06 in Tips & Tricks
News & Updates
In the spirit of making it even easier to send your invoices online, today we're pleased to announce the public release of the Blinksale API. We've been hard at work on this one for quite some time now, and we're thrilled today to roll out it.
We know of several third-party developers already building on top of the Blinksale platform, and we can't wait to see the solutions that come out of this release. We hope to release some examples of the API's use in the near future. If you have questions about the API or would like to brag about what you've done with it, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at "support [at] blinksale [dot] com".
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Oct 02 in News & Updates
Tips & Tricks
Inspired by Jon Hicks' Microformats Safari mockup, Left Logic has released a Microformats bookmarklet. The bookmarklet allows you to easily see a listing of all hCard formatted contacts on a web page, save those contacts as an .vcf file, then import that contact automatically in Address Book (if you're on a Mac). It's a pretty slick little piece of code, and it works just dandy with Blinksale (Blinksale supports Microformats, did you know?). Anyhow, the bookmarklet works in Safari and Firefox, but no word on IE6 support yet. You should probably check it out.
Just a hint: The best place to look for Microformats in Blinksale is your Invoice view (both client and vendor are formatted as hCard entries) or your People page (lots of hCards there).
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Sep 25 in Tips & Tricks
News & Updates
The Blinksale blog has been a bit quiet lately due to the arrival of a new baby here, so I've been a bit out of the office. On the development side though, the engines are churning, and it's time for me to catch up on a few of the recent additions.
First, we've added the long-awaited Invoice Notes field. Now you have a perfect place to store bank account details, additional invoice terms, or anything else you might like to have on your invoices at all times. You can also set your default Notes in your Settings page. It's a nice little feature for those who need it (which appears to be a large contingent of our international customers).
Also new to Blinksale is the new Create Invoice from Template feature. Many of you already use Blinksale's recurring templates to send repeating invoices on a regular schedule. Now you can use a recurring template to create a one-time invoice as well. Simply look for the New One-Time Invoice link on your recurring invoice page. We'll probably be renaming "Recurring Templates" to simply "Templates" soon to reflect this change.
Finally, many of you make Purchases from other Blinksale subscribers. You know that these purchases are stored in your Purchases tab. Now you can duplicate a purchase and create a new Invoice with the purchase data. This is perfect if you work with sub-contractors and need to turn around and bill that work to someone else. Duplicate your purchase, mark up the prices if need be, and send it on to your client.
And there you have the latest. More goodies are on the way, including the long-awaited API. It's very close now. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Sep 21 in News & Updates
News & Updates
We've been working on a handful of under-the-hood improvements to Blinksale, and Blinksale subscriber Jason mentioned that it might be nice to hear about those on the blog since its been a bit quiet on the blog lately. Great idea, Jason!
Those of you who follow our other product, IconBuffet, may be aware that we recently rolled out some major improvements to that website (AKA Refactoring to REST, for you nerdy types out there) that greatly improved the speed and performance of the application.
These improvements simplify code, improve performance, and make future updates easier to apply. We're now making these same improvements to Blinksale. Refactoring Blinksale will also give us a new, solid foundation to rebuild the Blinksale API from. We actually had a large chunk of the API completed, but put in on hold until this project is completed as they are tied together.
What does this all mean? Well, Blinksale is going to get a good bit faster soon. We're aware that larger accounts with potentially thousands of invoices can tend to bog down when viewing your invoices. This refactoring, coupled with a server upgrade in September will boost performance quite a bit. At the same time, we should be getting close on the API, so those of you chomping at the bit to integrate Blinksale with you favorite whatever will get your chance.
In the meantime, we're grateful for your patience, and wanted to keep you in the loop on the latest. Thanks for making Blinksale a success!
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Aug 03 in News & Updates
Tips & Tricks
Currently Blinksale does not really have an official way to create credits for client overpayments. However, Blinksale subscriber Matt Thomas has just posted a smart way to handle them yourself. We love it when we learn about folks using Blinksale in creative ways, and Matt is no exception.
So if your clients are sending you too much money (a good problem to have), check out Matt's client overpayment tip. I think you'll be glad you did. Thanks Matt!
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Jul 21 in Tips & Tricks
News & Updates
Boy, sometimes when it rains, it pours. On top of yesterday's bug (which is now fixed), it seems that the software we use to handle our support email has been errantly flagging some legitimate support email as spam.
That said, we just found a handful of messages from customers from weeks past this morning that we have never seen. This makes us feel pretty sick here. We make every effort to respond to support email in a very timely manner, and obviously for a few folks now, this hasn't happened. We're in the process of sorting through this mail, but we cannot guarantee we'll catch every one. We're disappointed in the way this has worked out.
If you've sent support email in the past and you still have an unresolved issue, please feel free to email us again. We will get back to you with a response. To those who have sent email, and have received no response, we apologize. It's no fun to be treated with silence. We're making steps to ensure no email gets left behind from now on. Thank you for your understanding.
Posted by Josh Williams
2006 Jul 06 in News & Updates
