Just a quick announcement: We are in the final stages of upgrading our servers right now. Once this is done, there should be a noticeable improvement in the speed of the website. These changes will likely go into effect this weekend.

Due to some more advanced processing of receipts in our Receipt Mail-In scanning operations and a significant increase in volume of Receipt Mail-In envelopes, our servers have been a tad stressed. We like to think that it’s a good problem to have since it means we are growing and more and more people are catching on to the Shoeboxed idea. For those of you that have experience interruption in service this week because of this, I just want to say “thanks” for bearing with us a little bit.  We are working round the clock to make sure that Shoeboxed is a fast and convenient way for you to organize and manage your receipts. If you have any suggestions or comments, please send them to us at help@team.shoeboxed.com.

We appreciate very much when you contact us. After all, Shoeboxed is all about what you want it to be, so all your comments are read and responded to by our great customer support team as soon as possible.

Viva Shoeboxed!

Though we like to treat you right and surprise you with fancy graphs and sophisticated tracking tools, we also like to listen to you. Probably our most requested feature is something a little less flashy (literally and figuratively), and we’re happy to announce that it is finally here.

(See, I told you we’d be rolling out features faster than ever after we upgraded our back-end architecture.)

What is called Browser History Management will now make it a lot easier to organize your receipts, as the website will remember what page in your receipt table you were working on when you are viewing your individual receipt.

So when you click a row in your receipt table, you will be taken to the individual receipt page as always. Now when you navigate back to the receipt table, you will be on the same page (and not set by default to the first page), the number of receipts you were viewing will be the same as before (and not set back to the default of 15 receipts).

Seems simple, but several of you that I talked to on the phone told me that it was annoying when you were trying to organize receipt in order when you kept getting sent back to a table with only your 15 most recent receipts. We got it on our features list and got it implemented right away.

Let me know if you have any other ideas. I’m happy to get them on our features list for you.

Who is he? Find out in the comments.

We’ve been working hard over here at Shoeboxed trying to make the site run faster for you. Today we launched an improved version of our web application that processes things quite a bit faster than before. Though the design is still the same sleek Shoeboxed design you’ve come to love, the backend of our website is leaner and meaner than it used to be. Expect more improvements in the coming weeks in this department. Also, we’ll be developing a lot of new features more quickly in the very immediate future. If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see most come to Shoeboxed, let us know at help@team.shoeboxed.com. Also feel free to call us anytime (we’re most always here, but you can definitely catch us between 9 a.m. and 2 a.m. EST).

We’re excited to bring you a better Shoeboxed and to continue to help you scan and organize your receipts and put them to work for you.

Elevators are an interesting thing. When you live on a building that’s more than a few stories high, you pretty much have to use them any time you want to do anything. Everyone else who lives in your building has to use them, too. For the most part, you have no idea who these other people in your building are, but the elevator forces you to interact in the most awkward of ways.

When you first hit the call button for the elevator and someone else walks up, there is always the uncomfortable half-smile and nod. There’s really nothing to say; the most you can hope for in terms of meaningful dialogue is something along the lines of:

“Hey, how are you doing?”
“Good, just waiting for the elevator.”
“Oh cool, me too.”
Awkward silence.

The awkwardness intensifies when you actually get in the elevator. Now you are in a confined space with someone you have nothing to talk about with, and the seconds stretch out into mini-eternities. I have a theory that time slows down in elevators in some kind of cosmic joke just to make my life more uncomfortable.

Even better, German elevators in particular happen to have been designed by the same people who brought you sardine cans and matchboxes. Seriously, cramming six strangers into a broom closet and riding to the 19th floor is one of the most tense situations you can imagine. And yet, for all this, you still smile and say goodbye when another person steps out. It’s the same tone you use when you have just shared a moment, but in this case all you shared was standing too close to one another and trying to avoid eye contact. It truly is bizarre.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have much experience choosing a secure data center to host a website. I leave that task up to our experienced founders, programmers, and other computer-literate team members. But I must say, the process is fascinating.

It’s like when you’re going out of town and you need to find a place for your dog to stay. You want a kennel where it’ll be safe, and happy–but let’s get real, it is a dog. You don’t have all that much money. I mean you hope the thing gets fed and walked, but you also hope you have enough cash left over to buy one of those sweet XL sombreros from Mexico. So you spend some time calling around to different kennels and asking some basic questions. Will Sparky see the light of day during his stay? Is his cage big enough for him to both stand and lay down? Will he be fed daily? The type of questions that any responsible and concerned owner would ask. But in shopping around, you’ll inevitably run into that one kennel–the one that offers your dog daily massages, dog bowls of Perrier, nightly “Yappy hour” social mixers, and one-on-one bedtime stories in the evening. “Welcome to The Lakeside Lofts at Kennelpark Manor, where trust, commitment and loving care will make your dog’s stay here just PAW-fect!”. You’re pretty sure they’re serious, and you’re pretty sure you just threw up in your mouth a little.

Believe it or not, we found the “Lakeside Lofts at Kennelpark Manor” of web hosts. The following is an excerpt from the section that outlines their security features:

“From the basics, such as 24/7/365 security and onsite network monitoring; to the advanced, such as strategically placed biometric palm and thumb scanners, extensive use of physical man traps, dual authentication access doors, and a state-of-the-art Altronix powered …” [link]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the train. Man traps? Does anyone know what that means? That was actually a rhetorical question, because I wikipedia-ed it. Although I still can’t tell you how or what these traps do, I do know that man traps that use deadly force are illegal in the United States. Looks like we’re going to have to look beyond the border. Good news is the more popular definition refers to the title of a season 1 episode from the original Star Trek series. There’s a joke there, but I’m too tired to look for it.

If someone has some advice for a good data center, it would be greatly appreciated–but at least for now, the search continues. Although I should probably mention, at this point, I’m much more interested in searching for the meaning of “Man Traps”. That might have to be a personal quest.Updates to come.