Embedding Youtube and other such items into your Qlubb

Many of you might not know that you can embed HTML into various parts of Qlubb. What this means is that you can embed videos, photos, etc. into your Qlubb site to enrich your group's site.

Areas such as the description and the "Useful things" can accept code that can pull in content on the Qlubb site. For example, here's a clip from the latest American idol pulled in from Youtube.



If you would like to embed this on your Qlubb site, just follow the instructions on:

http://www.youtube.com/sharing

Since this is generic HTML, you can embed all sorts of other things into your site. FOr instance, here's a small widget from http://www.widgetbox.com that does a little puzzle. Remember you can often interact with the widget and never have to leave the Qlubb site to do so.



You can also embed maps. Here's a quick writeup that discusses how to embed a google map right in your site. For events, it's a great way to put in the location -- people can interact with the map and find driving directions directly from the site - a good convenience.

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72644

If you have any fun or cool and useful applications that you've embedded, please let us know. We'd love to share what your favorite embedded codes are for Qlubb. Have fun!

Talking to our users...

We had a great chance to talk to some of our users recently to get a better understanding of how they are using Qlubb. We're always interested in learning more about who our users are and how we can make their lives easier.

Many of our users are very busy people trying to juggle the demands of family and in some cases a career. We find that they are the organizers of many activities -- for their kids and for their community. Most found Qlubb through a referral either through a friend or through an Internet recommendation. We're really glad to hear this since we haven't done much marketing as of yet and have been relying on word of mouth. If you are a member of Qlubb, we encourage you to look at using Qlubb for your other groups that you may be participating in. One thing that we've seen time and time again in Qlubb are that members are busy and active people so you are a part of a lot of clubs, organizations, associations, groups, etc. etc.

What's to like about Qlubb? We heard from our users that it saves them time, helps them get organized and gets everyone on the same page. We tried to make the process of "getting on" as quick, easy and painless as possible not only for the "heroic few" who are organized and making things happen, but also for the members of the Qlubb who interact with the system every day.

Another theme we heard is that groups tend to have members with varying levels of technical skills. Qlubb provides a great way for even those who are not very technically savvy, to be able to get on, figure out how to use it in a few minutes and start contributing. We hope to make things even easier even as we add more capabilities -- it's an important rule for us to keep things as simple and easy as possible.

Thanks again Qlubb users for providing us with your valuable insight. We're here for you! We love to hear from you so please let us know if you have any ideas, thoughts, etc.

Copy Events

A number of users wanted to create regular ongoing events but that had different task owners for them. In one example, they wanted to do a carpool but have different people pick up different people on different weeks. Also, another play group had the ubiquitous Costco run that parents volunteered to do but that they wanted different people to be assigned to the run.

So we created a new Copy Events feature so that you can easily copy the events but without copying the task assignments. You can copy the events daily, weekly, every 2 weeks, every 4 weeks, monthly and yearly. Give it a spin and let us know if you like it and most importantly how we can improve it.

New Features Rolled Out

Hello Fellow Qlubbers.

Last night we rolled out a number of changes that we hope will make your group even more productive. We also apologize for a few hours of downtime in the morning, east coast time so we hope that this did not inconvenience anyone. We will continue to improve our operations so that we minimize downtime as much as possible.

The main new feature we rolled out is the ability to create public websites directly from your private website. This means that with just a click of a checkbox, you can get a working publicly available website automatically generated from the content of your private, password protected website. No more webmasters required, no more onerous content updates to reflect new content. We hope it makes your life easier!

Note that all existing Qlubbs automatically have the Public functionality turned off so nothing is exposed. In order to turn it on, you just need to go to the Admin tab and click on the Public checkbox. Once this occurs, you can publish specific events, member information, blurbs and useful things as publicly available. Things not marked public will not be displayed on the public site and only be available on the private, password-protected site.

The public site is searchable and can be reached at http://yourqlubbname.qlubb.com.

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Did you know that most of the Qlubb fields can input HTML. You can therefore embed your favorite youtube video, javascript badge, widgets, etc. The description, useful things and many other areas of the site can input the necessary code snippets to provide this functionality.


If you have any feedback on how to improve this feature (or any other feature), please let us know at help@qlubb.com. We'd love to hear from you.