MindMyHouse News

Finally, MindMyHouse goes mobile

Well, it didn’t take half long enough! Our apologies to our members near and far (we’re beaming out to you from sunny New Zealand, in case you didn’t know) as we have been aware for a while now that our growing community website wasn’t very cell phone (or other tablet or mobile device) friendly. While we don’t have the exact statistics (OK it’s around 43.19%) for the numbers of screen views you are making via different mobile devices versus laptop and desktop computers, many of you have no doubt been struggling away for some time trying to see our site on your little screens! All should be good now… You have probably noticed that MindMyHouse is finally mobile device friendly. Huzzah!

What does this mean for you, you ask? Our website will now look even more dashing on your cell phone or on what ever old or new techno gizmo you’re using to access and read your listings with. Phew! You can blame our humble web developer for the delay, who insists he was busying himself with other projects all this time. If you have any problems accessing our site on your mobile device, please let us know and we’ll try to fix it in a jiffy!

Better Support from us

OK, so your hardworking editor puts her hand up to admit that she can be a bit slow sometimes responding to all your requests for help. We heard you! It’s taken us a while but as of right now we have a shiny new virtual help desk. When you write to us directly at our dedicated support email address or via our support form, you should now receive an instant automated response from us telling you that a support ticket has been created for you and that your query is in our queue. That means your messages to us won’t ever feel as if they have been ‘lost’ and also gives us better tools to manage our all-important communication with our wonderful members. That’s you!

The photo gallery upload editor should now be working for 100% of our members

Our intrepid web developer, Alan, has been at the receiving end of more than a few emails from frustrated members trying (and failing) to upload photos to their listings on MindMyHouse. Unfortunately for them – and us – their efforts were apparently met with nothing but a very annoying white space on their screens where the photo editor should have been! While we have been cheerfully stepping into the fray to upload our members’ photos to their listings for them, the excellent news is that the problem is now fixed! *Does a little dance*

You probably don’t want to know the technical details but suffice to say that it was extremely difficult for us to reproduce the problem. Every time we tested our photo gallery upload editor, it worked! In every browser and in every operating system and with every device. Bah! If you have yet to upload photos to your listing, PLEASE give it a go right now and let us know if you encounter any problems. We are keen to hear from you – or not hear from you as the case may be – on the subject of this pesky old problem.

And what else?

We’ve been busy making a few other minor bug fixes and additions to our site recently. Here they are in all their glory:

• SAVING YOUR CHANGES FOR YOU The web developer has added a new feature that remembers anything you write into your listing template during a session, so all your wise words should still there next time you login to your account. Even if you accidentally navigated away from that page BEFORE SAVING IT. Pretty nifty huh? That should save some frustration…
• DO NOT REPLY REMINDER Alan has added a super-useful ‘Do-Not-Reply’ component to the email addresses we were using in our automated and other internal MindMyHouse mail. Occasionally, some of our members were hitting ‘reply’ to our automatically-generated and other internal mail which zapped their message back to us here at Support instead of to their hoped-for recipient. Ooops! This fix should help you to avoid that pitfall in the future. Now, if you hit reply to one of these ‘Do-Not-Reply’ email addresses, your message should bounce back to you in your personal inbox, so you’ll know to re-send it to the right person.
• ERRONEOUS ‘SENT MAIL ERROR’ IS NOW GONE DADDY GONE The web developer has removed an occasional and unnecessary error message that was popping up in some of your online MindMyHouse Message Centres when trying to send messages through our online system. The error message erroneously said ‘Message not sent’ when these messages had, in fact, been sent successfully. Gah! These things are sent to try us…
• WHERE’S DA GOOGLE MAP? Poor Alan got all sweaty trying to sort out ‘the mystery of the missing Google maps’ that some of you wrote to us about. He initially suspected we might have a bug in our system that was preventing some of our users from seeing the Google maps that are meant to accompany every listing. But after much polishing of his magnifying glass and setting of his protractor and compass points, Alan discovered that the mystery of the missing Google maps was due to something completely different altogether. Turns out that Google had added limits to the number of map views our site members were allocated in each 24-hour period. We politely asked Google if could they please increase our quota of daily map views for our members and they said yes!

We turned ELEVEN in February 2016!

Well, that first decade went pretty quickly, didn’t it? In a strange way, MindMyHouse feels like an intrinsic part of our growing family here in New Zealand. Long-time members may remember us blogging about the birth of our first baby, Marlena Jayne, all the way back in October 2003 while we were living in a tiny flat in snowy London, UK. In between bottle feeding, nappy changing and going out for brisk walks with our precious new baby, we were doing all the pre-planning and research work to build MindMyHouse Version One. And now Marlena is 12 and a half, thinks we are ‘weird’ and has her very own annoying sister! Wowsa.

Happy house sitting. Or best of luck with your sitters!

Susan Holtham & Alan Koeninger
aka the team at MindMyHouse