We’ve done some maintenance on Simpleweight.  It is now faster and better than ever.

Please let us know if you find any issues, and as always, let us know how we can help you make weight management simple.

I migrated from mongrel to passenger phusion in an effort to reduce our memory footprint and help stabilize simpleweight to make it easier to use.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’m still debating on the backend administration settings and what our next move is to help you maintain your weight.

Of course, if you have any suggestions on what we can do at simpleweight to help you with your weight management goals, let us know.

Thanks for now.  More to come…

Here’s what we have?  We’re currently a team of two, Ryan and Scott.

We’ve always felt we’ve been missing someone.  We need a Designer.
Help us convert our  Duumvirate into a Triumvirate.

If you’ve read Getting Real, we’re fond of small talented, hungry teams.  We stayed small on purpose, but it’s time to grow.  We’ve got the Developer (Ryan), We’ve got the Sweeper (Scott),  We’re missing the Designer (Possibly You).  I know its odd, I read stories of different designers having difficulty find back-end developers.  Not us,  We have the developers, we need a Designer who is creative, effective, efficient, and an awesome Web Application User Interface Specialist.

However, we don’t just want any ordinary web designer. Here are our needs:

• You are a designer who is passionate about Design. You read the popular design blogs, but you stay true to yourself.  Our individual lives, jobs, family life take priority, but your passion is so strong, that you are designing in your spare time.

• You are a designer who writes well and thinks.  We often communicate via email/chat.  So, clear concise writing is imperative.  We feel good writing demonstrates creative thinking. Finally, good writing helps grow a business with blogging, twitter, friendfeed, etc.

• You are a designer who wants to learn, experiment, and do.  If you look at our post:  Why Build Simpleweight – Defining Simple Weight Success, our number one goal and our number two goal details learning.  We built simpleweight to learn about ourselves, to learn about entrepreneurship, to learn about weight loss, and to learn new technology.  Learning happens by doing and experimenting.  So you must be a learner and a doer.

• You are a designer who has a broad list of passions including but definitely not limited to Health, Fitness, or Weight Loss.  We’re trying to help large numbers of total strangers achieve a healthful weight loss balance.  However, we’ve got a number of other ideas in our ten webs project that we’d like help on.

• You are a designer who lives in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago, but this is not really a requirement it is optional.

• You are a designer that is efficient yet exceptional with web and graphic design tools. We will be wowed by your ability to take designs and make them come to life into interfaces that people will want to use many times a day.

• Finally, You are a designer who is willing to work for FREE and become a partner in our Triumvirate. You think I’m kidding?   Simpleweight is more about helping others than making big dollars.  Yes, if we had 200 million users, we’d all be doing pretty good financially, but our hope is that those 200 million users are healthful and saving the economy money.  We’re not a non-profit company, we expect to make a profit.  Eventually, it is our desire for our websites, applications, and other projects to grow enough financially where we’d be able to decide whether we want full-time jobs or not.  Until that time comes, our profit is funneled back into the company to help more people.  We expect you to have a current income that is sustaining your lifestyle.

Now, we understand no one works for FREE.  What do you get in return for working on simpleweight?  You get an outlet for your passions: Design and Fitness.  You get to learn and grow your career.  You get experience that is unmatched in your current set-up, because you now become a ground-floor partner in a business that compliments your passions. You get untold rewards that are limited only in our collective creativity and ability to act.  How cool is that?  You also get some developers to help you take your ideas to market into real-live products. Yes, we’re open.  Our ideas become your ideas and vice versa.

Are we asking for too much?  We don’t think so.  If you do, then obviously, you’re not the right candidate.

Contact us – We’d love to hear from you, see your portfolio, or read your blog.  Tell us why you should become a member of our triumvirate?

I saw this cool, interactive, guided health tour of the body at NY Times.

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Other Simpleweight News:  We’re putting the final touches on our next Simpleweight upgrade.  What can you expect?

• Expect a new design.
• Expect a couple of new nutritional reports.
• Expect the ability to create your own public page.
• Expect a little bit of downtime of the blog.  I’ll post some timeframes when you will see a hic-up.
• Additionally, expect a price increase to $29/year.  We feel we’ve added value and simpleweight is worth more.  We’re still going to have a free account, but we’ll also have an advertising-free full account.

Now, if you sign up today, you will lock-in our current price of $18/year.

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What can we do to help you acheive your weight management goals?

We started upgrading some internal pieces of Simpleweight last night in anticipation of next update coming this month, May.

As a consequence, Simpleweight Food is down for the time being.

We will have it back up later today.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  Everything else should be working normally.

Thanks for your patience.  If there is something we can do to help you with your weight loss management, please let us know.

What’s New with Simple Weight Loss?

• Exercise Calorie Calculators
  The General public can now calculate their calorie burn using our nifty activity calorie calculators.
• New, improved, and quicker Charts and Reports
  We’ve replaced some of our flash charts with simple image charts. The site loads much faster.
• Charts and Reports have the beginnings of Social Features: One can now easily paste their favorite chart or report into their own blog, facebook page, myspace, etc… Here’s my weight loss for the year 2008:
  Of course, this chart demonstrates that one needs to focus on the trend and not the day to day fluctuations.
• Minor feature and bug fixes for various requests by users. For example, you can now save custom foods with your own serving size without having to click or save twice.

What’s Next?

Well, we’re working on a site design refresh to liven up the site and make it more attractive. We plan to re-organize the public pages to better explain our exceptional simpleweight offerings. We’ve been promising more social features.

Why do we add and make changes?

We’re always trying to make simpleweight easier to use, and we’re trying to make it easy to follow weight loss’s aggregate best practices:

• Weigh yourself on a regular schedule. (I suggest every day, or once a week.). Make sure you weigh yourself the same time with relatively the same clothes
• Track your energy expenditures and how much exercise you can do.
• Track how much you eat, when you eat, how you eat, and why you eat
• Make your weight loss social!

We’ve got tools simplifying the top three in that list above, and Social Features are coming. It will just make it easier if you just start using Simpleweight now.

What can we do to make Simpleweight so simple you will actually use it

we’re working on a refreshed design, some more club items, and a few other features that we’re still ironing out.

If you’ve got ideas on how we should improve simpleweight, let us know.

Stay tuned…

We did have a couple of recent feature request. Specifically, one of our users asked to sort favorites. Consider it done.

All you have to do is drag and drop your favorite foods in the order you want. They will save automatically.

What does the work behind the scenes mean for our users? It means, we will be able to continue implementing features on a quicker basis with easier testing.

We have noticed simpleweight is a little slower since the recent upgrades. It’s due to our popularity increasing. We’ve had a lot of viewers and page hits recently. We’re working on improving performance. We appreciate your patience.

Thank you again. If you like what you see, please click on advertisement or two to help sponsor us or of course. we ask you to recommend your friends, and we’ll pay you for your referral just Refer your friends to Simpleweight.

As always, What is the one thing we need to do to simpleweight to help you join our weight loss club?

Thank you for your patience.