Moonfruit Lounge

#flymeto Creative website competition Winner and Top 10

Joe — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:47:00 +0000

Oooo this was a toughy. There was a flurry of entries on Friday from people who've clearly spent some time working on their #flymeto websites for the chance to win the last set of tickets to their dream destination. It's been a pretty tough decision going through them all and working out who the winner is. In fact too tough. So we've decided to give prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places...

Winner!! - 1st prize of a $3500 holiday to Tokyo Japan from the UK!!
@SimonCwaller: Hi chaps, here is my entry for the #flymeto competition. I hope you enjoy it!

http://flymetotokyo.moonfruit.com

1st runner up - 2nd prize that we made up because it was too hard to pick. These guys will get $2000 towards their trip, which will hopefully nearly get them there ;-)
@netscribe http://twitpic.com/ohp0v - @moontweet #flymeto where the cherry blossoms bloom.

http://tokyobound.moonfruit.com

2nd runner up - winner of a shiny new ipod touch
@tom_hayward: @moontweet #flymeto my updated NYC Site for the contest :) thanks

http://newyorkfeeling.moonfruit.com

3. http://flymetohawaii.moonfruit.com
@sweet_teets: @moontweet Here is my website design for the game of skill: http://flymetohawaii.moonfruit.com #flymeto

4. http://www.flymetotokyojapan.moonfruit.com
@Timiwriter: @moontweet #flymeto Japan check out my website while I was eating #moonfruit http://www.flymetotokyojapan.moonfruit.com/

5. http://dreamnz.moonfruit.com
@ auntiedragon Despite the lovely snow it's still dark and depressing. I wonder if @moontweet would make this come true: http://dreamnz.moonfruit.com/

6. http://www.flymetothailand.moonfruit.com
@philimobi: @moontweet #flymeto Thailand, one country, million reasons to visit, check my site http://www.flymetothailand.moonfruit.com

7. http://pooh.moonfruit.com/
@49Chen @moontweet. Please #flymeto Sydney, even though I've written a website about New York. http://pooh.moonfruit.com

8. http://jenngw.moonfruit.com/
@jenngw: @moontweet My love letter to the place I'd like you to #flymeto: London. http://jenngw.moonfruit.com I had a blast making the site! Thanks!

9. http://londoncalling.moonfruit.com/
@jonathanwthomas: @moontweet Right-o, here's the awesome website I created for the contest: http://bit.ly/1QOX24 - can you confirm my entry? #flymeto

10. http://dreambig2california.moonfruit.com
@SparkleFreak here's the final product of my site:) #flymeto Hollywood, CALI http://bit.ly/3C8gp0

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this competition over the past week. We've loved your responses, humour and creativity. If we could we'd #flyyouall to see us ;-)

Moonfruit goes global - your site served from 14 locations around the world

Joe — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:57:00 +0000

Moonfruit.com and every site hosted by us are now served from 14 locations around the world.

To celebrate the launch of this new service we are offering five (5) pairs of return tickets from wherever you are in the world to any of the 14 locations that Moonfruit sites are now served from. And we'll offset the carbon footprint of your flight so you can still look all your green friends in the eyes - or will that be green eyed friends ;-) - with a clear conscience.

To find out more read on...

What does this mean for you?

Moonfruit (and every site we host) is now running on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which means your sites and all their contents are now being served from a distributed network of servers located in 14 different places around the world. Using clever routing and caching, visitors to your site get the content served up to their computer from the closest location to them, which means they get your sites faster!

What do I have to do to get on this?

Most of you will already be on the CDN following changes in our domain name configurations that have been taking place over the last couple of weeks, but for some of you, who have your domain name hosted or managed elsewhere, you will need to take some action. So here are the different cases:

You have a site with one of our subdomain e.g. site.moonfruit.com (also t83.net, kk5.org, sm4.biz) - do nothing, you're already running on the CDN
You have a domain name which you bought from moonfruit.com, e.g. www.yourdomain.com - in most cases do nothing, you're already running on the CDN for the 'www' part of your domain, e.g. if you use www.yourdomain.com you're on the CDN, if you use yourdomain.com (without the www) you're not. This is because you can't set CNAME records on the root of your domain. So to get on the CDN you need to use the www version of your domain. (Instructions on how to do this will be provided.
You have a domain name hosted or managed by someone else (e.g. another domain name provider, not us) - in this case you'll need to change your DNS Zone file and create a CNAME record on the www part and set that CNAME to use your canonical address which is the original subdomain you got when you started your site, e.g. probably something.moonfruit.com. This doesn't mean that address will be displayed, it just means your domain name will copy the settings from this. Your domain provider will be able to help you with this (or you can always transfer it to us ;-) ).

Why did we do this?

More and more of our customers are located outside of the UK and have a global audience. This was really brought to a head following our last Twitter campaign in July which received an enormous amount of international attention. So that got us thinking, how could we improve the global delivery of our awesome website builder and improve the quality of service for everyone? The CDN was our answer.

And best of all, it will cost you nothing! We're paying for it, even for free sites. Consider it an early Xmas present. Enjoy!!

Where do I get the flights from?

That's our new Twitter comp to celebrate this launch. Check out www.moonfruit.com/flymeto.html.

So there you have it. Most of your sites are already running on the CDN, but for those that are not you can take the steps above and accelerate your site globally.

Scheduled Mail Service Maintenance 00:00 - 06:00 GMT 28, 29 and 30 Oct 2009

Walt — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:53:00 +0000

REASON: Network distribution maintenance

PLANNED DURATION: 3 days (limited to a few hours each morning)

NOTES: Our domain partner Gandi will be performing major upgrades to their network distribution infrastructure during the nights of 28 to 30 October. During this time email services will experience a number of intermittent disruptions in connectivity beginning at 12:00am (GMT) with maintenance activities finishing by 6:00am (GMT) each day. We will endeavour to minimise impact to services where possible, but given the scale of the upgrades being performed, most services will encounter at least some disruption. No mail will be lost but access may be restricted and delivery of mail delayed.

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this work may cause.

New Release - 27 October 2009 - Finalised New Toolbar

Joe — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:48:00 +0000

Thank you to all of those who provided us with feedback over the past few weeks while the Toolbar has been running in Beta. This has been very helpful to us in ironing out some of those strange little bugs. We're very pleased to announce that the new (and improved) Toolbar is now live! Here's a quick grab of what the final version looks like.

New Moonfruit Toolbar

So what are the differences? Read on, read on...

Bug fixes and improvements
On the road to make it fully ready for everyone to use we've had to fix quite a few little buglets and add a few sprinkles of magic. The highlights of which are:

CTRL key now works again
Keyboard shortcuts now function normally again
@ symbol and backspace now work correctly in Chrome
'-1' error (and '404' on Macs) for large file uploads has been fixed
In Firefox the keyboard nudge, enter, tab keys and cursor will work normally again
'Delete this page' option has been restored to the 'Pages' menu
Domains module now loads in the edit environment (doesn't go back to moonfruit.com)
Loading has been optimised for quicker download and more feedback
Sidebar panels now animate to add a bit of sparkle (we all need sparkle ;-) )

You can still get to the new Toolbar in the same way, e.g. 'View' --> 'New Toolbar', or if you're already using it you'll get the updates automatically.

I thought I'd give you a quick summary of the advantages of the new Toolbar from the last blog article. We're really please with how it has turned out and hope you like it too.

New Toolbar highlights
The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are, or can be, used today. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help you 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects while in Edit mode (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quicker ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)
Copy site/transfer site feature - allows you to create copies of your site as the basis for a new site (not for backup)
HTML widget - add any HTML snippet to your site using our HTML widget snippet (e.g. Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more).

Here's the original beta release article if you missed it.

And if you want to give it a go why not build your own free website ;-)

So that's it for now. Look out for a further announcement next week with some exciting service improvements...

Our partnership with MOO and free MOO card giveaway!

Wendy — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:53:00 +0100

We’ve partnered with MOO, who love to print! You can use your own images, logos and content to customise your own business cards and personal products. Much like Moonfruit, MOO provides easy to use edit tools to customise your business cards and they also love good design.

We came across MOO when we needed to print our own business cards and we loved them so much we thought your might like to use them too for your projects and business ventures. We know many of you have fabulous images, designs and logos which you already use for your Moonfruit sites. MOO also think their customers might like to build Moonfruit sites to promote their projects, businesses and communities.

So to kick off the partnership we've been promoting some unique offers to our customers.

MOO customers have been taking advantage of a discount on Moonfruit premium packages and 200 packs of 50 free MOO cards have been snapped up by Moonfruit premium subscribers.

We wanted everyone in the Moonfruit community to participate in the partnership so here's an offer for everyone. 10,000 free packs of 50 MOO cards.

Click here to get your free pack.

Enjoy!

The Moonfruit Team

RESOLVED: Service Distruption 15:30 - 16:20 BST (GMT +1) 15 Oct 2009

Walt — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:39:00 +0100

DETAIL: We are currently experiencing some unexpected problems with our service delivery.

RESPONSE: We are investigating this and expect to have this resolved promptly.

DURATION: We will provide an update on the cause and resolution once completed.

UPDATE: 16:20 BST (GMT +1) 15 Oct 2009

We were performing a routine maintenance operation to expand disk space. This normally requires no downtime, however the operation hung causing a cascading problem which required us to restart the entire service.

Because the restart was unscheduled we took great care to minimise risk. This means that restarting our entire service takes time.

New release - 29 September 2009 - New interface, HTML widget, site copy and more...

Joe — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0100

Yeah, it's release time again! Believe it or not we get just as excited as you do at these times. The months of hard work all come together and we get to push new things out to the Moonfruit-osphere. And this one is a biggy too.

So first things first, the new interface. For those of you who didn't see our sneak preview, this is what it looks like.

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

We're seeing the largest overhaul to the edit environment in the last 5 years as we drag SiteMaker kicking and screaming into the present and pave the way for the future. The long awaited HTML widget is now out of beta, works in all browsers (ooooohh), and opens up libraries of additional content. And you can now copy an entire site too...

New Toolbar (beta)
Some call it SiteMaker5, some call it Moonfruit+, all we know is we call it the New Toolbar. It's been launched as an opt-in beta version, which means it's fully functional, you can choose it, you can use it, but you're not forced to. We're looking for feedback - good and bad (constructive) - so that we can polish it off for a final release at a later stage. But it works and in our testing so far makes things far quicker and easier to do.

To get to it, login to your site and go to 'View' --> 'New Toolbar (beta)'. Your site will reload in the new environment but you can revert to the old style toolbars at any time. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quick ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)

The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are used today. When we started many years ago we built a 'Page editor' whereas today SiteMaker allows the management of your website over its whole lifecycle. From initial build -> monitoring traffic and performance -> developing community -> monetisation -> ongoing updates.

Copy/transfer site
Some new features in the 'Admin' section are the copy site and transfer site features. This allows you to create a copy of the design and structure of your site which you can use as the basis of a new site. Please note this isn't a complete copy like backup, as some data is not copied, e.g. individual posts in comment feeds or forums. But the text, images, design, structure, etc., are all applied to the new site.

The transfer site feature allows you to transfer an existing site (or a new copy) to another user of Moonfruit.

Both features have been asked for many times, both by customers that want to build more sites themselves and by resellers who find they want to build similar sites for clients in similar industries over and over. These new features will help make that easier to achieve.

The HTML widget
You can't add HTML to a Flash site, don't be ridiculous! Or can you ;-) ? Some of you will have been using the Beta version of this widget for some time now, but for others this will be new. The HTML snippet widget allows you to paste in HTML code (or markup for the purists out there) that you might find elsewhere (Amazon affiliates, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.) into your Moonfruit website and use it seamlessly with our other features. The changes/improvements for this release are:

The widget now works in all major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and on PC and Mac
Works with all HTML snippets (probably - we can't find any yet it doesn't work with, but I'm sure you will ;-)
Some regularly used services (Youtube player, Twitter feed, etc.) have some preconfigured widgets (snippets) available to help you get started (use the 'Setup' tab to get the HTML code)

So this new feature makes available all Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more. Happy hunting!!

But remember, this still only works if you have the Flash 10 player!! Currently FP10 has around 86% penetration according to Adobe but growing by 3-4% per month.

Product selling page templates
There are now some new product selling page templates with suggested layouts for creating easy to use product pages on Moonfruit. You can do this in the 'Add page' option in the 'pages' menu.

For those of you waiting, these are not the long awaited e-commerce updates, so apologies about that, but we are still working towards that goal and the interface lays yet further foundations for the e-commerce tools that will require these new technologies to work as well as they can.

Anyway, so that's about it. We hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think! Enjoy!

Known issues with new beta toolbar (keyboard shortcuts)

Keyboard shortcuts, such as copy, paste and delete among others, do not work in the beta toolbar
The Ctrl key does not work, e.g for multiple select and for drag select or for forcing links to work in edit mode
In Firefox, keyboard nudge, enter and tab keys do not work and the cursor will not flash in any text field

Sneak Preview: Radical Overhaul of Moonfruit Sitemaker Edit Environment

Wendy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:24:00 +0100

We love the autumn(fall)! After a refreshing summer break everyone's 'back to school', sleeves rolled up and raring to go! The Moonfruit team is no exception: we're dying to show you the new product improvements we've been working on over the last few months.

One of the areas we've wanted to improve and simplify for several years now is the editing workspace for Moonfruit. We wanted to provide old Moonfruiters with quicker access to hidden power-user tools and to help newbies get to grips with customising their websites faster and even more intuitively. So here's a glimpse of what's coming very soon...

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

Pages section (click to enlarge image).

Admin section (click to enlarge image).

And that's not all. Our next release will have a few extra tasty goodies too (the eagle eyed will spot some in the sneaky pics). Watch this space ....

POSTPONED: Scheduled Downtime 06:00 - 08:00 BST (GMT +1) 25th Sep 2009

Walt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:20:00 +0100

REASON: Data cleansing and archiving

PLANNED DURATION: 2 hours

NOTES: To improve the efficiency of our database, we plan to archive legacy data. This operation needs to be done off-line, that is all websites must be taken off-line for this period. Customers will be shown a page advising them that their site is unavailable and will be back up shortly.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Moonfruit twitter campaign wrap up - creative responses under reported

Joe — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:02:00 +0100

Before we launch into a new season of exciting product releases (really watch this space for a radical overhaul!) and new fun and games. We thought we'd reflect on what a crazy summer it's been. The Twitter campaign we ran in early July sparked a huge amount of interest across the globe with over 200 blogs and articles written in everything from the Wall Street Journal, FT and Forbes magazine in the traditional press through to Techcrunch and Mashable leading the way online.

It has also been interesting to see the varied responses from different parts of the world. For example the US press were much more positive about the campaign, while the UK press focused more on the controversy and ethics of the campaign.

But what was interesting was that few articles really picked up on all the creative entries and enormous amount of time, love, humor and fun participants generated during the campaign. This was obvious in a conference we spoke at last week about marketing on Twitter where many of the experts and delegates told us there were totally unaware of the creative part of the campaign and felt it had been under reported.

For us this was the most exciting and rewarding part of the campaign, where we got to really engage with the Twitterverse and see your playfulness and good humour come out in bizarre and wonderful interpretations of our brand. With over 500,000 tweets, 3000+ images, 500+ videos, and many songs, poems and even crochets birds created by you during these 7 days, this really made the campaign what it was.

We are grateful to all participants, new subscriptions increased by 20% during the summer so we must be doing something you like! We will continue to ensure we keep innovating, provide good service and add a little humour and creativity to everything we do.

So for all of those that missed it, we thought we'd summarise these wonderful contributions one more time. This is by no means exhaustive, but gives a good taste of what was done.

CREATIVE COMPETITION PICTURES

Just a few (hundred) of the many awesome pictures you guys sent in, THANKYOU!

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621912820609

So there you have it. We're still beavering away on new product features and a radical overhual of the Moonfruit tools, to be released next month. And maybe, just maybe we may call on you again with some Twitter based madness...

Scheduled Downtime planned 07:30 BST (GMT +1) 21, 24 & 26 August 2009

Walt — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:32:00 +0100

Scheduled Downtime

We will be performing routine database maintenance this morning which will take approximately 1 hour to complete. We will also be performing this action on Monday (24th) and Wednesday (26th), next week, in similar one hour blocks so that we can minimise disruption.

Thank you for your patience and apologies for any inconvenience caused.

REASON: Database Maintenance

PLANNED DURATION: Approximately 60 minutes each time.

NOTES: This is routine maintenance on the database which should result in improved overall performance of sites. We opted for these changes to be split into three different time slots during our periods of low activity in order to reduce the impact on customers.

NB. For the most up-to-date details on SiteMaker status, please visit our SiteMaker Service Status site and subscribe to the RSS feed for this service.

UPDATE: 8:39 BST (GMT +1) 21 August 2009

Maintenance completed successfully and service fully restored.

UPDATE: 8:32 BST (GMT +1) 24 August 2009

Maintenance completed successfully and service fully restored.

UPDATE: 8:15 BST (GMT +1) 26 August 2009

Maintenance completed successfully and service fully restored.

Upgrading your Adobe Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris)

Walt — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:22:00 +0100

Following a bulletin from Adobe, we are advising all customers to update their Flash Player version if they are currently running v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris. This upgrade is strongly recommended by Adobe.

To verify the Adobe Flash Player version number running on your system, access the About Flash Player page, or right-click on the Flash content and then select “About Adobe Flash Player” from the menu. If you use multiple browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc) on the same computer, please perform the check for each browser you have installed on your system. The page will indicate the ‘Version Information’ in a boxed section and list the version number e.g. “You have version 10,0,22,87 installed”.

If you are currently running Adobe Flash Player 9.0.246.0 or 10.0.32.18 then you don’t need to do anything. You have the latest version.

However if you are running another version, especially v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87 then Adobe recommends that all Flash Player users upgrade to the most recent version of the player through the Flash Player Download Centre and take advantage of security updates.

More details on this, if interested, can be found on the Adobe Website Bulletin page.

New release - 20th July 2009 - Membership tweaks

Joe — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:47:00 +0100

Following the successful release of the Membership features in May, we had some requests for a few tweaks and additional options. So being the friendly and agile guys we are, we thought we'd do them (while continuing with the other things we're working on).

So today we published a few minor adjustments to the Membership settings to allow you to:

Set a redirect page after login
Disable Facebook Connect login

The first of these changes was much requested, allowing you to send your members to a specified 'success' page after they have logged in to your site. This is great for redirecting them to the 'members home page' or whatever page you want to send them to. You can set the 'post login page' on the Settings tab of the 'People' section when editing your site.

The second change allows you to disable the Facebook Connect login options for members. Facebook Connect allows new or existing members of your site to login using their Facebook credentials, so there is no need to create a new user account on your site. This streamlines the join process and makes it easier for you to attract new members. It also ties together with the ability to post out a note to your Facebook wall from the 'Send a message' section of 'People', which is a great way to invite people to join your site. However, the new setting allows you to turn this off, which some customers (particularly businesses users) had requested. Again you can change the settings to disable Facebook Connect on the 'Settings' tab in the 'People' section.

Things we're working on now are the final delivery of the HTML widget (currently available in beta, but now that Firefox 3.5 is out we can release fully), and some changes to the edit environment to integrate new technology on the path to the new e-commerce features.

We hope you like the changes!

Creative Moonfruit Website Award and Thankyou to Twitter, Twitterers and Moonfruiters

Wendy — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:40:00 +0100

Following on from the incredible range of creative and humorous responses you sent in, we decided to give out one last prize, an 11th macbook pro for the most creative Moonfruit website. Again the diversity and calibre of the websites produced have been impressive.

Thank you to all Twitterers and Moonfruiters old and new for engaging in this campaign with such enthusiasm, creativity and large injections of humour! We'll continue to chat to you about our new product innovations, things you're up to and interesting design stuff. We'd also like to continue doing a variety of creative projects with you in areas you are passionate about. We have some ideas brewing but if you have any suggestions they would be very welcome!

We'd also like give one big thankyou to Twitter itself. Without their boundary breaking, communication platform, this would not have been possible.

As explained in our previous blog "We'll pick the site that is most true to its stated objective and inspires us as a great example of what a website can do. Build it about something you're passionate about and are interested in."

People put a lot of effort and thought into their sites and to be fair to everyone we thought we should explain the process we've been through to choose the winner(s).

A team of three, Kevin our lead designer, 'Web Guy' Dan and myself sat down and looked through every entry. We then chose our favourite 30 with a bit of wrangling, our top 10 with a lot of arguing and hair pulling and finally we chose a winner ... thankfully unanimously!

WINNER: Creative Moonfruit Website

Wins Macbook Pro "13

@sloorp - sloorp.moonfruit.com

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Win Sitemaker Max Package for 1 year (an extra year for existing customers).

OUR FAVOURITE 30

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621596748144

CREATIVE COMPETITION PICTURES

Just a few (thousand) of the many awesome pictures you guys sent in, THANKYOU!

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621912820609

Final creative prize for a Macbook Pro

Joe — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:46:00 +0100

Thank you all for making this competition so special. The creative entries have really blown us away and we'll be continuing to pick through them all, post up the best and create a gallery to pay our respects for all those who have entered. (And maybe a few discretionary prizes too ending Friday 10th July 3pm BST).

But we thought we'd end this crazy Twitter promotion with one more Macbook Pro prize. And this will go to the creator of the best website on Moonfruit.com. Anyone can enter from new or old customers, friends or foes, and you certainly don't have to enter if you don't want to ;-).

The website contest will run until 17th July (next Friday 3pm BST) at which point we'll pick and announce the winner.

Judging a website is going to be tricky, so when you enter your website we want you to tell us why it's special or innovative and why you think it should win. All entries should be as comments on this blog and we'll pick the winner from there. We'll pick the site that is most true to its stated objective and inspires us as a great example of what a website can do. Build it about something you're passionate about and are interested in.

Thanks again for all your support and may the Fruit be with you. Always.

Rules

Create a website on www.moonfruit.com
Post it on this blog with your reasons for why it should be picked
One website entry per person (and one post please!)
Winner will be posted to this blog on 17th July at 3pm BST (GMT+1)
Good luck!

Twitter censors Moonfruit? What does it mean for the future of Twitocracy?

Wendy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:08:00 +0100

Late Friday night 3rd July, around midnight UK time Moonfruit finally tumbled off the top of the trends list on Twitter. Now this wasn’t wholly unexpected with July 4th on the way and the resignation of Sarah Palin. But what was odd is how it that it never returned despite the stats being above other trending topics. If you compare Moonfruit vs Wimbledon in terms of share of tweets (see graph below), you can see Moonfruit has ranked higher at all times except the Men’s final. But Wimbledon has been a trending topic several times over the weekend. I’ve also included data for Serena and Venus which have also been on the top trends list.

http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=moonfruit%2Cwimbledon%2Cserena%2Cvenus

There is further data available at http://hashtags.org/ which shows popular hashtag topics. So on balance it looks like the Moonfruit tag has been removed from the trends list by Twitter.

We also sent an email to Twitter on Saturday asking them about this, but have yet to get a reply. It may be because it’s been the 4th July weekend, so we'll wait and see but given the profile of this story and the furore in the twittersphere we would expect them to respond?

What does this mean?

Ok, first things first. When we started this we wanted to create a buzz there’s no doubt about that. But we didn’t expect the campaign to become so large. And believe it or not, we didn’t want to dominate Twitter for 10 days, or push important subjects like Iran off the agenda.

But given how it has turned out we are also touched by how people have responded to the brand and campaign. We love how they’ve questioned it, played with it, joked about it, sung about it, painted it, made it out of fruit, shouted at it and made it what it is through their participation. We are in awe of the brilliance and creativity of the Twittersphere. So thank you all.

However, we also recognise that the campaign sets a dangerous precedent and could have implications for how Twitter is used and abused by marketers. This is a subject much commented on (see Mashable, Techcrunch, BBC), etc.

So if Twitter had come to us and said, “guys, enough is enough”, then we would have worked with them to limit the campaign, or complied with whatever they were demanding. However, if they have pulled the trending without explanation or communication, this sets rather a different tone.

Not to be misinterpreted, it’s certainly their right to protect their network and technology investment. (And incidentally, I think taking us off the trends at this point is the right thing for Twitter, and I’m happy with that response). But as a company that strives to provide a real time, democratic communication platform, we don't believe taking action quietly behind the scenes is the right answer, not exactly transparent. Particularly given the numbers of press, marketers, businesses and consumers on twitter following this campaign right now.

I’ve said it before in comments on other blogs, but this is probably a commercial channel for Twitter in the future (I’m sure they’ve thought about it! Maybe we've touched a nerve.) Perhaps there should be ‘commercial trends’ vs ‘normal trends’ lists. And its certainly been said that users should be able to filter their feeds to remove ‘commercial’ or unwanted tags.

What would help me is a clear understanding of what happened, and therefore what the new ‘rules of the game’ are going forward. What does this mean for topics on Twitter? What does it mean for marketers? If we were removed as ‘spam’, when did we become spam, was it ok for the first few days, just not after? And are the creative responses, videos, images, songs, etc. all just spam? (see 'Real people get creative with Moonfruit').

Two oil paintings of Moonfruit? A woman paper-maching her face to look like a moon (while eating fruit)? A ransom letter to Moonfruit demanding a Mac? A man making his lunch zuchinni into the words ‘Moonfruit’? Writing songs and penning Haiku’s? Teenagers dancing and producing films? Is this spam?

Maybe there's no right answer, ultimately only what the twitter crowd agree. Perhaps if they had been given a bit longer they would have decided for themselves. That's the intention surely of 'follow' and 'unfollow'.

What does the Twitterverse think?

Twitter, what happened?

Important Update – Big Bang Finale!

The competition response has been crazy and wonderful. Thank you all. But to bring the mayhem to a close and remain respectful to the Twitterverse, we’ve decided to bring forward the end date from Friday 10th July to Tuesday 7th July (e.g. this week).
This means all remaining Macbook Pros will be given away on this last day. Still 10 Macbooks, just in 7 days not 10. So there will be 4 winners on Tuesday for Macbook prizes 7, 8, 9 and 10. All will be randomly picked from the last 24 hour of tweets.

We’ll still take creative entries for discretionary prizes, so send them to us @moontweet.

And we’re looking at how we can have an ongoing competition for our customers who built the best new sites each month.

Once again, thank you all for your input, creativity, love and humour (and humor ;-). Best of luck!!

Wendy Tan White

Real people get creative with #moonfruit

Joe — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:24:00 +0100

Well we never expected this! Songs, pictures, stories - all about Moonfruit. This crazy thing is getting out of control! We love the things you're doing. You guys have turned this Twitter campaign into a Creative Moonfruit Movement.

NB: Will add as fast as we can. We are using the searches below and a database of tweets to look at entries. Please add to this blog if you think your entries are missing. Thankyou!

Creative responses on YouTube
Creative responses on Flickr
Our 'Thank You' compilation of responses

Here's selection of some we've picked up, sorry we haven't got to everyone yet there are so many:

@sutuma http://bit.ly/Z6IoR (first winner)

@tear96 http://bit.ly/19snmq (2nd winner)

@chadwelch http://bit.ly/w73zF (3rd winner)

@bramketting #Moonfruit didn't comply to my demands so I set the bird free: http://pic.gd/de8f5 It's over: http://bit.ly/1VxxCh (4th winner)

@Felorah http://bit.ly/tKZVX (robot cartoon animation)

@awessendorf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vckPscOt7Y (cartoon song)

@usebombs http://twitpic.com/9695y (Moonfruit picture quiz)

@topitzman http://bit.ly/krfq6 cool Moonfruit song

@pauldz http://twitpic.com/947yr (moonfruit comic strip)

@ChosenPredator http://bit.ly/VqI8O (moonfruit puppet story)

@sloorp http://bit.ly/143TzF (moonfruit animated story)

@MasterWayne http://twitpic.com/975wm (mathematical fruit)

@eagleascent http://bit.ly/ir3UE (US kid talks to himself)

@pauldz http://bit.ly/UqJSF (picture story)

@fabulouscess http://bit.ly/U1XMa (two sisters singing)

@JorjLim http://bit.ly/17mJNI (so bad it's great)

@aurelienlewin http://twitpic.com/94r44 (radio active moonfruit)

@tgundred http://twitpic.com/991n9 (apple moonfruit)

@kelsiwaslike http://twitpic.com/992ja (another apple moonfruit)

@mayasud http://twitpic.com/994c4 (nice picture nursery rhyme)

@essexgourmet http://twitpic.com/9dzms

@rockstarsharks http://bit.ly/bc4uT (video shows real dedication!)

@lintster http://twitpic.com/9p1sp (cute illustration]

@yashiyama http://twitpic.com/9ff4q (adorable!)

And there's more to come. If you've seen some that you think are great post them here too. Enjoy!

Holy Twitter Batman - the campaign response

Joe — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:45:00 +0100

Many of you will have noticed our twitter campaign that started on Tuesday to give away 10 Macbook Pros to celebrate the 10th Birthday of Moonfruit. Yes we're that old ;-). But I don't think any of us expected it to go quite so crazy.

We've been trending at the number 1 spot on twitter for the last 36 hours or more, our number of followers is approaching 20,000 before the end of the first 48 hours and our site traffic has increased by 8 times or more. Ouch.

Mashable (The Social Media Guide) has written this up as 'A Twitter campaign done right' and an SEO expert calls us bigger than Michael Jackson. And Brand Republic calls it a massive success.

At around midnight last night 300 tweets per minute were about moonfruit and this accounted for 1.63% of all twitter traffic. And including the Mashable article that was also trending about Moonfruit it was around 2.85% in total.

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=moonfruit&span=24

Interesting times. We're looking forward to seeing what happens...

RESOLVED: Service Disruption 09:11 BST (GMT +1) 02 Jul 2009

Walt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:47:00 +0100

DETAIL: We are experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the services, which is currently overloading our firewalls.

RESPONSE: Our technical team are working hard to get this attack under control and return full service to all customers. We hope to have this completely resolved shortly.

UPDATE: We've managed to block what appears to have been three different types of DDoS attack. Combating the three attacks has taken us longer than expected but we appear to have got them under control as of 11:35 but continued to experience minor issues until 12:32 BST (GMT +1).

Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro

Joe — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:47:00 +0100

To celebrate Moonfruit's 10th birthday we are giving away 10 new Macbook Pro's, one each day for 10 days! If you've never seen one of these in real life, they are just as svelte and beautifully crafted as they look in the pictures, we can't keep our hands off them! (I'm using on now, but not one of the competition ones obviously ;-) )

Check the full details of the competition at http://www.moonfruit.com/macbook-pro.html and follow us @moontweet to find out who the winners are each day.

We wouldn't be here today without all you wonderful people building websites with us and allowing us to support you in your online adventures. So a special thanks to the 2m+ of you who've built a site with us!

Happy tweeting!

Moonfruit Lounge

#flymeto Creative website competition Winner and Top 10

Moonfruit goes global - your site served from 14 locations around the world

Scheduled Mail Service Maintenance 00:00 - 06:00 GMT 28, 29 and 30 Oct 2009

New Release - 27 October 2009 - Finalised New Toolbar

Our partnership with MOO and free MOO card giveaway!

RESOLVED: Service Distruption 15:30 - 16:20 BST (GMT +1) 15 Oct 2009

New release - 29 September 2009 - New interface, HTML widget, site copy and more...

Sneak Preview: Radical Overhaul of Moonfruit Sitemaker Edit Environment

POSTPONED: Scheduled Downtime 06:00 - 08:00 BST (GMT +1) 25th Sep 2009

Moonfruit twitter campaign wrap up - creative responses under reported

CREATIVE COMPETITION PICTURES

OUR FAVOURITE 30 CREATIVE WEBSITES

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

SUMMARY 'THANK YOU' MONTAGE

Scheduled Downtime planned 07:30 BST (GMT +1) 21, 24 & 26 August 2009

Upgrading your Adobe Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris)

New release - 20th July 2009 - Membership tweaks

Creative Moonfruit Website Award and Thankyou to Twitter, Twitterers and Moonfruiters

WINNER: Creative Moonfruit Website

HIGHLY COMMENDED

OUR FAVOURITE 30

CREATIVE COMPETITION PICTURES

Final creative prize for a Macbook Pro

Twitter censors Moonfruit? What does it mean for the future of Twitocracy?

Real people get creative with #moonfruit

Holy Twitter Batman - the campaign response

RESOLVED: Service Disruption 09:11 BST (GMT +1) 02 Jul 2009

Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro