Postcrossing Blog

We have been quite busy lately with tweaks and improvements to Postcrossing! Here are some of the things we are excited about:

Twitter integration

If you have a twitter.com account, this feature is for you! Postcrossing can now automatically publish your events (for instance, when you send or register a postcard) to your twitter stream. And it’s really easy to setup!

More stats

Do you like statistics? We have been improving these, adding more graphics and information to the stats page. Let us know what else you would like to see in there.

Improved invite friends

Have many friends that might like Postcrossing? Too hard to remember all of their cryptic email addresses? No problem! Now it’s much simpler to invite friends in Postcrossing because you can import your contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and MSN accounts easily. We have used the latest technology available to make it really safe, so you don’t have to give us your email account username and password. Give it a try to see what we mean.

And many more to come! We know you have suggestions for changes and improvements for the project and we’d love to hear them – while we can’t promise to do all of them, we will certainly look into it so give us a shout!

Because it’s fun to check what others have sent and received, we have created the Postcrossing gallery! It’s a section where you can shuffle through all the postcards uploaded to Postcrossing. Or, if you’re curious to discover what a certain country looks like, you can choose to browse only the postcards from that country: just select it from the list!

But, that’s not all! We have received many requests to be able to leave comments on the postcards so we’ve just finished adding that. Head over to the page of a postcard and you now have a place to leave your feedback there.

We have other things on the oven getting ready so keep coming back! And as always, we appreciate your feedback to improve the project.

So far, to see the final result of the postcards exchanges, you had to go to our Postcrossing Flickr group. Flickr is great, but wouldn’t it be awesome to match the images with the postcards and their senders and receivers?

After several weeks of work, we are proud to announce Postcrossing postcard walls! Now everybody can upload their received postcards to their respective profile! All your postcards will be displayed in your profile as well as a gallery of images that we like to call postcard walls. And we have even added a slideshow to go with it!

How does it work?

Simple. Grab your scanner or camera, get an image of the front part of the postcards you received, go to your 'Received postcards’ section and click the little icon on the right end of the row. Follow the upload instructions and voilá!

And there’s more: we have managed to copy a good amount of the postcards directly from the Flickr group to their respective profile owners so that you don’t have to do it again. Have a look at your profile – you might find out that someone has uploaded a postcard you’ve sent! If you find something that doesn’t match what you received, then simply delete it.

We will keep the Flickr group as it is for the moment but with postcards uploads closed. In the future, we plan to use it to host photos of the Postcrossing meetups and other media related to the Postcrossing project.

We hope you all enjoy this new functionality as much as we do. Oh, and if you have comments or ideas of how to improve it, we would love to hear from you!

Last, but not least, we have a request too. This new feature will represent an increase in costs for Postcrossing (like storage and bandwidth) and is only possible to sustain if postcrossers continue to support the project by donating to it. If you enjoy this new feature, and would like to help keeping the project running, please consider visiting our support page – it’s really simple and quick. Thank you in advance! ☺

It’s been a month since Postcrossing launched its’ Supporters program… and it has been a success! We are really grateful to the many people that decided to generously contribute.

So, what is Postcrossing doing with your donations?

Over the time, Postcrossing has grown too big for its current server so the most important short term improvement will be a much needed server upgrade. In addition to increasing the speed of the site, it will also allow room for future improvements.
There are a lot of not-so-little ideas that have been postponed because they were dependent on the server being able to handle them. With new equipment, this should not be a problem.

PS – Lilo, our cat, is just as excited as we are :)

We know many Postcrossers take their yearly break in the upcoming weeks to relax and visit new places. If you are one of those and you’ll be away from your home address for a while, we recommend you to switch your account to the Inactive state – you can do that easily just by editing your Postcrossing profile. When you are back, all you need to do is to switch it back to Active and you’ll be back in business again! This will tell Postcrossing to not give your address to any other member while you are away. Rest assured that when you’re back, they will be sent your way.

Oh, and don’t forget to re-stock with postcards from the place where you’ll be spending your days away!

Bon voyage!