You may have noticed that when a user tries to subscribe with the signup panel and fails three times, it shows the following message:

Previously, a user would have to contact us with their phone number and we’d reset their panel so they could try again.

We’ve changed the panel so that it automatically resets after 15 minutes of being in the “Oops!” state. Now users will be able to try re-subscribing without our intervention.

I’ll be updating the panel copy shortly and also fixing that glaring typo! Can you find it?

A lot of you have been asking to send ad-free messages, so we made it easy! Choose a plan according to your outgoing SMS volume, make a small code change, and you’re set!

Check out the Ad-free Plans.

Ad-supported messages will remain free and will contain a short advertisement.

How does it work

Once you sign up, you’ll need to add ad_free=”true” to each message that you’d like to send without an ad.

Check out the updated docs for more info.

Questions?

For more information, check out the ad-free FAQ.

Happy developing!

I collected some code samples from our discussion group, blog posts and our own work on the new code samples page. Some of them overlap in what they accomplish, so take your pick.

Check out the Code Samples page.

Thanks to everyone who contributed! If you have any samples you’d like to share, let us know.

Hey Zeep Developers! We just released the updated version of the signup panel. You don’t need to make any changes to your implementation.

The new panel

So, what’s different?

1. Goodbye, country dropdown

We got rid of the country dropdown since we only support the US. This makes the panel easier to use and has the added benefit of making it load a lot faster.

2. A narrow version

In case you want to stick the panel in a sidebar or somewhere narrow, I made some tweaks to accommodate that. Adding a &width=narrow parameter to the iframe source URL will load an additional stylesheet that makes the panel display correctly when it’s in a narrow space. The screenshot there fits in a 200px space.

You’ll have to tweak the height and width of the iframe depending on the exact space.

Happy Zeeping!

We’re releasing a couple of updates to the site today and are going to shut down the site and API for up to a couple of hours, just in case things don’t go as planned.

So, what’s new?

Wait and see! We’ll announce everything right after it goes live.

What about messages?

Inbound messages from users will be queued and passed along once service is up again. Outbound messages won’t be sent.

Thanks for your patience!

We’re fixing a problem that prevented message delivery and expect things to be up and running again at 6PM PST. We’ll keep you posted.

Messages sent during this outage will be queued and re-sent once we’re back up again, but messages prior to this post are unfortunately gone.

Thanks for your patience!

Hey Zeep Developers! Our current version of the Zeep Mobile signup panel has been bugging me since we first released it. I’m making some improvements and wanted to let you know what’s coming and give you a chance to give feedback.

First, the current panel

And the updated version

So, what’s different?

Goodbye, country dropdown

The country dropdown in the current version is a disaster! For one, it gives users the false impression that our API works all over the world (we only support the US). Second, it makes the panel load so slowly it hurts. I ran a few tests the load times were regularily clocking in at over 10 seconds. It’s mostly because each of the flags in the dropdown is in individual image.

Some new styles

In the spirit of making the panel load faster, I’ve done away with most of the images that give the panel it’s current look. All of the rounded corners are now achieved via CSS with the border-radius property. Sure, it only works in the “good” browsers, but if your users are still riding the interwaves on the old IE, they don’t really care about how websites look now, do they?

New wording

I updated a lot of the copy to make things easier to understand. I replaced any instance of mobile with SMS. Hopefully the new wording will increase the number of signups for you guys!

A narrow version

In case you want to stick the panel in a sidebar or somewhere narrow, I made some tweaks to accomodate that. Adding a &width=narrow parameter to the iframe source URL will load an additional stylesheet that makes the panel display correctly when it’s in a narrow space. The screenshot there fits in a 200px space.

What do you guys think?

It’s still a work in progress, so let me know your thoughts and suggestions. We’re planning to push this change (among with various other improvements) early next week.

Happy Zeeping!

We’re upgrading some systems to increase performance and scalability and all Zeep Mobile services will be unavailable on Sunday, July 26th at midnight for about an hour.

Inbound messages from users will be stored in a queue and delivered when maintenance is finished. However, outbound messages during this time will not be delivered.

Thanks for your patience!

Hi Gang, it’s high time for an update! It’s been since December that you last heard from us and that just won’t stand! Things are moving along here in Zeep land. As usual, we’ve been spending most of our time working on Zeep Media, our ad network.

Zeep Media the service that advertisers use to place ads in messages generated by the API. We’ve also partnered with some other SMS publishers to get access to more volume. We’re ironing out some bugs, fixing stuff up, and you’ll hear from us when it’s nice and ready. We’ll have a special offer for our developers to try it out.

Check out Zeep Media

Now, some fun Zeep Mobile stats

We keep some rough monthly stats about Zeep Mobile and thought you guys might be interested in how things are moving along. In a nutshell, we’re growing steadily.

Message volume
This is a combined incoming and outgoing message volume by month. We had some hiccups in February that put a slight kink in the graph, but overall we’re seeing steady and predictable growth.

Unique subscribers
This shows the number of unique subscribers that have registered to receive alerts from services powered by Zeep Mobile.

Let me know if there are other kinds of stats you’re curious about.

Ad-free messages

We’ve also rolled out a pricing plan in for developers interested in ad-free messages. Some organizations simply cannot have ads placed in their messages, and we wanted to accommodate a wide range of use cases.

Ad-free pricing

If you’re interested in ad-free messages, drop us a line. We’ll have to set you up manually for the time being.

Happy Zeeping!

We seem to be experiencing some issues either internally or with our service provider. We’re working to resolve the issue and hope to get messages flowing again shortly.

Update: Tue Dec  2 23:39:46 PST 2008

Messages are flowing, and things are again operational. You might notice some problems with long messages that also contain characters that require two bytes to encode using 7-bit GSM.

http://www.developershome.com/sms/gsmAlphabet.asp

Don’t know what this means? Basically any of these characters might cause unwanted behavior.

^ { } \ [ ~ ] | €

We’ll try to have this fixed tomorrow.