HisReach.com

Merry Christmas to everyone on HisReach. We hope that your holidays were blessed.

We wanted to notify everyone that blurbs now last for 7 days. After that point, they are permanently deleted. This is for a handful of reasons…but you didn’t really care now did you?

Also, just a reminder that there are still 4 days left in the iPod Touch Giveaway. Help us to finish up the year strong and continue to invites your friends. There is an iPod Touch and 3 HisReach tees up for grabs. You don’t even need that many invites to win! Invite all of those relatives you saw over the last week!

Have a Happy New Year!

Make sure to check out the 25 new profile backgrounds on HisReach from c28/Not Of This World. We are constantly trying to add more, so make sure to check it out regularly! Enjoy!

You’ve asked for it and they are finally here! You can now add a background to your HisReach profile. Check it out on your Edit Background page. You can find this page at:

Edit Profile > Background

From here you can check a category and see all the images in that category or try searching by words. We are getting more options for backgrounds very soon, but you can help! Submit your own…you will find directions on how to contribute by checking out the lower right corner of the ‘Edit Background’ page.

Hope you all enjoy this fun new addition. More coming soon!

UPDATE: If you are having an issue with HisReach looking really bland or drastically different than what it used to look like, you will need to refresh the page. Your browser is caching some old pages and so it will look very odd. To refresh, you must either press the ‘Shift’ button on your keyboard and then click the refresh button on your browser OR clear your browsers cache in the settings. Hope this helps!

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If you haven’t noticed by now, HisReach has new style! In a continuing effort to update our look at HisReach, we have restyled EVERY page in your community. It’s not just about the style, however, we also have added a lot of new features to the navigation of HisReach. Now things are easier to find and easier to use.

Top Buddies - Now you can show off your best buds to everyone on HisReach. Make sure to set them up so they will show in your profile. You can do so at http://www.hisreach.com/user/edit_buddies.php. Also, use this page to easily access all of your top buddies profiles…just one click away!

NEW RETRO HISREACH TEE - Don’t miss this! There is an awesome new HisReach tshirt in the HisReach Store at http://store.hisreach.com. They are totally hip and now in ladies styles as well as mens! You’re going to like them for sure! Show your HisReach love!

New Search Feature - You may have noticed there were some issues with searching from the navigation bar. Well worry no longer! The bar is now fixed and you can search for anyone on HisReach by first or last name in only one step. Need to search for churches or groups? Click ‘Search’ in the navigation bar and you are there!

Help Promote HisReach - Visit http://promote.hisreach.com. We have a new button for you to place on your blog, website, or MySpace. We need your help getting the word out about HisReach…we can’t do it without you! Definitely go check it out!

Hey HisReach,
We just want to keep you updated on what is going on in the HisReach world. There are tons of new people, tons of new church additions, and tons of new suggestions for HisReach.

We TOTALLY appreciate your feedback and we are hearing everything you say. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of time to respond to everything…but no worries, you are being heard. Keep the suggestions coming…together we will make HisReach an amazing place to be!

Just a little look into the future…HisReach is on the move! We are going into a time of great growth for HisReach and that means a lot of fun new features for all of you. Just to name a few:
1) Brand new photo system for your profile - Unlimited pictures, multiple albums, tagging, etc. - Get excited because this is going to be really cool!
2) More changes to how HisReach looks and functions - We are continuing to change HisReach to look great and function even better.
3) Music Profiles - Yes…some of you have been asking for almost a year and its nearly time. Before the summer is over…there will be music on your profiles…it’s going to be awesome…I promise :)

So…with all that on the way…we need one thing from you….especially all the new members out there. We need you to invite your friends to check out HisReach. If you love HisReach, if you think HisReach is alright, or even if you just see the potential of HisReach…help us get there! We need you to invite friends because it makes HisReach more fun, more active, and helps us to keep developing new stuff. There are 2 easy ways to invite your friends:

1) On your home page, there is a section called ‘Invite’. Simply type in your friends email addresses and a little message and send away.
2) If you prefer the easier route, you can import your email addresses from your email account into HisReach and then you don’t have to type at all. It’s REALLY easy and only takes a minute to actually do. You can find the address importer in the ‘Invite’ section on your home page at the link called ‘Find Your Friends on HisReach’ or at http://www.hisreach.com/general/invite_address_book.php. Also, if your friends are already on HisReach and you don’t know it…this tool will let you request their friendship immediately. Pretty cool!

So, thanks for helping us make a great site. Thanks for checking out what we are doing. Stay tuned here on the HisReach blog for more about a free iPod giveaway very soon!

You must have noticed by now that HisReach has a new look! We really wanted to move in the direction of taking our design to the next level, so this is where we started. A simple new header and a little less orange throughout the site. We are still working to update all the pages, but we are really excited about our new look. Let us know what you think!

Also, we have a new navigation system! We noticed that we had a lot of ways to get to the same page throughout the site. After quite a bit of analysis of the website, we came up with our new bar as you see it now. You should find everything you used to see on the new bar. If you don’t immediately see it, check out what is in the dropdown menus. We have some big plans for the next few months for HisReach and our navigation bar was getting smaller and smaller. You will find the most used pages on the top level and lesser used in the dropdowns. We hope you like the new navigation…we are working to make HisReach great!

Spirit West Coast starts today in Monterey, CA and runs through Saturday night. If you didn’t know yet, HisReach has a booth! We are located in the middle of the vendor island area. Make sure you come by the booth to say Hi. We are giving away free wristbands, free water bottles, and a raffle ticket to win one of THREE FREE IPODS. We would love to meet you, so grab some friends and stop by to meet us.

Lastly, along with our new look on the website…we have a new t-shirt available. Much thanks to Jason Kleist from Rambler Media for all of his hard work putting together the new shirt. You can check it out and order your own in the HisReach Store!

Thanks to everyone for all your support as we continue to grow HisReach. We appreciate all of your kind words and support.

Update: The site is back up and running. Hopefully there will be no more downtime. Thanks for your patience.

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Some of you may have noticed some downtime over the last 24 hours. First off, sorry for the inconvenience! The exciting news is that HisReach has a new home! We have big plans for some new features and are ready to grow up. For us, that means a new server…and unfortunately a little downtime as we fine tune the website.

We are now on a dedicated server where we are the only site running from this machine (unlike before where there were hundreds of other sites running on our machine). Now we won’t be affected by other websites writing bad code or compromising our machine. What does this mean for you? It means that HisReach will be faster and safer than it already was before.

Again, sorry for the inconvenient downtime, but trust us….there is some cool stuff on the way in the weeks to follow.

UPDATE: You may change your privacy settings by clicking on ‘edit settings’ on your main page or by clicking this link.

You can also set your username by going here.

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Things are really rolling at HisReach. We are working to design cool changes to make your experience more fun. Part of that is making HisReach more accessible to everyone. Don’t freak out…we haven’t created the HisReach “news feed”.

What we have done though is create usernames! “So what?” you might be saying. Well, usernames allow you to easily access your personal profile from anywhere on the web. All you have to do is log into your HisReach account, click the link that says “Set My Username Now”, pick a username between 5 and 16 characters, and you are done. Now you can access your personal profile from anywhere on the web by visiting http://www.hisreach.com/yourusername. For example, my username is ‘garrett’…I know…shocking, huh? So I can easily visit my profile by going to http://www.hisreach.com/garrett. Check it out…and don’t hesitate to add me as your friend…I like meeting new people!

“Woah Woah Woah, I didn’t sign up to have my profile visible to the entire world”, you might be saying. Trust us, we understand. That’s why we have now added privacy levels for your profile. There are three levels LOW, MEDIUM, and HIGH. By default your account is set to HIGH privacy and will operate just as it always has since we created HisReach. None of your information will be visible to anyone that is not your friends. You can still access your personal profile like we described above, but users will have to be logged in and already be your friend before they can see your profile. The next level is MEDIUM privacy. This allows your “limited” profile to be visible to any member of HisReach only. People must have a HisReach account in order to see your profile. When they are viewing your profile they will see the “limited version”, meaning they will not see your prayer requests, your contact information, or your profile statistics…at least until they become your friend. The last level is LOW privacy. This allows anyone on the internet to see your “limited” profile without needing a HisReach account. Again, your “limited” profile does not share your prayer requests, your contact information, or your profile statistics.

We implemented the privacy in this way to encourage you to share your HisReach profile with your friends and make it as easy as possible to show someone. Don’t worry Moms and Dads, just make sure that your child’s profile is set to HIGH security and everything will remain totally confidential. We are always thinking of your kids safety and security first.

Lastly is our call for help…we need you, our members, to help keep HisReach alive. Part of staying alive is keeping HisReach active and exciting. Help us by inviting your friends to join HisReach with our invite feature. You are going to make HisReach great and we need your help. Don’t forget to send a friend an encouraging message or add to the discussion topic. We hope you love HisReach as much as we love serving you!

More great features on the way soon!

It’s been a while since our last update, but I can guarantee there are going to be a lot more coming soon. We are working full steam on HisReach and working towards all those fun things you all have been requesting. We did an update today though, so I’ll let you know what exactly it is that we did.

* Open signup - People can now sign up for a HisReach account without needing to be invited! It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally ready. We still want to encourage you to send out invites to your friends, but now there are no more messy invite codes and requests. We always worry first about your experience and security as a member of HisReach, so please if you ever see anything questionable, report it to us as soon as possible with the ‘Report a Violation’ link or by shooting us an email at admin@hisreach.com.

* Group Updates Notification - Tired of having to check all your groups to see if anything has changed? Us too! Now when group members add posts, pictures, or change the group profile information you will see that the group has been changed. Click the ‘Groups’ tab on the top navigation bar and you will see all of your groups. All that is left is for you to hunt around and see what’s new.

* Find My Friends On HisReach - This feature did exist before, but it is newer and better. You will find it right under the invite box on the main page of HisReach after you log in. Click the link and follow the instructions on importing your emails into HisReach. This will allow you to invite all your friends without typing in the email address by hand as well as requesting friendship with those that are already on HisReach.

* New Tour - If you want to show your friends HisReach before they sign up, send them over to the HisReach Tour to see a little about what we are doing around here. It even includes some pictures :-)

That’s all for now, but much much more to come in the following weeks! Hope your Wednesday is a great one! Don’t forget to tell a friend about HisReach.

There is currently an issue with notification emails not being sent when a new message is posted to your profile, when someone asks to be your friend, or when you invite someone to join HisReach. We are sorry for the inconvenience and are working to fix it promptly.

UPDATE: We have fixed the email system as best as we can tell. If you find that you aren’t receiving emails like you would expect from HisReach, please let us know. In the meantime, make sure to resend your invites since there is a decent chance your friends didn’t receve them. Sorry again for the inconvenience. Check back tomorrow for some fun changes to HisReach!