Today we released a brand new Carbonmade portfolio search that returns accurate results. Now when you search for "New York illustrator" you only get illustrators in New York rather than both people in New York and people that are illustrators. We've also chosen to mimic Google's notation to keep things uniform, so adding + signs and brackets ( ) will now work with Carbonmade searches. Here are some examples:

» Dave Gorum (people search)
» New York (location search)
» New York illustrator (location + skill search)

Carbonmade has always been a great place to find freelancers and people looking for work and our new portfolio search is a massive improvement to what we had previously. It is now arguably easier to sort through a collection of results (e.g. "New York illustrator") on Carbonmade than anything currently existing on the Web. I hope you all find this useful and please let me know if you encounter any bugs or have any questions.

A few days ago we introduced search to the Carbonmade portfolio listing. This first release was a bit limited, but we've fixed all that! We've updated it. You can now search through more facets of your portfolio. These include: your name, city, state, country, areas of expertise, skills, and title. You can also include "+" to group two search terms together (e.g., Fashion + New York).

Also, as an added benefit to our paying customers your portfolio will appear higher in the results than non-paying folks. So, if you want to up your chances of being seen now is a great time to upgrade!

Here are some interesting searches we've come across:
» Illustrators in Tel Aviv, Israel
» Web Designers in Poland
» Designers who know Ruby
» Copywriters in San Francisco
» Photographers in Detroit, MI

The two biggest requests we get are for search and for a detailed help area. Well, we've added both. With search you can look up people's names, locations, and other tidbits. And with the Help area of Carbonmade -- see the tab above -- you can get answers to the most frequently asked questions. It's divided into three sections (General, Billing, and Settings) and covers almost anything you're looking for. If you do have problems that aren't covered there, please do shoot us an e-mail. That's all for now, but more is on the way.

At the request of many people, we've added PayPal as a form of payment. This should certainly make it easier for our international customers, as well as anyone else who wishes to use PayPal rather than a credit card. Whoo! customers wishing to switch over to PayPal should have no problem either. Simply log in to your backend and select PayPal as your new billing method. Please email us with any questions.

The other change we've implemented today is an update to our Privacy Policy. There aren't any significant changes, but we've cleaned up the language to make things clearer for you. You can read our Privacy Policy here, and if you have any questions, you can certainly contact us. We respect your privacy and won't do anything to jeopardize it.

This just in; enjoyable projects a neglected blog make. Record covers and new apps and Indian coffee, oh my! Also we've pushed over 3,000 portfolios, whoo!

To list or to gallery
You can now choose between two methods of displaying your images: the original "slide show" method and the all new "list" method (e.g. this 'un). The list view is particularly nice for you web designers because you can show off really long screencaps of your web layouts in your projects.

Choose your thumb poison
There are now two thumbnail options for your image galleries: horizontal and vertical. Check out the display options in your projects and give them a drive around the block.

You and yours
We've added a few little features to your About section. You can include a flag that lets everyone know that you are taking freelance work (which also shows up on your widget in the carbonmade.com portfolios page) and you can list out all your areas of expertise and skills in the corresponding tag fields (these to show up on your portfolios page widget as well). As always, only fill out and turn on what you'd like.

We'll be back with more, including your portfolio feed, speed increases, and all the little things that make Carbonmade go "zoom" in the night.

Back again with part two of the summary of new things Carbonmade. First off, we must express our bittersweet happiness at the World Cup's conclusion. It was mighty hard getting things done around here with all the high drama and what not. Now we only have to contend with the Tour de France.

Sport aside (which I'm sure none to few of you will mind), we have a gaggle of features to go over today. Let's dive in.

Frames per second
Motion designers rejoice! We are offering high-quality hosted videos in our Whoo! plan. Upgrading will get you ten 50mb videos to do with as you please. We also did a number on the Quicktime player and skinned it to match our streamlined interface. And to all of our less timeline oriented Carbonmaders spread the word to your motion happy peers so we can start filling up the community with purty movin' pictures.

Oh so pretty
We moved the featured artist posts out of the blog and into their very own spot in the Portfolios section. Keep an eye on the list as we'll be updating it regularly with artists that strike our fancy or folks who are using Carbonmade in neat ways. We've also added a feed so you can get a regular dose of eye-candy via your favorite reader.

All thumbs
The project listing page was in dire need of some updatage so we added a few features to the project thumbnails. You can now turn off and on the thumbnail text at your preference. We also added the option of displaying your thumbs 1up, 2up, or the default 3up. Folks are all ready playing around with custom thumbnail images and the new layout options to make interesting and unique listing pages. We love it!

Well, that'll do it for this installment of Awesome New Carbonmade Features. Tomorrow the Tour heads to the mountains and we'll be back with another update (after the stage finishes of course). Keep posting your beautiful work!

Well, howdy! It has been awhile. So, we just launched something like 150 updates and I've been tasked to try to catch you up on everything. A fair amount of the new features are biggins so I've decided to break everything out into a number of posts over the next few days. In addition to these overviews we'll be regularly posting new FAQs and tips and tricks. All righty, onward!

The new face forward
Firstly, you've probably noticed that we purtied up the main site here. Things have been stretched out some and we've added a few sections. The two hotspots on the tour of the new site are the Portfolios listing and the About page. In the former you'll find a number of new sections, big ol' featured portfolios, fancier thumbnails, and tag sifting. We've also added feed support so get your subscription on. In the latter you'll find a write up on who we are and some nifty buttons and badges to help you help us help the world get to know Carbonmade.

Whoo! not Meh.
One of the chief updates to the app is the addition of a payment plan. We have only one plan which costs $12/month. For your 12 bucks you'll get 50 projects, 500 hi-res images, 10 high-quality videos, and a host of other goodies. Head over to your Account section to check out the rest.

Okay, in an effort to keep this post from becoming a monster we'll stop there. Check back tomorrow for a new round of updates and enjoy all the new toys. Oh, and now that you're able, leave us some feedback in the comments. Tata.

Another week and some change gone by and we're back on the scene with some jive new features to wet your Carbonmade whistles. But first, let's get a little state-of-the-web-app action out of the way. We're closing in on 900 portfolios, a crowd of folks have been in touch offering kudos and suggestions, and we've received a gaggle of great write-ups. The response to Carbonmade keeps on exceeding our expectations and we love it! Now let's get our feature on.

Thumbnails for people who need thumbnails
A healthy handful of portfolios were showing up with a good number of images per project (photographers, we're looking at you). As nice as the slideshow project view is it's just not meant to handle 50 images without inducing carpal tunnel. So, thumbnails to the rescue. Head over to your project edit screen and look for the big green button to flip them on.

You've been Flashed
We added Macromedia Flash based projects to Carbonmade. You can now upload SWFs under a meg and show off your work in fancy-schmancy, moving, vector style.

Wide Load
Only about 1% of Carbonmaders were running resolutions below 1024x768 so we decided to take advantage of all that unused real estate and bump the edit screens to 1000px wide. We believe you'll find this particularly useful when editing projects.

Cloak of Invisibility
Have a project that needs some finishing off or ready to retire that sloppy mess of a layout you made last year? Well, salvation in the form of Hidden Projects has arrived. You can now hide any project in your portfolio by toggling the big ol' blue button in the project edit screen.

How about them Markups
Your About section just got a little nerdier. You can now use basic HTML tags and Markdown codes to help people get the lowdown on everything that is you.

All the Rest
In addition to the bigger stuff, we also went through another round of optimization. Ends were unloosened and code was given a good scrub down. We cleaned up a lot of little bothersome display things like the Image Caption widget and nixed a few bugs. Oh yes, and for the folks who care everything now has Unicode Text Support (Jason tells me this is hot lava).

So another great week-and-some-change. We have another round of features loaded up in the production cannon and we're this close to lighting the wick; keep an eye out (for cannonballs?). Let us know what you think of the new goodies and keep showing off all your great work!

Time for a quick "This Week In Carbonmade". This week we concentrated on cleaning up a lot of the little loose ends left from our previous feature launches. We slimmed down the code even further, did battle with a little server overload, slayed some bugs, and prettied up the interface in places. Overall Carbonmade should be a little more responsive and a smidge more stable.

Unless you're one of our thirteen or so feed subscribers (we love each of you!) you've undoubtedly noticed a few changes on Carbonmade.com. Briefly, here's what we've done:

Added a quick login
We noticed that some folks were having trouble figuring out where to login to their accounts so we've added a login box in the upper right hand corner of the Home page. Pop in your email and password and off you go.

Now with demoability!
A lot of users were signing up with dummy accounts to check out the service so we decided to offer a demo to give a little try-before-you-buy action to those in the need. Hopefully offering the demo will help increase the already high level of quality featured in the Portfolio List. You can take a gander at the demo portfolio at trycarbonmade.com or by clicking the giant red button on the home page.

Features page and this and that
Not much use to those of you who have already signed up but we built out a features page to offer new visitors a quick look into the product. Some other cosmetic and tiny functional touches rounded off the update to Carbonmade.com.

So, another good week. We're on our way to 500 users and the upcoming week will see Jason and I buckling down to add a number of big features to the Carbonmade arsenal.

Your feedback is like crack to us; keep it coming!

A week and some change after our first update we're back with round two. We asked our Magic Eightball if things were going to slow down in the second week after launch and it replied with a solid, "Probably." Well, the Eightball is now garbage truck fodder because we topped 200 sign-ups, received a bunch of feedback, and a whole whaleload of visitors.

Based on that feedback and with a few ideas of our own we've rolled out a buffet of new stuff. Here's the list:

Image Captions
We had quite a few requests for individual image captions and now folks need request no more. Just select an image in edit mode. fill in the corresponding input field, and hit Submit. Viola! a caption. The caption will appear underneath it's parent image in your portfolio.

Project Display
We moved things around in the project display a bit to make room for the image captions. In doing so we decided to move the project title and client to the top of the screen. Also, you can now access the project notes by clicking the title/client text up top.

Google Analytics Tie-in
If you have a Google Analytics account you can now use it to track visitors to your Carbonmade portfolio. Just grab the number that looks like this: UA-XXXXX-X and head over to the Settings screen in edit mode. Plop it in to the Google Analytics edit block and start checking your stats.

Project Types
No longer must you strain your memory and your fingers by reinputing your project types. In the project type(s) edit block we added an interactive list of all your previously used project types. Just click the type(s) you wish to associate with the project and off you go.

General Behind the Scenes
Finally, we cleaned up and discarded a fair amount of code this week which should result in a noticeable speed increase in both edit and view modes. We also took care of some functional inconsistencies that were popping up when managing project images and deleting content.

Good stuff. Let us know if you have any suggestions, feature requests, or just want to send us some digital thumbs up (we love kudos oh so much). As for the coming week, we dug the Eightball out of the trash and asked it if there are awesome things in store and it said, "Concentrate Harder."