Hey ‘traq-ers, if you’ve been bouncing around the site today you’ve probably noticed we enabled category browsing and cleaned up the project browser quite a bit (and fixed a stupid htmlentities encoding bug – sorry " folks "). The new categories are based on what we get fed from Kickstarter, so they should all be covered, but without the multiple drill-downs and slow load times. If you don’t believe us, go browse through the Categories on our Browse page and then compare them with the load times on Kickstarter (We love Kickstarter, but we love fast response times more). I think I’ve double and triple checked that they’re all there, but let me know if you notice any are missing.

With the new Browse page comes a few top-level Kicktraq exclusive browsing options, including our new “Day-1” projects, and the ability to find projects that are participating in the “Kicking it Forward” pledge.

Day-1 projects are projects which project owners or backers have taken the time to add to Kicktraq the first day they are live. We’re specifically calling these projects out is because A) it helps us Kicktraq folk out in the long-run to have full project data for future models, and B) it helps project backers get the most accurate representation of a project’s movement over the life of that project. We’ve gone so far as to give project owners special badges if they want to call out their project for future or current backers to track their progress, which will hopefully encourage on-the-fence backers to stand behind a project if they see that it’s likely to fund or current backers to pledge more if it’s likely their project will hit certain over-funding goals.

Lastly, I just have to say thank you to all the people who continue to use and promote Kicktraq. It amazes me to see my site mentioned in Kickstarter project comments, forums, official project Facebook pages, and more. To see more than a hundred people have already downloaded and are using the Firefox extension is incredible, and seeing the statistics where tens of thousands of charts being served for projects every single day and that people are returning for 5+ minute sessions daily is mind-blowing.

I’ve already had some amazing feedback over the last few days from project owners who found out about Kicktraq through their Kickstarter report because backers have come through Kicktraq to find them, then have pledged as a result. That, to me, is the most exciting news of all and the whole reason I’ve spent so much time working on this beast.

I was going to keep the next feature a secret, but I’m terrible at surprises, so you should be seeing category-specific RSS feeds in the very near future! This will allow you to subscribe via RSS to any category in which Kicktraq currently tracks projects. It’s exciting for me personally to know that now, with nearly 450 projects (and growing) being tracked, I can see all the latest cool Board & Card Games projects right in my newsreader.

Let me know what you think!

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