The New Blog!

We've officially launched our new blog, powered by Google's Blogger! We felt that separating our blog functionality and contents from the rest of LearningZen would allow us to be more blog "compliant" with regards to linking, searching, and following. It also frees up time for us to work on the product we love, rather than reinventing the blog wheel. Our new blog - as you can probably see if you're reading this - is located at http://blog.learningzen.com, or can be accessed by clicking the LearningZen Blog link in our header. This new blog went live with our LearningZen launch on January 29, 2010.

Other changes were also included in the launch, albeit mostly minor. This launch was focused mainly on maintenance items, but we have also added a few useful utilities for portal administrators.

Portal administrators now have the capability to change their members' account login (email address) and display nickname. Additionally, administrators may also delete portal user accounts if said user has not participated in other LearningZen activities. These two features give our portal administrators that much more control over the management of their users, allowing them to quickly make the changes which they need rather than being required to call LearningZen's support line.

As always, we are interested in your feedback and comments. LearningZen is a customer-driven application and we strive to incorporate requests from our user community. Feel free to post some comments!

Development Update

We launched the change that switched the login process to use email addresses on Wednesday of this week. It seemed to go well. I have not heard any complaints or comments from our users about this change. Please don't ever hesitate to let us know if you don't like something we have done. You can do this by emailing support@learningzen.com, posting a comment in any blog's discussion forum, or any general site forum. Rest assured that your comment will be noticed.

It is particularly important right now that you let us know what features you want or need in LearningZen. We have a lot of items on our backlog list, but we need your help in determining what makes the most sense to build.

Thank you for your support of LearningZen.

Thomas Klassen

We're Changing the Way You Log In

The LearningZen team has concluded that we will change the way you log in to LearningZen. Although originally designed to utilize only a username and password, LearningZen will now use your email address and a password to log in.

This change has been talked about since the practically the beginning of LearningZen and we have now made it official! We have had a number of discussions, but ultimately the end users of LearningZen were the most important factor - particularly those who use our Premium Services.

What this means to you is that you will now be able to log in to LearningZen using your email address and password. You will still retain your nickname, and that nickname will be used when your profile is displayed to other users. Your email address will not be publicized to anyone.

In addition, you will now be able to change your email address, display nickname, and password recovery question & answer from the "My Account" section of the site. Previously, users were locked into their username and nickname and were never able to make changes.

To take advantage of this new feature, simply log in to LearningZen as you normally have. After logging in, the system will prompt you to confirm the current email address we have on file for your account. Once you confirm, your "username" will now be your email address next time you log in.

We hope this change helps alleviate some friction that users have been feeling when having to remember a separate username, email address, and password. We would love to hear comments from you!