"Celebrate your nation's independence by blowing up a small part of it." We suggest using fire quackers. On July 4th, the USA is 232 years old and Scribbls is a wee little baby at just two months. A whole lot has happened since our public launch on May 4th, and we've been so busy we've neglected to write self aggrandizing blog posts about it.

One of the big things that happened was a fairly major traffic spike that came the second week of June thanks to shout outs from Andy Baio at waxy.org, Cal Henderson at iamcal.com, Woot, and other great friends.

This was right on the tail of a traffic bump we got after Minnov8 published an interview with us (thanks for the beer, Phil). MinnPost picked up the interview as well, which was great!

In the end, several hundred people created Scribbls users, including very talented artists and hilarious stick figure aficionados. You've all made us laugh until we peed our pants on more than one occasion. P.S. You owe us new pants. Plural.

So with all these new community members, we've been working hard on new features. One of the major features we added early on was of course the Heart Beat, which became the homepage for Scribbls. When we have hundreds of new outcomes drawn in a single day, we want to filter those down into the community's best in a way that stays fresh as new submissions keep coming in. That's exactly what the Heart Beat does for Scribbls.

We added a way to browse through all of our outcomes randomly. We also made the drawings on the draw tool clickable, so you can easily reference their histories while you are creating a new outcome.

On each person's profile page, we added a way to sort their outcomes by newest, most hearted by the community, or by incomplete outcomes—things they have drawn that don't have a history yet.

Most recently, we added the ability to leave comments and private messages for people on their profiles. This gives Scribbls community members a more direct route to communicate between each other, and gives us another way to get in touch with people, too.

Of course, now it might be nice if you could be notified somehow when somebody leaves you a message on your Scribbls profile, which happens to be an excellent segue into what we're working on right now: notifications! If anybody has an opinion on the kinds of things they want to be notified about, or the ways in which you would like to be notified, be it by email or some other method, share your mind with us in the comments here or use the Scribbls feedback form.

To wrap thing up, we want to re-welcome all of our many new community members. We're really happy that you all seem to have as much fun on Scribbls as we do. We're working hard on creating new features for Scribbls that we think you will like.

Minnebar was this past Saturday here in Minneapolis, and we wouldn't dream of missing out on one of the biggest local tech events of the year. We caught some interesting sessions, ate some spectacular roast beef, and followed along on Twitter during the day while hanging out with friends and making some new ones, too.

The roast beef really was unusually delicious, and the free spread even included watermelon slices. I'd like to think it was ordered special for us.

The highlight of the event for us was both watching and participating in the lightning demo rounds. I really loved the very meta lighter flame iPhone app for concerts by CodeMorphic, and Paul was pretty interested in FanChatter. Just before those two we were able to do a quick demo of Scribbls for the crowd. Unless everybody was laughing at us, I'd say it was very well received. We weren't even able to get to all the questions from the crowd because we couldn't hear anybody over the roars of laughter. I guess Kitten Bacon isn't just funny to us after all.

After the demos and closing comments, we had some beer (thanks sponsors) and enjoyed making connections with several people. MinneBar gets all the best local minds together, and we can't wait until next year.

I'm very happy to announce that our first site, Scribbls, has launched and is ready for everyone to start drawing and hearting outcomes!

So come one, come all and join our collaborative drawing community!

We’re making Scribbls live for the whole world [wide web] to see in just a few weeks days hours! If you are half as excited as we are, you need new underpants.

Thank you so much for your help testing out the site over the last weeks or months. You have all found some bugs that we’ve squashed, and you’ve also recommended some great features — some of which we’ve gotten to, many which we plan to get to soon.

We’ve got lots of features we want to add after launch, trust us!

Anyway, when the site goes live it won’t be hidden behind a login page anymore, and since launch is so close, we need to test out the login system we’ll use when we are live. This means that you might be asked to log in one more time. We appreciate your help testing this.

Now is actually a great time to double your bug finding efforts. And hey, those of you who really help us find things that are broken or give us any other great feedback, or if you’ve done so in the past… you might just have a little thank you gift in your future.

Happy hunting!

Hearts are better than farts stars. Rather than starring the things you like on Scribbls, you can now heart them.

All you need is love.

This is just one of the many changes that came with the latest Scribbls update. Check out our posts about the randomizer and the new sketchpad.

Having a mental block when drawing? Tired of picking the drawings you want to add together yourself? Reloading the page too much for you?

Worry no more!

Introducing the all new, all natural, 100% post-consumer plastics, batteries included, fantabulous, Randomaticator. Now when you're creating your new outcomes you'll notice a new icon — two arrows forming a circle:

Just give that icon a click, and presto, change-o, new drawings to add together will be randomly chosen for you through the magic of AJAX! Yes, AJAX! One more time, AJAX!

You can even use it if you've started to draw something — the amazing, on sale now, while supplies last Randomaticator is smart enough not to delete your artistic efforts.

Product name may vary. Void where prohibited.

Just over two weeks ago, I started up a complete rewrite of the Scribbls sketchpad for drawing new outcomes. Sure, the old sketchpad was working fine, but we all wanted more out of it. This new version includes, most notably, undo and redo buttons. You asked for it, so we're giving it to you. Possibly more importantly, this rewrite is a complete overhaul of the entire codebase for the sketchpad. It's been rewritten for better debugging, faster and more responsive drawing and ease of future feature additions. For the power-users, I've added keyboard shortcuts for common tasks^*:

• Keys 1-9 switch your pencil color according to the colors in the color manager. If you only have two colors, black and red, numbers 1 and 2 will switch between them respectively.
• 0 (zero) and 'e' will switch to the eraser
• 'z' will undo your last line
• 'y' will redo that undo
• 'esc' will activate the trash confirmation

* These shortcuts have changed.

I hope the new sketchpad helps us now and in the future. And as always, submit your feature requests and bug reports to us! We heart your feedback.

…Bees?

Paul and I have been working on a few new things in response to some of your feedback. Paul's got a new header for Scribbls in the works, which some of you might find a bit more intuitive. He's also all wrapped up in a complete rewrite of the sketch pad. He's making crazy fast progress. It's going to have new features like undo/redo. Pretty sweet.

What have I been doing? Blogging. That's pretty much it.Just kidding. I've been working, too. I've juiced up the autocomplete results when you are creating a new outcome to be more inclusive.

Just for example, type 'turd' into the input and you'll quickly see rather than just drawings starting with 'turd' you get all sorts of turd options, like 'Flying Ninja Turd.' It was pretty annoying before when you typed 'mom' and you wouldn't get 'Your mom' as a result. Problem solved.

Once we release more of this new stuff we'll be inviting another wave of people. More people means more doodlers. In the meantime, have you seen all the Halloween stuff? We're even prepped for Thanksgivings.

Oh man, I have to remember to say that we're now hosted with the good folks at Slicehost. I've noticed a definite speed improvement, and we've got plenty of opportunity to grow. How about that name, too, huh? Slicehost. Like a watermelon slice. Get it? So punny.