Hi everyone! Here are some more pics with my new colleagues in Brookyn! Yesterday I visited “Afilliate Summit East” at Hilton NY with some of them and it is going be a very interesting experience!

They also changed the wall clock into Valencia time..

Regards. Talk soon!

Last August, we posted a blog showing our user map which highlights where our site visitors are coming from. As was the case then, we’re currently seeing visitors from all over the world, with the majority of them coming from the USA, Russia, England, Spain and Japan. Check out the map and Top 15 list below.

Currently on the light side is Australia, New Zealand, Africa and South America. Where you at Southern Hemisphere?

Over the past several weeks we’ve been collecting all kinds of great input from the community on what features the site needs. We brought some of these ideas to life last night by wrapping up our website migration process to a new platform. This is a significant change and we apologize for any frustration it may cause anyone. This was a one-time effort and hopefully the benefits of the new features outweigh any inconveniences you experience.

If anyone is having trouble accessing their account, you may need to reset your password, which can be done here.

Over the next several weeks we will be deploying several minor site updates, tweaks and fun features, so keep an eye out for them. We still continue to encourage input from everyone to help make the site and the community increasingly better.

First off, we want to say thank you to all of you that have signed up for updates from SwapYourShop as well as followed us on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

If we’ve been silent for a while its because we’re working away on building the full site, which will allow you to connect with creatives around the world and get to swapping. Building SwapYourShop has been an incredibly fun project for us and seeing it come to life is thrilling.

Now we need your help. Please take one minute to answer just a few questions and email us your answers:

1) What concerns would you have when swapping with another creative (ex. safety, quality of housing, unfamiliar with location, job security, etc)?

2) Are there ways you’d like to use SwapYourShop that you haven’t heard mentioned yet (ex. swap your full team, intern swaps, freelance swaps, etc)?

3) What features do you think will be important at site launch? What will you want to know about the person/place you are swapping with?

Again, just send us an email with answers and any additonal concerns, thoughts or suggestions and you’ll be helping us move further faster, which means you can swap sooner.

And now I’ll end this post as I started it with a big “thank you”.

I was working on some swapyourshop buttons the other day for an AIGA Small Talks presentation and I wanted to share how refreshing it was to sit for an hour and create something with my hands. Yes, making one button at a time over and over got old fast but what it did do was well worth the effort.

1) It got me off the computer. Yes you can create without a computer.

2) The repetition put my body in a machine-like state cranking out buttons while my mind opened up to new and creative ideas. What a great exercise for the brain and it made my work day easier since I came prepared with concepts.

3) Believe it or not, a task like this one can be a great stress reliever. Less stress is good.

4) I made some pretty cool buttons.

The number of visits to our site has jumped greatly in the last month thanks to features on Creative Review and Quipsologies. One of the more exciting things about the visits (besides confirmation that we’re not alone in our desires to work abroad while keeping our jobs) is where the visits are coming from. They’re all over the map! Check it out:

Who wouldn’t want to swap with someone in Rio de Jenerio, Amsterdam, Auckland, Moscow or New York City?

Some of the feedback we’re getting says you want us to hurry and get the site up so you can connect with each other and start swapping. Well, we’re working on it. Josh has figured out our backend setup and we’re working through the features we’ll have at launch.

Got some ideas around that? We’d love to hear them.