Small:

<a href="http://www.blist.com/?=b"><img src="http://blog.blist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/blist_badge_small.gif"></a>

Large:

<a href="http://www.blist.com/?=b"><img src="http://blog.blist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/blist_badge_big.gif"></a>

Email the link to your page with a blist badge to feedback@blist.com, and we will mail you a blist sticker.

1. A more discoverable Permissions & Privacy section, which allows you to easily make your blist public or private.  Public blists are a great way to share interesting data with the blist community.
2. A notification feature that emails all of the people with whom your blist is shared.  If you’ve made a large change to your blist, and want to let everyone know that it has been updated, click “Notify all of changes”.

These are just two small enhancements to improve the experience of working with blist.

First, blist is great for classroom administration - being a database, you can start with one row per student, add yearbook photo in one column, upload homework as a Word document, or other file in another column, and then create a whole table within a cell for each student to keep track of grades for each student on each assignment in each class.

Second and more subtly, some teachers are using blist to teach computer and database concepts to students in a visual and intuitive way. For instance, the idea of a database itself as a collection of two-dimensional tables connected together in specific ways can be hard to conceptualize, but is easy to show using blist’s table within a cell feature.

TeachersFirst, an online resource and community for educators recently reviewed blist and provided these ideas for using blist in the classroom:

Possible uses: Teach about data collection and analysis using this tool on your interactive whiteboard or projector. The highly visual, drag and drop interface will make data manipulation work more intuitively for your students to understand. Let them click and drag to create a blist and resulting graphs from surveys the class conducts. If you are comfortable allowing students to use the tool, create an inventory of books read independently with reviews, ratings and more. Students can add to it from home and collect credit for outside readings or find books based on others’ reviews. Collect lab data, have groups collect data on famous people, inventors, or historic events. Compare consumer goods. Share important dates and checklists for major projects by allowing student and parents to VIEW (not edit) a database you create. Assign students to evaluate and compare different web resources as part of a class research assignment.

You can read the rest of the review here.

The TeachersFirst Edge Team conveniently created a blist with even more ideas for classroom use.

Wetpaint is a terrific place to publish your own rich, online community. It’s an incredibly easy to use, collaborative wiki service that also has some of the features of blogs, forums and social networks. You can either create your own site or explore the thousands of sites created by others in the Wetpaint community.

Recently folks have asked how to publish a blist widget on a wetpaint page. Here’s how.

First, think about permissions. You are in full control of who accesses your blist, whether it’s potentially viewed on the blist site proper or running as a widget in another host site like Wetpaint. So you probably want to set the permissions on the blist to match those of the host Wetpaint site. If that site is public, make the blist public. If you shared it with a few people by name or email address, do the same in blist. You can adjust permissions on the task pane, to the right of the desired blist.

After you have the permissions on your blist set correctly, click on the [Publish] icon in the ribbon menu:

When you click on the [Publish] icon the publishing dialog will pop up. From the size combo box, choose the size of widget you want. We don’t have a shortcut code for publishing a widget into Wetpaint, so you’ll need to copy and paste the embed code manually.

Put your cursor anywhere inside the embed code multi-line field and then select all of the text. The easiest way to do that is by pressing <ctrl><a> on Windows or <cmd><a> on a Mac. Once all of the embed code is highlighted, press <ctrl><c> or <cmd><c> to copy it to your clipboard. You won’t notice any visual change, but the embed code will be on your clipboard.

Now go into Wetpaint and bring up the page you want to host the widget. Click on the [EasyEdit] button:

The EasyEdit menu will pop up. Out at the far right end of the menu is a button that says [Widget (videos, rss)]. Click that button to bring up the Add Widget window, which looks like this:

There’s no tile for blist (you should contact Wetpaint and demand it) so you’ll have to scroll down and select Other Widget from the bottom row:

We’re almost done. Hang in there. The Add Widget window will change appearance, allowing you to paste in the embed code you copied out of blist:

Position your cursor in the text box labeled “Enter the code for your widget” and then press <ctrl><v> (on Windows) or <cmd><v> (on the Mac). Finally click on the [Add Widget] button at the bottom of the dialog and you’re done!

Here’s Wetpaint’s help guide in case you need help with embedding the blist widget on Wetpaint.

After you save the changes to your Wetpaint page, you’ll see the blist widget come in. Here’s how mine looks. Pretty sweet.

I’ll close with two final thoughts. First, blist widgets are dynamic. If you update the data in blist, people who see the widget in Wetpaint will see the changes automatically. Second, you can publish a lens instead of the blist if you want. Remember a lens is a filtered view of your data. In fact, the 49ers schedule above is a lens against the entire NFL schedule. The lens has only 49ers games, sorted in chronological order.

Give blist widgets a try. They’re a great way to publish and distribute your data.

“I use blist for an online database for our small employment agencies. We run an employment agency in Hong Kong, placing Filipino workers with HK families. We have to collect and keep data on the domestic helpers, including medical reports, scanned passports, etc. We also need to keep a simple CRM database on people who call or email us looking for a maid. Many of these people will eventually go from leads to customers. We also keep documents for them, proof of address, income, etc. that we use to apply for a work visa. We want to be able to integrate the two, and blist’s ability to place a blist in a blist is great.

Traditional CRMs are expensive and often difficult to set up. The makers seem to think that one size fits all. blist would be ideal for any business that needs to keep a variety of “stuff” together. It’s like having a smart file folder, into which I can stuff pictures, documents, etc., and find them and their connections quickly.”

We find that every business is unique, and while there are many needs in common, each business, not just each vertical or category, requires special consideration. This is blist’s sweetspot: simple yet powerful, and easily customized to the specific needs of your own business. Try blist for yourself: www.blist.com

As you can see, we’re in good company.

Here’s a time sequenced screen progression to show you how it works. Click into a date cell. Notice there’s a calendar icon, which opens a date picker if you want it.

We don’t want to pick from the calendar. We just want to type ‘today’ into the cell.

And then as soon as we tab out of the cell, the string ‘today’ will be replaced with today’s date.

That’s all there is to it. I find it helpful and hope you do too.

To the casual observer, blist looks a lot like a visually rich spreadsheet. That’s by design. We want blist to seem familiar despite that under the cover it’s more a web-based database than a web-based spreadsheet. After all, spreadsheets are great for crunching numbers. But databases are much better for storing, finding and analyzing data.

One of the features that makes blist a database is the ability to create, save and execute lenses. A lens is a custom view of your data. A lens can include:

• Optionally a filter - criteria used to select a subset of the rows from the underlying full blist. Here are a few examples:
  • Lead Stage = In Closing
  • Varietal = Merlot AND Vintage BETWEEN 2003 AND 2005
  • Priority = High OR (Age > 90 AND Priority = Medium)
  • Opportunity > 1000000 AND Probability of Close = High AND State = CA

If you create a filter, you’ll only see those rows. The rest of the data is still there, it’s just concealed from you while you work through the lens. If don’t create a filter, you’ll see all of the rows.

• Optionally a column list - a subset of the columns that you want to see when viewing your data through this lens. As an example we use blist for our bug tracking system. It has 20 columns including a plain text field to hold the subject and a rich text field where we enter a much lengthier narrative description. Sometimes I just want a quick peek into open bugs so in my lens I hide about 10 of the columns I’m not currently interested in, including the description.

• Optionally a sort order of rows visible through your lens. Perhaps you want to see your sales leads by stage and then opportunity size. Maybe you want to view your open bugs by priority then severity then age. If you don’t specify a sort order the rows are displayed in their natural physical order, which is the order in which they were entered.

The user adoption pattern for lenses is interesting to observe. People operate without lenses for quite a while then all of sudden create dozens of them. I think it’s because there’s a barrier to overcome understanding them, then the lightbulb goes on, and people realize that lenses are a really powerful way to slice through data.

While there are times when going through the effort to create a temporary, disposable lens might make sense, the real power of lenses is that they can be saved, reused and shared. To change my view to any lens for the current blist, I just need to drop down the lens selector:

Hopefully you’re now excited to try lenses for yourself. Let’s make one. We’ll create a lens against the following hypothetical sales pipeline:

To start creating a lens, load up one of your blists then click on the lens builder icon or feel free to borrow the one above. It’s called “Hypothetical Sales Pipeline” and I’ve made it publicly accessible.

Click on the lens builder icon. I’ve circled it in red to show you where it is.

The lens builder has 3 tabs. The first tab is for creating your filter criteria. The second tab is for selecting the columns you want to show and which you want to hide. The third tab is for specifying the sort order.

The first tab - Filter Criteria - is initially empty:

Let’s find all of the leads where the stage is “Active Negotiations” and the opportunity size is greater than or equal to $2,500. Drag and drop the column called “Sales Stage” from the list of columns onto the filter canvas. Leave the condition combo box in the middle set to “Equals” then drop down the values combo box. It’s the rightmost combo box. Notice it has all of the sales stages. Find “Active Negotiations” in the list and select it. Next drag and drop the column “Oppty Size” on to the grid. Notice that an [And] button appears to connect the two conditions. That’s what we want, so leave it alone. (Under different circumstances, we might want either stage = “Active Negotiations” OR opportunity size >= $2,500. In that case we’d just click on the [And] button to flip it to [Or].) We want to change the condition from “Equals” to “Greater than or equal to” and then type in $2,500 into the rightmost field. When you’re done, it should look like this:

We don’t need all of the columns in the output. Let’s just include the name of the company, probability of close, the sales rep, and the opportunity size. Click on the columns tab and move all but those 4 columns from the list of visible columns to the list of hidden columns. You can move them by any of three methods -  dragging and dropping, using the left and right arrows in the middle, or double clicking. When complete, it will look like this:

Finally, let’s sort this in descending opportunity size order. Click on the “Sort By” tab. Move the column “Oppty Size” from the unsorted columns list to the sorted columns list. By default columns are sorted in ascending order. We want them to be listed in descending order, so click on the word “ascending” to invert it to “descending” order. It will look like this when you’re done:

We’re almost done. We could click [OK] and see the results and then perhaps discard the lens. But let’s instead give our lens a name in case we want to run this again in the future. Click on the [Save as...] and call it “Active Negotiations” then click [OK]. The lens has been saved by name and the results are displayed. Here’s what the results looks like:

That’s all there is to creating a lens in blist. Remember that a lens is a real-time view of your underlying data. If you load the same lens two days in a row, you will get different results if the underlying data has changed.

If you would like a more visual tutorial, we have a 2-minute blist video that shows you how to create a lens.

Go ahead and start highlighting rows.

Here are HTML links to the videos, if you’re reading this from a source that doesn’t have flash support.

• Create a blist
• Import an Excel File
• Find a Template
• Add a Contact
• Share a blist
• Add a Table to a blist
• Filter and Sort
• Create a Pick List
• Print
• Upload a File
• Add a Photo
• Tag a blist
• Delete a blist
• Getting Started Guide