Pledgehammer

Thank you for making pledges!

It gives everyone at the ivory tower of Pledgehammer headquarters great joy to see that there are more and more pledges made every day. We’re still far from the milestone of, say, ten thousand pledges but you have to start somewhere, right?

If you’re out of ideas what to resolve try out Resolution Randomizer. For yours truly it recommended to resolve to never to be seen arm wrestling in the break room. Word.

Mark Twain on New Year’s resolutions

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is harmless annual institutions, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.

If that’s true charities will have an awesome 2009. Go on, make a pledge.

“In 2009, I will finally get around to voting for President.” - Homer Simpson

It’s that time of year again… And here are two great New Year’s resolutions to get you in the mood: Somegreybloke and The Simpsons.

Pledgehammer -1 : IE - 0

Today we fixed a few nasty bugs that stopped people with Internet Explorer 6 or older seeing the front page correctly, editing their profile or viewing cheers to pledges.

No wasting words here. Keep calm and carry on.

We are live!

We’ve fixed many nasty bugs our beta testers had pointed us to. And at wee hours today we made the courageous decision to go live. So here we are now, live, and it feels awesome. We know there are a few bugs still lurking around in the system. If you come across anything that shouldn’t be there please drop us a line.

Great new features

After some tweaking, building and tinkering we’re proud to present some nice new features that are yours to use from this week. You can now post updates of your progress and cheer other people that have made a pledge.

You can edit your profile so people know it’s you not a random line of letters and numbers making pledges.

And  you can also change your mind if you so wish. Edit the deadline or financial commitment of your pledge or delete it off the face of the Earth, that is. What luxury!

Finally you might notice that your home page looks slightly more informative now and there are more charities to choose from if you happen to fail a pledge (don’t worry, it’s only human).

We hope you like the new & improved Pledgehammer. Please send your feedback and feature requests to beta (at) pledgehammer.

New charity - ChildLine

Starting from today you can choose to donate to ChildLine if for some reason your pledge is not successful. ChildLine is a confidential helpline for children at risk of abuse who have no one to turn to. I think the Hide this page button on their page illustrates the need for such service well.

£20 could pay for an NSPCC ChildLine worker to answer calls for another hour, so more desperate children can get the vital help they need.

All in all, failing a pledge just got a little more noble. See our Charities section to see the full list of Charities we work with.

Hi, we’re still Pledgehammer

Long time, no see! Sorry for the silence, we’ve been busy with our day jobs and families, so you haven’t seen Pledgehammer developing all that fast.

The good news we’re back in business and almost done with the next release that includes many vital features. So start thinking about those pledges already, soon you’ll have a great site to make them on.

Hi, we are Pledgehammer

Pledgehammer is a site that helps you keep your promises. You make a pledge, we make it public and sharable, let you pick a financial incentive and send you an email upon the deadline you have chosen. If for some reason you didn’t keep your pledge we ask you to pay up. And money will go to a charity you pick yourself. Either way the world will be a little bit better.

We are currently in beta. Apply for an invite if you want to be among the first people to make pledges here and help us get ready for the launch.  Or check back here in a few weeks.