It’s Out

It’s out. Finally.

We’ve released FindALostPet, a lost pet database intended to help reunite lost pets with their owners as quickly and easily as possible.

So, what should you know?

1. Anyone can sign up

Just go to FindALostPet.org and sign up with email. It’s free to sign up and free to post your lost pet (and it’s ad-free too, thanks to the generosity of our Indiegogo donours).

A tip: use a good password, preferably longer than twenty characters (and not “passwordpasswordpassword”). Find some phrase in a song you love or a good poem and use that; we find that that’s a good way to remember long passwords.

2. We’re in public beta

Public beta is a fancy way of saying that we’re not absolutely sure that everything’s working, even though we’ve tested it a lot. It’s ready to go, with all the features you need to add, report and find your lost pets, but it’s not a final product. There could be some rough edges here and there and there might be a feature or two missing.

Some things we know about:

• There’s no settings menu. We’re working on it and we plan to push it out this Friday.
• File uploads don’t show up in the file upload dialogue, even though they are there. We’re working on a new file upload system and we plan to push it out Friday as well.
• There are no tutorials or explanations of how to get started after signing up. If you need any help, just tweet us (@findalostpet) or send us an email (theteam@findalostpet.org); we look forward to hearing from you.
• Emails sent from FindALostPet, such as for confirming email addresses, are often marked as spam; Gmail seems to be fine (at least on the ones we’ve tested) but Yahoo still has problems.

Tip: If you find anything wrong with FindALostPet at all or just want to give us a suggestion or talk about the weather, you can click the “Send Feedback on Beta” button in the bottom right-hand corner of every page. We look forward to speaking! No bug is too small and no bug is too big.

3. This is a serious beta

We’re actually serious about helping bring lost pets home in this release, so don’t post things like “is this thing on.” Post your real pets and post real sightings.

And other than that…

Just get going! Head to FindALostPet.org right now and sign up!