CardThis is proud to be a part of New York’s Photo Hack Day this Saturday, August 20^th.

Smart people from across the country are coming to General Assembly to build awesome photo apps in an old-fashioned hackathon.

We’re giving away $500 to the team that best incorporates our awesome technology in its app.

Here are the details:

What CardThis Does:

There are so many amazing photo apps coming to the market these days, but so few ways to turn these incredible images into meaningful, tangible items that people can cherish and share with one other. The CardThis technology is absolutely the best way to share images offline. With one click of a button, users can turn any images into fantastic greeting cards. After the users type in their messages and input their addresses and payment info, we print the cards at a top-notch facility and send them directly to the recipients.

How the Tech Works:

The CardThis technology is incredibly simple. It’s just one line of javascript, and it can be built into any program, mobile or otherwise. CardThis is built for everyone and every platform. All you have to do is sign up here to get access to the code (and get paid whenever a card gets sent from your app!) Got a tech question? Email our founder Josh – Josh@CardThis.com – and he’ll get you all set in no time.

Ideas for Apps:

By letting people share the web offline in the form of gorgeous personalized greeting cards, CardThis instantaneously makes the world a more thoughtful place. Any app that truly incorporates that spirit of sharing will grab our attention. Here are a few examples:

• InstantCardma: Any picture taken with this app is automatically turned into a greeting card and sent by mail to a loved one.
• PenPals: Like a mashup of PostSecret and ChatRoulette using printed greeting cards.
• ThankYouNow: An app that automatically sends printed thank you cards once gifts have been purchased from wedding registries.

Come join us – sign up here:  http://photohackday.eventbrite.com/

Here’s how you do it:

1) CREATE A CARD

Go to our Create Page and pick a good theme (I like “Season’s Greetings” and “Holiday Fun”). Then upload your family photos and write something nice like “Happy Holidays” then click Finish. Looks pretty good, right?

2) ADD YOUR RECIPIENTS

So you’ve created a great card. Now, click on “Send Card” and add in the addresses of everyone you want to send your card to. You can add them one at a time, or you enter them all at once by clicking on the “Import Contacts” button.

3) WRITE ONE MESSAGE – FOR EVERYONE

That’s right, just one message for everyone. We’ve come up with cool technology that lets you personalize each card with the name of its recipient at a click of a button – plus you can go into each card and tweak the message to make it even more personal.

4) FIRE AWAY

Send all of your cards right away, or schedule them to be delivered closer to the big day(s) of your choice.

If you have any questions, call me or email me – I personally want to make sure that all of our users have a great experience with this amazing new technology.

Thanks!

Josh Stein
CEO, PigSpigot.com
(347) 422-7370
josh@pigspigot.com

Today is a great day. Today is P-day – the day we introduce our new and improved site to the world. We’ve spent the last several months putting in long hours to try to make PigSpigot not just the best greeting card site around, but also the best place in the universe to be thoughtful. As we emerge from the sty – carrying trash cans full of empty Mountain Dew cans and Cheetos bags – we can honestly say we’ve succeeded. Here’s why:

We Give You the Best of Both Worlds

You want to be considerate, but you don’t have the time to regularly send out personalized, printed greeting cards the old-fashioned way. So we’ve designed and built a flexible template system that lets you write – and personalize – dozens of cards to dozens of different people in minutes. You can write one holiday card for all of your friends and relatives, and then personalize each message in several different ways, in just seconds. It’s the coolest thing since bacon.

We are the Address Book of the Future

Every time you send cards to folks, we save their addresses. The next time you come to the site, you can send another card to them simply by clicking on their names. It gets better, though. Much, much better. With our contact importer, you can upload all of your contacts from any other address book in just seconds.

We Listen to You

You are our core users. You told us what you liked about PigSpigot, and then you told us what you wished we would do better. When Jessica T. told us she wished she could schedule delivery of printed birthday cards to all of her friends throughout the year in one sitting, we got to work making that happen. With our new delivery scheduler, you can pick a different delivery date for each of the cards you’re sending, and schedule cards to be sent out months from now. Jess, you’ll never forget an important date again!

So go check it out, and send a printed card or ten.
In fact, if you’re willing to send out your holiday cards with us, we’d be so honored that we’ll help you design it – for free.

Remember, we make it easier for more people to send better cards!

See you around the sty,
The Pig
ThePig@PigSpigot.com

Before today, though, if you wanted to create a card for our site, you had to have a little bit of time and some PhotoShop skills. We wanted to remove both of those barriers in one fell swoop, so we’ve spent the last several months tinkering away in the back of the sty to build the Card Creation Wizard.

Now anyone (even you!) can create a great-looking card in less than a minute simply by uploading a photo or two and typing in a couple lines of text into the wizard. How do we know it will look great? Because we’ve made it impossible to screw up.  Each of the three themes you can select from the left side of the wizard were designed by amazing artists so that no matter what images you select or text you write, your card will look beautiful and professional.

The process itself is incredibly simple – just follow along with the images on the right.

1)   Select a theme from the menu

You’ve got a choice of “Minimal”, “Basic”, and “Memories”, which each make slight changes to the positioning and size of your photos and the location, size and font of your text.

2)   Select “choose pictures” from the menu

You can upload any image or photo already on your computer, or select one from the PigSpigot gallery. Don’t want an image on the inside of the card? Just hit the X button on the menu.

3)   Select “input text” from the menu

Write whatever comes to your mind in a Twitter-sized chunk. Remember that you can still personalize the card to your heart’s delight with your message later on in the sending process, so don’t worry if you can’t fit everything you want to say into the card creation part.

Once you’ve created your card, simply hit the “Finish” button, add some tags to tell PigSpigot what you’ve created, decide if you want it to be public or private, and then you’re good to start sending it to friends and family. You guys are the very first people to be testing the wizard out, so we want to hear from you about your experiences. Therefore, every one of you who creates a public card using the card wizard over the next week will get a free card credit from us so you can send it for free.

Greetings Piglets!

Our most favorite love-themed holiday is just around the corner, and the cockles of our hearts are getting warmer by the second. Looking for the perfect way to send Valentine’s Day greetings out to the one (or ones) you love? Say it with puppies. Or try some beatnik poetry. Or — sheeee-it! — let Sen. Clay Davis tell them how it is. However you decide to share your love, we’ve got you covered. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Prior to today’s announcement, whenever a new card was uploaded to PigSpigot, it was immediately added to the site’s gigantic card library so that other users could comment on it, rate it, and send it. But members of the PigSpigot community asked to be able to keep some of their creations private.

Indeed, some cards are best kept private. Whether it’s a holiday card featuring pictures of the kids or a racy snapshot from a boudoir session, you can now send PigSpigot ecards and printed cards to select family and friends without letting the entire community know what you’re up to.

To upload a private card, you simply have to check a privacy box on the CREATE page to send your design directly to the new “private cards” section of your profile page. From there, you can send your card out by mail or email just as you would any other card on the site.

Image: The new Private Card box on my MyPig page, with the good stuff blurred out.

And there’s still time to send one of these awesome Thanksgiving greetings as an ecard.

_

So pick one and fire ‘em off to the family you aren’t going to be able to be with tomorrow, or send some to friends you haven’t been with in awhile.

Finally, our wish for you tomorrow…

As Twitter has grown, its users have created lots of portmanteaux based on the service. Some of them are hilarious — see “Dweet” for “drunk Tweet” and “Twitterhea” for, well, using your 140 characters way too often. There are plenty of examples of less ingenious neologisms, as well, at the Twittonary (twanxiety, anyone?). But before we get too high up on our horse (or hog), though, we’d like to introduce our own Twitterism: the Tweeting Card. What’s a Tweeting Card? Glad you asked.

Tweeting Cards are the newest and hippest way to reach out to your friends and followers on Twitter. Simply pick a great PigSpigot card (or create your own!) and choose the “Tweeting Card” option from your list of sending choices.

Then all you have to do is personalize a message to include in your card and fill in both you and your recipient’s Twitter names. PigSpigot automatically generates an @reply Tweet (containing a bit.ly link to the card) that you can send out directly from our site.

One thing to keep in mind: unlike sending an e-card or a print card, when you send a Tweeting Card to someone over Twitter, all of your followers can see the card as well. Unless you’re an exhibitionist (which you might be – you’re using Twitter after all), it’s best to keep these cards a little less revealing than usual!