We’re only a small team here at PetRescue, but we make big and bold platform updates to help more pets get seen, and adopted, every day!
From time-saving features for rescue organisations, to matchmaking, to security and stability patches and speedy optimisations; we’re all hooves on deck to remove the boundaries in animal welfare!
Check out some of the most recent updates our pawsome Devvies have recently shipped!
Got a suggestion for us? We're all ears
July 2024
We’ve implemented an incredibly im-paw-tant improvement to our Members’ pet listing form. Medical notes are now mandatory for every single pet listing before they go live on the website - ensuring potential adopters are always privy to the health history of pets they are looking to welcome into their family from the get-go!
Clogged inboxes are ruff! So, to alleviate this - we’ve reduced the frequency of pet alerts to ensure that you are still notified when a pet you may be interested in becomes available, but your inbox also stays as clutter-free as can be!
Loading images has never been this paw-some! We’ve sped up the loading of listing images - so you can browse furry faces faster than ever.
June 2024
We've taken a proactive step to ensure that every new listing is as comprehensive as possible. Medical Notes are now a must-have for all new pet listings, helping potential adopters make well-informed decisions. Because every furry friend deserves the best care, right from the start!
Our Work page just got a facelift! We've reimagined the layout to make it easier for you to explore the impact we’re making together.
Keeping track of your actions just got a whole lot sleeker. We’ve polished up the History Log, now, reviewing past actions is as easy as a wag of the tail!
Less clutter, more focus. We’ve removed the map image from the group’s page to declutter the view and make it easier to find the information that really matters. The result? A cleaner, more streamlined experience.
May 2024
Finding the right blog post just got a whole lot easier! We’ve sorted the blog post categories alphabetically to help you quickly locate the topics you’re interested in. Whether you’re looking for tips on pet care or the latest news in the pet community, everything is now organized for your convenience. Dive in and explore!
We noticed that our postcode search wasn’t behaving as expected due to some legacy code. Our team have rolled up their sleeves and fixed the issue, ensuring that your search results are accurate and reliable. Now, you can find what you’re looking for without any hiccups.
The enquiry form’s button layout was a bit ruff, causing some confusion. We’ve fixed the layout to make sure it’s clear and user-friendly. You can now submit your enquiries with ease, knowing exactly where to click.
Our location search on the rescue directory was a bit under the weather, but we’ve given it the attention it needed. Now, it’s back to full health, providing accurate and efficient search results to help you find rescues nearby without any fuss.
We made some adjustments to the blog panels to ensure they display correctly across all devices. Your favorite articles and updates are now presented paw-fectly, making for a seamless reading experience.
April 2024
Finding the right blog post just got a whole lot easier! We’ve sorted the blog post categories alphabetically to help you quickly locate the topics you’re interested in. Whether you’re looking for tips on pet care or the latest news in the pet community, everything is now organized for your convenience. Dive in and explore!
We noticed that our postcode search wasn’t behaving as expected due to some legacy code. Our team have rolled up their sleeves and fixed the issue, ensuring that your search results are accurate and reliable. Now, you can find what you’re looking for without any hiccups.
The enquiry form’s button layout was a bit ruff, causing some confusion. We’ve fixed the layout to make sure it’s clear and user-friendly. You can now submit your enquiries with ease, knowing exactly where to click.
Our location search on the rescue directory was a bit under the weather, but we’ve given it the attention it needed. Now, it’s back to full health, providing accurate and efficient search results to help you find rescues nearby without any fuss.
We made some adjustments to the blog panels to ensure they display correctly across all devices. Your favorite articles and updates are now presented paw-fectly, making for a seamless reading experience.
March 2024
First up this month, the crew encountered a pesky new security issue - exploitation of donations! We created a filter to stop the exploitation of donations as a security feature and enabled the ability to ‘block donors’ in the case of dodgy situations, keeping everyone safe.
It was business as usual as we proactively looked into the future and caught bugs before we even knew they existed, by adding a testing library for the React front end.
In good news for pet lovers everywhere, we updated our blog post cat-egories! Now, when everyone from paw-tential adopters to existing pet guardians visit our ma-hooo-sive library of content and resources, they can much more easily find what they’re looking for. You can check out PetRescue’s blog (and fall down the rabbit hole of pet content) here.
The only rouge dots we like are the adorable spots on our pet’s fur! We fixed a furr-strating bug that caused random bullet points to appear when members were listing pets on some browsers.
While we were busy fixing bugs, we also fixed a bug that caused the rescue directory not to load properly. Now, you can search away for awesome PetRescue member organisations near you til the cows come home.
Last but certainly not least, we caught and released a bug that caused an issue with pet’s feature photos coming through when exporting from Sheltermate. Don’t worry, you can now view these pet’s adorable feature photos when browsing rescue pets!
February 2024
At PetRescue, we’re all about helping pets to become their best selves by using only positive reinforcement, and educating folks about what to look for when selecting a trainer for their furry family member! We’ve now popped the link to our force-free trainer guide into the header of the website, ensuring this resource as accessible as paws-ible to help pet guardians and their doggos to find a force-free professional for their pooch.
Hackers beware! Every month, they come up with crafty new ways to hack the software used for the PetRescue website. In order to stop those pesky hackers, we updated this software and its underlying tools, which allow us to bring the website to pet lovers just like you.
We want to ensure that our im-paw-tant Member communications are as convenient as possible for the PetRescue Member community - which is why we updated our article email template. With a preview of the article name, excerpt and a clear call-to-action now available, it’s much clearer to Members what a new article is all about when they receive their alert, improving accessibility as well as the overall Member communications journey!
January 2024
Usually, we can’t get enough of adorable pet videos... Well, except for when they cause pesky problems! The team fixed an issue that caused videos in pet profiles to show up in the gallery list and start to play - they’ve now been relocated to a dedicated video gallery.
While it’s su-purr important for us to make sure we’re meeting state-based legal requirements for pet listings, such as Property Identification Codes - we don’t want to cause unnecessary headaches for Member organisations who don’t require them for their pets! This is why we implemented PIC number exemptions for organisations who aren’t legally required to obtain them.
While the team had their handyperson toolkit out and were fixing things left, right and centre - they also repaired the adoption fee field for Member organisations, which previously wouldn’t allow text and would automatically set the amount to zero dollars! Consider this one rectified.
Akin to your pets’ ability to find the warmest spot on the bed, we like it when our own processes are also intuitive! This is why we shifted the order of the ‘draft’ status in the pet listing platform to sit before ‘active’ - making life that little bit more straightforward for the busy Member organisation folks listing adorable pets for adoption.
This just in: after a pandemic-sized paws - PetRescue’s Pet Transport Program, supported by Jetpets, is now available to member organisations to fly homeless pets in need to their new families once again! We popped information about this exciting program into our Member Benefits page to ensure it’s accessible and easy to find for all of PetRescue’s Member community to learn more, and apply!
December 2023
Farewell to conflicting vaccination details on pet profiles! We've removed a glitchy vaccination flag on profiles listed via external animal management software, which showed a pet as being unvaccinated, when they actually were! Now, when the vaccination status comes through to our platform as unknown from the external software - this is now indicated visually a straightforward "-", rather than a firm no, to keep things as clear as can be!
In Australia, the term "pound" carries the weight of outdated community safety and amenity practices that do not meet modern expectations for how lost or homeless pets are cared for. While the term is synonymous with council facilities, it does not fully encompass the heart of community and welfare services that progressive Council-run shelters provide. Additionally, PetRescue values the role pets play in our lives beyond their legal position as property to be impounded and held by councils, and recognises that language matters. In order to advocate for all pets to receive the sheltering and support they deserve while in care of a council, we must move beyond acceptance of 'pound only services' as a minimum level of care. PetRescue aims to redefine the narrative, so we have updated our platform to embrace the term "council" over “pound”- in an effort to transform perceptions, while transforming language!
We’ve proudly added a shiny new The Australian Charity Awards ‘Outstanding Achievement’ winner logo to the platform for the third year running, making space for a victory strut to celebrate a big win for us as a team. This award recognises charitable organisations that have achieved outstanding results through initiatives that have significantly benefited charitable causes, and is a nod to the collective achievements of our pet-loving community!
Our Member benefits page just got a paw-some upgrade! Now our Members can explore their exclusive perks with our newest partner, Pet Circle, and hop on board as we re-launch the Pet Transport Program - helping to relocate homeless pets in need around Australia, and fast-tracking their journey into safe, loving homes!
November 2023
We've fixed a bug which resulted in the navigation bar being cut off of the page, preventing visitors from finding their way, ensuring it now stays on the page - keeping your adoption journey as smooth as a cat's purr.
Rescue organisations utilising animal management software to manage their pets listings can now draft profiles with ease, following our release of API access. Now, Members can truly unleash the paw-tential of this listing management feature, available to them on our platform.
Time to say goodbye to accidental copy-cat moments! We fixed a glitch in profiles listed via a synced animal management software, which resulted in pet photos appearing as duplicates on the website.
Similarly, we also resolved an issue where pet images were stuck in the past, preventing them from updating on the platform. Now we can guarantee pet profiles are all up to date with picture-paw-fect snaps!
We've ensured only the fur-iendliest emails make their way to our rescue organisation Members and limiting the opportunity for phishing opportunities, by locking down on conversation senders. Members can now pre-approve email addresses with our snazzy secure allowlist feature - ensuring their inbox is a fortress of only fur-tastic communication!
October 2023
We've purr-fected imports by from external animal management systems feeding in to our platform by converting our fetching URLs to secure versions - ensuring a smoother process and fewer sync errors from here on out!
Our mobile layout got a furr-bulous facelift! We've fixed a bunch of mobile-related visual issues, ensuring that browsing on your phone is now as delightful as watching a bunny hop around with joy!
This month we survived a major system paws-aster and emerged with newfound agility! We faced some database ruff patches causing the site to take regular catnaps. Our resolution not only fixed the glitches but gave our database a turbo boost - making the platform speedier than a rescue pup chasing a tennis ball.
No more automated off-boarding for our Vets & Council rescue members! They're sticking around like a loyal companion and have now been exempt from our quality assurance process which sees idle rescue organisation members who haven’t utilised their PetRescue account in a long time automatically offboarded. This will ensure they can access our platform to list pets they have available for adoption at any time, regardless of how often pets may come into their care!
We proactively implemented an internal policy around how to handle, and swiftly respond to any data breach issues, ensuring the safety and security of your information and keeping a vigilant eye – or should we say, vigilant paw on any potential threats to our platform.
September 2023
At PetRescue - we’re all about inclusivity for humans and pets alike! We've rehashed the the user menu in our main navigation with some simple, but impactful accessibility improvements for keyboard navigation, screen readers and mobile devices. Along with all-round visual aesthetic upgrades, this piece of work will see our code prevent certain bugs, and be easier to maintain - to help future us!
Our pet search feed had a bit of a ruff time this month, returning errors instead of fetching purrfect results for those searching for their future bestie. But fear not! We've chased down the bug, and now the search is sharing accurate results on available pets for adoption faster than a doggo whose just been caught chewing on something they shouldn’t be!
The account signup page recently received a little grooming session with layout and visual improvements.
As we strive for continuous improvement for all of our users, we've added some paw-some quality tracking data to our internal reporting tools. Now we can measure the success of our newly-released pet listing features, such as our AI Bot profile writer, ensuring they improve the lives of our rescue organisation users more than a catnap in a sunbeam!
August 2023
Avid fans of our platform may have noticed that it took a slow and steady approach momuntarily this month as a large image loading incident which resulted in cascading performance issues around the website (not the relaxing, waterfalley type either, unfortunately!). Our team quickly established the concern and powered through a resolution to get the issue resolved, so PetRescue.com.au is running at hares speed again!
A silver lining to finding bugs is then creating proactive improvement solutions to ensure it won’t happen again! As a follow up to the aforementioned incident - we implemented rules on image uniqueness, and limits to how many images can be parsed to our platform from external animal management systems, which will ensure our website will stay stable and running regardless of how hard it’s working behind the scenes.
We’re zooming with excitement because this month we announced on our platform that Pet Circle and PetRescue are now officially working together to create a better world where every pet is safe and loved. Their ongoing support of PetRescue and our rescue organisation members will see us collaborating to provide food and product donations, guidance and education resources for pet owners, monetary discounts for rescues and free vet advice, amongst other amazing benefits!
No more ruff drafts! We've patched up a loophole that allowed previously saved draft profiles to go live on the platform without legally required identification, to ensure every pet profile now includes their microchip number for a purr-fectly secure adopting experience
We’re all about purr-fect timing here! We updated the auto-counter on our website - so that PetRescue’s birth date changes on the actual day rather than at the start of the calendar year, ensuring we paw-ty right on time.
July 2023
How about a new navigation bar to jazz up your PetRescue website experience? The team at PetRescue are paw-ssionate about inclusivity and making sure the website is accessible for everyone who visits it. The current navigation bar has now been rearranged to help those who might need a bit of extra help when utilising text-to-speech apps to browse. While this feature isn’t officially live yet, keep your eyes peeled because it’s coming soon to a browser near you!
When Dev teams work on new website updates - they are first saved on an environment called “staging” which should not yet be visible to the public before being released to the public, while they undergo thorough testing for quality before going live to users. Shout out, and equal parts commiserations, to the sneaky little kittens who may have caught a glimpse of this in the past - as this has just been fixed, meaning only the PetRescue admins can now view what we have in store for you next. Se-purr-ity is su-purr important here, and everyone loves a surprise, right?!
Uh-oh, did your Mittens walk across your keyboard while trying to log in and lock you out of your PetRescue account again? It happens. As does simply forgetting your password! However, the team have now limited login attempts to protect your identity and to make sure no pesky scammers can get through. This means if someone tries to log in to your account with incorrect information, it will be lock after five attempts. Don’t panic if this occurs and it’s actually you, though - you’ll be able to unlock your account successfully by simply checking your email, which will have instructions on how to get back in!
Science shows that looking at photos and videos of cute pets may contribute to a reduction in stress by improving blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety! So the last thing we want to do is impact your health by having the pet profiles on our platform load too slow! The PetRescue team are onto it, and have been working hard in the background to improve the way images are stored and managed. So this means all profiles (especially the older ones) will be loading in no time for all your viewing needs!
PetRescue has hit refresh on a new donation page website design. We’ve provided more detail around exactly what programs and initiatives you’re supporting when you kindly donate to us!
Members - if you’ve received an email alert from PetRescue recently and it doesn’t look fur-miliar? That’s because the team has been working on a whole new design! We wanted you to have an idea of what exactly it is you’re missing out on before you take the time to click through - so along with a much needed visual make-over, we’ve also implemented previews of the newest article to read in the alert up front!
June 2023
The team have done a re-barkable job working on the new ‘Draft Listings’ feature for the PetRescue member community which was launched this month. The feature enables PetRescue members to create draft listings when uploading pet information, but aren’t ready to publish the profile just yet. This means you can create a profile for the pet with the information you have on hand, upload photos from your phone and save it to complete later. It also assists teams to collaborate better while pet information is being confirmed because multiple people can make changes to the listing now. Draft mode will enable you to If a listing is in draft mode, it won’t be visible to the public.
PetRescue member group admins can now remove users who no longer work with their rescue or organisation. The only exception to this is, the person who originally created the group on the PetRescue website cannot be removed.
Whether your pet is a cat, dog or bunny, you’ll now find the ‘species’ box at the top of the listing form.
PetRescue website users can fur-get about those errors popping up on listings and forms because the team have been on it. The new improvements will have users feline fine!
Se-purr-ity is super im-paw-tant here at PetRescue and the team have been working very hard to ensure that your data is better protected from those pesky scammers!
May 2023
We hope our puns aren’t taxing because it’s that time of year again, tax time donation appeal is here! Firstly, a round of a-paws for every single one of you who donate. Your donations support our big, hairy and audacious work towards creating happiness and saving lives, which you can read more about here. Every donation you make over $2 is tax deductible, we appreciate you, fur-real!
The team are feline-fine about how updates show up on our website because the whole process is now more secure.
If you uploaded a paw-some video to your pet profile as the featured image and couldn’t update it to the purr-tty new selfie you took, don’t worry this has been fixed. You are free to change your feature photos and videos as often as you want!
We had a pesky bug floating around the website this month which stopped our users from removing their group logos. Don’t worry this has now been fixed!
Paw-den us, a button that was reserved for PetRescue admins started showing up on group members admin pages - oops. If you spotted this, well done. If not, you can fur-get about it because there’s nothing to see here anymore.
Breaking Mews: we have removed the option for member organisations to connect their Facebook accounts to their PetRescue account. This is to ensure our online community are purr-tected from those pesky scammers!
Are you pro-cat-stinating writing pet profiles? Don’t forget, our profile writing AI Bot is a claw-fully useful tool for you to use! If you need a refresher, check out our members benefits page here to make sure you are using the free resources available to their full pet-tential.
April 2023
The team were busy fixing things this month. If you had trouble changing or removing your paw-some profile photo or rescue group logo, this has now been fixed. Make sure your photos are showing off your purr-sonalities!
When you release an animal into the wild, it takes some time to learn about its surroundings before adapting. Well, since we released our profile writing AI bot into the wild, it has been learning a lot. It is currently deciding what works well and what doesn’t to make sure it can write the purr-fect profile for your pet.
The team is always on top of se-purr-ity and they’ve been busy updating our internal software.
Remember when we launched PetRescue TV? You’ll find banners displayed across our website to purr-suade you to click on it for a cuteness overload! Check it out here.
March 2023
Call se-purr-ity! This month the crew set up additional security measures for the information we store in our database so that we can cryptographically secure more data. In layperson’s terms: we scrambled up some data to secure it - so only we can access it, and no pesky scammers can!
While we were prettying things up, we also added in a placeholder image with a pet logo to pet listing pages before the group uploaded an image.
Have you checked out the Just Adopted page before? Good feels are guaranteed - you can check out just some of the happy faces who have just been marked as adopted on PetRescue! This month we popped in some quick links to happy tails of adoption to the page to keep the wholesome vibes going!
We were in fix-it mode this month! Previously, when groups were deleted and then re-instated, their name would be missing. Now, if groups leave the platform and then return, the name of their group will be correctly reset.
Two factor authentication is su-purr important for keeping everyone and their data safe and secure online. The team fixed a pesky bug which was causing the two-factor authentication toggle to not switch on when folks booped it - yikes!
Two factor authentication continued to be a little furr-strating this month, with it giving a pesky message saying that the login code was invalid when entered. This is all fixed.
The crew also caught and released a bug that was affecting the bulk status update feature. Previously, nothing was happening when groups tried to update pets statuses to ‘removed’ - this is now fixed and includes a confirmation pop-up.
Social logins got an update this month in line with the social platforms also being updated to a new version.
February 2023
This month may just have been our biggest yet! The crew released PetRescue’s AI bot into the wild, which writes a whole pet profile from just a couple of bullet points entered! The new feature will relieve busy workloads for rescue workers and volunteers, and speed up the adoption process. As powerful as it is though, the AI Bot could never replace the task completely because every pet has a beautifully unique paw-sonality! Learn more here.
The team have been working hard behind the scenes to launch PetRescue TV, the fun video streaming tool bringing you all the joy and happiness you’ll need today! You’ll be seeing videos of adoptable rescue pets from all across Australia currently looking for love, from big dogs, to quirky kitties, to bonded besties. But read the warning label first: there’s a cuteness overload of boopable snoots coming your way. You’ll find some basic details about each pet (like their name and location) next to their video, and you can easily click through to their profile to find out even more about their special purr-sonality and the home they’re looking for.
We made im-purr-vements to the two-factor authentication input, making it easier to understand and navigate. This also included a fix that means if you need to get a new token, you’ll be sent one automatically, meaning folks can start enquiring about adorable rescue pets even quicker!
We fixed some furr-strating bugs too this month - the photo editing modal for PetRescue member groups wouldn’t open when they tried to crop images - this is now sorted.
Adorable pet photos are the best, but not when they’re duplicated! We caught and gently released a pesky bug which caused some pet listing photos to be duplicated when members uploaded them.
We were busy doing zoomies this month, transferring a lot of data that was in a clunky format into a new format that’s faster and easier to manage. This will set us up to make performance im-purr-vements in the future!
For all the love birds out there, we set up Valentine’s Day gift cards featuring some loved-up pets - an adorable way to support PetRescue’s mission to create happiness and save lives!
Boop! We switched on the PIC requirement for groups rehoming farm animals, as mentioned last month.
January 2023
Just like your nosy pet who loves watching the neighbours from the window, it’s im-paw-tant for us to keep up with all the happenings in the world of animal listing requirements. With Property Identification Codes now required for organisations rehoming livestock in Victoria, we made this a listing requirement for all farm animals listed for adoption in Victoria.
PetRescue’s Home2Home program allows a pet owner to safety rehome their pet - with assistance from our friendly team, they can chat with potential adopters, arrange meet-and-greets, and finally select the right human for their pet. We created a new Home2Home donation page this month which allows pet owners using the program to ‘pay it forward’ by making a donation that will cover another pet owner’s program fee. As many folks using Home2Home to rehome their pet are experiencing financial stress, this helps to keep the program accessible for all!
Who doesn’t get that strong urge to share every cute pet listing they come across on social media?! This month we fixed the pet listing Facebook share link, so you can continue to spam your loved one’s new feeds with adorable snoots.
We know how busy member groups are, so it’s su-purr annoying when pesky issues slow down their pet listing process! We fixed a furr-strating issue in our API which meant if groups using ASM used the wrong case when typing in a location, a location name wouldn’t appear.
Zoom zoom! The team started the process of doing a major reorganisation of our database structure with the big goal of making things faster and more affordable.
While we were making the site do extra fast zoomies, we also optimised the ‘Rehomed’ page to make it quicker - previously it was very slow and impacted the entire system and its responsiveness.
The crew fixed a bug that caused the main menu alignment on screens in between mobile and tablet sizes to bork.
We also fixed an exploding page! When a large number of attachments were sent in a conversation (say, photos of a potential adopter’s backyard) the page gave up. Rest assured, this is now fixed.
Like when your doggo’s stuffed toy mysteriously explodes, it was time for a clean up! We cleaned up some old code and data, and also upgraded some software to new versions.
While we were in freshin’ mode, we removed some old code we no longer need for the PDF generator.
It’s su-purr important that the PetRescue platform is accessible, so as part of this, we made an update so that folks using assistive technologies can hit the ‘escape’ key to exit out of pop-ups.
December 2022
Our Christmas elves were busy working away on PetRescue’s 12 Pets of Christmas appeal campaign this month. Our wonderful sup-paw-ters allow PetRescue to stay free for member groups and adopters, and continue to connect thousands of people and pets each month! We were overjoyed that many of the 12 pets featured in the campaign found loving new homes - check out a wrap here.
The crew also managed to find time to fix a pesky bug that caused the main navigation menu to look all funky (and not in a good way) on smaller screens.
As part of their ongoing work to improve the experience of member groups and adopters, the team also removed the site footer on conversation pages, to allow for a better (and clearer) chat experience between groups and potential adopters.
Lastly, another bug was caught (and gently released) which was occurring when there were loads of attachments in a conversation. Just like when your doggo generously eats all the crumbs off the floor, things are looking a lot cleaner around here! 🧹️
It was all hands on deck this month, as the team worked hard to build PetRescue’s 12 Pets of Christmas campaign. With some homeless pets finding themselves in care for months on end, it was an op-paw-tunity to shine the spotlight on 12 adorable pets looking for the gift of a loving home. This came as part of our larger Christmas appeal, which enables PetRescue to continue helping homeless pets connect with loving humans, by providing a free listing platform for rescue organisations and adoption platform for adopters across Australia.
Our Christmas elves continued to work hard this month, this time on Home2Home’s ‘pay-what-you-can’ program fee feature. The Home2Home program empowers a pet owner to find a new home for their pet while they continue to care for them, helping to stem the flow of pets entering pounds and rescues. The decision to rehome a pet is never taken lightly, and is often driven by factors like being unable to find suitable accommodation, financial hardship, changes in circumstances and human health issues. This update will allow our small, hardworking Home2Home team to help even more people and pets, while still being flexible depending on the owner's individual circumstances with no requirement to pay a certain amount, especially during times of financial hardship.
As part of our work to make our Home2Home program accessible and the different options for rehoming easy to understand, we gave the Rehome Your Pet Via PetRescue page a refresh. It’s now easier to find important information, especially during a very emotional time for folks who want the best for their pet.
What could be better than a pet-themed game to play with friends and family? Nothing, that’s what! The team created a fun ‘Ta-boop’ game for pet-loving folks to play at their festive feast.. No more awkward gaps in conversation at the dinner table this Christmas!
There’s nothing more satisfying than having a spring clean! This month, the crew created a new feature for users to have the ability to archive conversations (not just member organisations). This is su-purr handy for older conversations when a pet may have been adopted, for example.
PetRescue’s incredible donors make our work to connect pets with loving families possible! It’s so important that we can personally communicate with, and thank all the wonderful pet lovers who make our work possible - so the team created a way to ensure all of their information is up to date whenever we reach out to them.
Phew… yep, there’s still more! The adopter profile form also had a glow-up to make the style more consistent on the page. The form is now new and shiny for adopters.. Just like those Christmas baubles your cat can’t stop booping.
Lastly, the ‘Subscribe’ link shifted locations and got its very own header in the footer. It’s now easier to join the PetRescue community, and receive adorable pets looking for homes, pet owner tips, happy tails and fun facts straight to your inbox each month.
Like when your cat boops you when they want pats, we’re all about making things simple and crystal clear for potential adopters! This month the team created a new account sign-up confirmation page to replace the previous pop-up which could be missed. Now folks who sign up as members will go to a page letting them know to check their emails to confirm their new account.
While we were in spring cleaning mode this month, we jazzed up the conversations UI! Now when awesome PetRescue members are hopping into their chats with potential adopters, they’ll be visually treated to a cleaner and prettier page.
When people are researching their options to rehome their pet, it’s su-purr important that they can easily find the important information they need during this difficult time. This is why we made some content updates to the Home2Home page, adding more important information while making the format cleaner so it’s easier to find the resources that folks need.
It’s zoomie time! Thanks to some massive performance improvements, things are now running 25% faster, just like when your pet sees you pull out the treatos!
We know that awesome PetRescue member organisations are su-purr busy saving lives, so we wanted to make it even easier for them to catch up on important mews and updates, and improve their visibility. This is why we added a new banner to the top of the member homepage, which highlights important news and security updates.
When it came to updates for our paw-some PetRescue member community this month, we were on a roll! We’ve popped in additional features for conversations, making it even easier for the good folks who work and volunteer at member organisations to sort and view all conversations for a pet.
We’re all about making it even easier for pet-lovin’ humans to connect with wonderful rescue pets! This is why we added sitemaps to improve our SEO tooling - as this will help folks searching for rescue pets on Google to find pet listings.. And hopefully connect with their new furry best friend!
Thanks to a lot of optimisation work, the dev crew will be doing zoomies now that their ability to get code up online and running has halved! This will allow the team to get mew code to your screens even quicker than your pet runs when they hear their food coming out.
As part of our ongoing work to ensure our site is safe and secure, we made furr-ther improvements to the enquiry page, improving the way we filter out spam enquiries and creating tests to ensure that less pesky spam gets through to member organisations, so they have more time to focus on their im-paw-tant life-saving work.
Like your doggo who borks every time someone comes to the door, we’re all about making sure everything is safe and secure around here! This month, we worked to ensure that contact information is hidden in the new conversations UI (stay tuned for more de-tails on this one..). This ensures that folks enquiring about pets can’t view the details of the individual at the member organisation that they’re chatting with.
At PetRescue, we’re paw-ssionate about connecting loving humans with awesome rescue pets! Improving the quality and detail of enquiries that come through for pets will help to create these connections, while helping to free up rescue group’s time spent sorting through enquiries. This is why we’ve introduced the need for an account to furr-st be created before a pet enquiry can be sent - it’ll ensure that the group receives more details about the enquirer’s home, saving time for everyone (and keeping away those pesky scammers)! To make life easier, when signing up for an account to enquire about a pet, it’ll be much easier and seamless for folks to go back to the adorable pet they were looking at. Bring on the adorable happy tails of adoption!
The only funny characters welcome around here are adorable rescue pets! The team fixed a pesky bug which was causing strange characters and symbols to be added to social cards when sharing listings on social media and programs like Slack.
It’s purr-ty awesome to see how many folks are mindful of keeping their personal data safe on the internet, and we want to make it as easy as paw-sible for everyone to stay safe! We’ve created an even easier anonymisation process to allow for removal of data (when requested) to happen even quicker.
Call se-purr-ity! As part of our ongoing work to ensure our site is safe and secure for all, we fixed some listing edit and manage access vulnerabilities.
Just like when you pick up your dog’s lead and it’s not time for walkies just yet, we’ve got a real teaser for you! The team have been hard at work behind the scenes to make conversations in platform between rescue groups and potential adopters even cleaner and easier. Watch this space..
🧹 The crew made sure to run their usual platform health checks, and deployed some dependency pup-dates to make sure member groups and paw-tential adopters are kept safe online.
Bump bump bump! When awesome member groups were ‘bumping’ pets to pop them at the top of listings results, they sometimes received a purrty annoying 404 error page. Fret not, we’ve fixed this bug and these adorable pets will be boosted to the top of search pages for paw-tential adopters to easily fall in love with.
Speaking of furr-strating bugs, when perusing pet listings, the number of pets displayed per page wasn’t the same as the number at the top of the page. This is all fixed, allowing you to enjoy looking at cute rescue pets without any pesky little errors.
We want to make it as easy as falling for your pet’s puppy dog eyes for council pounds to sign up as PetRescue members and start connecting adorable pets with loving new homes ASAP! As part of PetRescue’s safe and sound pounds work, we’ve removed the requirement for vet referees when pounds are signing up as members, so that there’s as few barriers as paw-sible.
In pre-paw-ration for NAIDOC week, we added an Acknowledgement of Country permanently to our website footer. It’s important for us as an organisation to pay our respects to indigenous elders and acknowledge the beautiful land we live and work on.
We want to woof from the rooftops about all the different work we do - PetRescue is much more than an adoption platform! This month we updated our Our Work page with THREE exciting new projects on the go, and four new innovations in progress, as well as updating and expanding our Fundraising pages. It’s now easier for both individuals and organisations to fundraise for us and find useful information about how to do so.
We know it can be overwhelming trying to select which adorable photos to upload of a pet when you’re creating their listing! This is why we’ve been working on making the image and video upload process a lot clearer and easier for members, adding in ‘save’ and ‘go back’ buttons to ensure they don’t lose their progress.
It was business as usual, with the team maintaining the site’s se-purr-ity; deploying dependency gem updates to keep potential adopters and PetRescue member groups safe online.
Who says that magical time machines don't exist? In the background, the devvies have been working on some campaign tooling optimisations to reduce the amount of repetitive work and introducing pawsome streamlining with automations. What this has made possible is more time to spend on future tools and features to help the rescue community get even more pets get seen and adopted!
In purr-y good news, PetRescue’s Home2Home program has now helped over 250 pets find paw-some, loving homes and stay out of the pound system! We’re constantly working to scale and grow the program to help even more folks needing to rehome their pet. Speaking of magical time-saving machines, some of our manual spreadsheets to manage the program are now automated dashboards equipped with controls for us to filter down to the important details. Less time spent on admin = more time to help people and pets!
Call se-purr-ity! The team deployed some regular dependency gem (not the shiny type) pup-dates to keep members and adopters safe while visiting PetRescue, ensuring it continues to be a trusted and secure platform for all.
Watch this space! We’re setting the stage for some furry exciting design updates in the future. As part of this, the squad created and implemented typescale and components - these progressive enhancements are making way for the website to look even more purr-ty and visually appealing (and of course - easier to use!)
The PetRescue squad works hard to create our library full of furry useful articles and resources for adopters and member organisations alike (sometimes we have to toot our own horn - toot toot!). We want to spread the word about these handy resources and make them as shareable as possible on different social media sites - which is why we updated the style of the blog social share buttons, which are paws-itively 100% cleaner and prettier to look at!
This month we were busy bees behind the scenes! We published a new Grow Your Family page - which outlines one of our new projects and programs we’ve been working on to help more pets - specifically to normalise and grow paw-some multi-pet households. This new page will make it easier to keep you all updated on all the exciting projects we’ve been working hard on - watch this space!
This month we loosened the leash on the requirement for extra security for adopter accounts - leaving it as an optional feature instead of a required one for folks who are simply browsing for a pet to adopt. Less hoops to jump through = more time enquiring about adorable pets.
We’re all about time-saving for amazing PetRescue member organisations so that they can spend more time on the important stuff (saving lives!) Now, when there’s a change of owner for a listing, the new owner is automagically assigned to conversations - making the whole process a heck of a lot smoother and easier for all!
The team gently caught and released a pesky bug which was causing the feature image on pet profiles to be off-centre on the main listing page. It’s now purr-fectly centre aligned. Phew!
Speaking of pesky bugs, the team also fixed a furr-strating one which was causing notifications to try to clear twice instead of once when folks were trying to clear them.
Lastly, in a bonus not-yet-released note.. The PetRescue squad worked together during a recent Hack Day on a very exciting secret project! This new project will put adorable rescue pets on a pedestal using technology, and is the work of our dev and marcomms brains combined! Make sure you check back in at our Charter to see what we’ve been building behind the scenes.
Group users and admins were treated to a brand new boopable toolbar navigation menu this month This update aims to improve usability and accessibility - so that platform tools and resources are easy to access on both mobile devices and desktop by making the clickable areas clearer and larger to find and see on the toolbar. The icons also assist with making it easier to navigate around and find what you need quickly.
There’s nothing that gives us the warm fuzzies more than adorable pets finding a home! As part of our National Pet Adoption Month campaign, we added a boopable ‘Just Adopted’ feed so folks can see some of the cute faces who have just been adopted and do a happy dance for them.
Including microchip details is su-purr important for PetRescue members when advertising pets for adoption, helping adopters recognise listings as trusted and from reputable members of the rescue community. This also ensures that we’re complying with laws around rescue pets, and the ability to prevent online scamming by putting in some safety checks! This month we made it a requirement to include microchip details - which can be hidden from the public for privacy reasons if needed. It's sometimes easy to mistype or copy and paste in the wrong microchip number, so we've also added helpers to prompt for valid microchip information.
As part of this microchip work we’ve included pre-adoption processes as part of the update. We’ve added an age exemption option for very, very smol kitties and pups (under 12 weeks old) to have microchip details included on their profiles so that we could help connect them with homes as soon as possible.
Beyonce may have said ‘to the left’ but this isn’t where we want our ‘edit form’ button to go! We fixed up a bork which was causing this button on every form on the site to be left-aligned and put it back to the centre.
We know what it’s like when you want to shout from the rooftops about a pet’s amazing purr-sonality! This is why we doubled the character limit for pet profiles for members, so they can include a big ol’ description and help potential adopters get to know them and really fall in love with their adorable personalities.
What’s better than watching adorable pet videos?! Nothing, that’s what! This is why we increased the limit of our video uploader for members - bring on the adorable TikToks.
We vegan-beefed up our security even further this month by blocking enquiries that include untrusted links. This update aims to stop those pesky scammers in their tracks!
March is National Pet Adoption Month! We’re shining the spotlight on big dogs, cats and bonded pets who typically take longer to find homes - with the big, hairy goal to reach 4,000 pets adopted via PetRescue this month! We were working away in Furr-bruary to create a paw-some ‘love-o-meter’ which tracks the progress towards this goal, as well as a fun pet quiz to help folks find their soulmate.
The special connection between bonded pets means that they're inseparable. We wanted to make it su-purr easy for potential adopters to start their search for bonded pairs. This is why we made ‘pets needing a home together’ a special feature during valentines day and leading into the 2022 National Pet Adoption Month (March)
As part of our work singing from the rooftops about how great bonded pets are, we’ve popped our adorable ‘Bonded Besties’ sticker on top of all bonded pet listings. This is purr-ticularly handy for when bonded pets have separate listings, or when their feature image is only of one pet.
We were fast and furr-ious this month, and made some speed improvements to make searching even faster. Less time waiting for the site to load = more time looking at adorable pet profiles.
The only borks we like here are the adorable doggo kind you receive when you arrive home! The team fixed the footer headings which were visually borked and showing a squiggly line underneath.
Yikes! Another furr-strating visual bug meant that our awesome member organisation’s PetRescue feed wasn’t showing listings pro-purr-ly. The team got onto that one stat and it’s now looking prettier than ever.
Sweep sweep! While we were busy making things look purr-ty, we also fixed the search summary text size as it was the wrong size on mobile.
There are so many different types of pets on PetRescue! Unfortunately, the values for some of the more unusual pets were missing in the ‘other pet’ search summary, which resulted in a bug that was less than easy on the eyes. Fear not, this bug has now been gently caught and released!
January 2022
We were su-purr excited to kick off 2022 by sharing our first state of adoption report, which included valuable insights from the rescue community, combined with data from our platform. This im-paw-tant report aims to capture the challenges and track the progress we make together in the rescue sector. We're sure you didn't want to try and decipher tables and tables of data and insights, so we carefully designed it to be as easy to read as possible.
This update has got our tails wagging because we love seeing that look on a pets face when they're enjoying one of their fave times of the day; mealtime! Which is why we updated the total amount of food donations we’ve coordinated to date on our homepage (that’s a lot of happy pets!)
Whoops - in a recent navigation menu update, we forgot to update our hovers and our clicks! This would have been furr-strating for many people, so we've fixed that up now.
Pro-purr-ly formatted numbers make us happy, which is why we popped delimiters into the numbers in our search sidebar.
Using their elusive dev magic, the team made the site faster by adding caching for feature toggles. Or, for us mere mortals, we added shortcuts to get data, optimised to improve performance.
Our dev crew gently caught and released a bug which was causing a visual issue with the spacing of alert page ‘tags’. Much better!
While they were busy gently disposing of bugs, the team also fixed the button alignment for enquiries, which was to the left.
Another whoopsie caused the pet search to always include pets available for interstate adoption even if it was unticked. With a bit of convincing and snoot boops, the function is no longer ignoring that request and won’t show interstate pets if this box is unticked (even though pets available for interstate adoption are great!)
While we were busy making things visually appealing, we also fixed the alignment of ‘tags’ inside the pet listing breed(s) input, making for a better listing experience for member groups.
Yikes, for a little time there, our handy help beacon was covered by a pesky ad - which meant that folks had to click to exit the ad before they could access the help beacon. We’ve now fixed the beacon’s positioning so that it’s su-purr easy to access these helpful resources again.
December 2021
To kick things off this month, we improved search capabilities by adding additional filters and options for each species of pet, which means that more adorable pets are now appearing for each search. The sidebar also now displays exactly which filters are applied, for an even better experience searching for pets! Better search experience = better chances of humans finding their new soulmate.
Next up, we focused on improving our security for both users and member groups. In the unlikely event that a user or group is hacked, we can now force log them out of their account, without them losing access. PetRescue: 1, Spammers: 0.
Another security measure put in place to stop those pesky hackers was to replace messages created by potential spammers with a handy spam warning to purr-vent any phishing incidents.
One of the most im-paw-tant parts of the PetRescue website is the helpful resources we share with our wonderful member groups and the public. We’ve moved a very useful resource about compassion fatigue for member groups into the footer for these amazing folks to easily access.
The only funny characters we like around here are adorable pets and their a-mew-sing ways! Encoded symbols were being added sometimes in chat emails in older email clients, which meant that the recipients weren’t receiving these - grrr! This is now all fixed.
What could be better than giving a gift that can help homeless pets?! We popped in a new banner which promotes awesome PetRescue gift cards available for Christmas. This came as part of our larger Christmas appeal, which enables us to continue helping homeless pets all over Australia, and providing an awesome free platform for all!
November 2021
We’re feeling festive at PetRescue HQ this month! We popped on our Santa hats and added some Christmas easter eggs to the site.. Search for a reindeer name or click the PetRescue logo in the header three times for a Christmas surprise.
There’s not many things we enjoy more than looking through adorable pet photos, so to make this viewing experience 10/10, we added in a blur effect around the edges of images uploaded to cater for different ratios, making all images look square and nice and tidy. Rescue groups will now save time from needing to do things like cropping when uploading photos as the platform will automagically format them - hooray!
We know how furr-strating it can be when there’s ads in the way of something you want to click but sometimes the cheeky things break out of the box! We’ve done some shuffling to fix these up.
We’re always on the lookout to improve security on the website - we’ve done some optimisations across the website - including on the login, signup and password pages.
This month, we were su-purr excited to announce that we were recognised as a Winner for Outstanding Achievement in The Australian Charity Awards 2021! This award is a paw-some opportunity to bring awareness and fantastic exposure to Australian pets in need and to connect the incredible rescue community with a potential new wave of supporters and adopters. For this reason, we popped the charity award logo into the footer of our site.
We know how many pet-loving folks visit our website for helpful pet adoption information, so we popped a link to our blog library into our new mega menu, to make it easier than ever to find these resources.
While they were adding more pizazz to the website, the team also brightened up the banner on the homepage and added some shadowing to the hero image so it’s more visible to see the images of the happy pets! Making it su-purr visually pleasing to everyone visiting the site.
The devvies squad also caught (and gently released) a bug which meant the library impact page link was incorrect in the mega menu - this now all fixed, and folks can easily find out about our impact and work towards our big, hairy audacious goals.
There were also some sidebar links which were broken, that the team fixed, making for a much easier user experience all round.
October 2021
We’re starting off with a bang this month - the team has been working hard behind the scenes to build a paw-some new mega navigation menu (found at the top of our site). This makes it easier for folks to follow their nose and navigate through the sections of our giant floofball of a website. Visitors can now find specific pet species and highlighted areas such as helpful resources and featured pet types with a quick boop (rather than lotsa boops)!
Speaking of menus, the “burger” menu also got an upgrade to be even better for the mobile experience. Both the desktop and mobile versions of the website are now easier to use and navigate as it’s now su-purr clear visually. And that’s (almost) as good as a tasty burger!
Who doesn’t love watching adorable videos of pets? We know that seeing videos of a pet in action can really help a potential adopter to fall in love quickly, so as part of our work to put the video feature front and centre, we’ve redesigned our video and photo uploader for member groups. It’s now easier than ever for members to upload adorable videos of the pets in their care. As part of this improved design and usability, members can now easily add or change a photo or two, not the whole listing. This is the start of some very exciting editing tools that are being rolled out to make things as easy as paws-sible for members to manage pet profiles - watch this space!
As part of the updates we’ve been working on to put the video feature front and centre, there is now an easy edit button for photos and videos on pet profiles. We know how difficult it is to narrow down all the adorable photos and videos of a pet to post, so now it’s much easier for groups to switch these out!
We believe that two pets are better than one, so our devvies have continued to work hard behind the scenes on setting up data models for related listings (bonded pets).. Watch this space!
Any bug that causes adorable pet photos to be cut off isn’t our friend! The team fixed a bug which was causing banner images on our blog to be cut off, maximising your blog viewing experience.
This month, our devvies caught and gently released an annoying bug that was causing user profiles to bork when a pet photo doesn’t exist, stopping this furr-strating user experience from happening.
Usually we’d love a cookie overflow situation, however a cookie overflow error in dev land is not ideal! While the devvies were working on activating admin tools, the machines would rise up and kick them out of their own session - this has now been fixed. Devvies: 1, machines: 0.
September 2021
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is super im-paw-tant for getting potential adopters eyes on sweet rescue pets featured on our website in need of a family (this term re-furrs to improvements made to the platform which result in Google being able to read and interpret the content on the platform). So this month, the team has been working hard to improve our SEO in order to maximise visibility for all the pets looking for a home!
First up on our Devvies SEO checklist in September was to create brand new adoption landing pages, highlighting awesome bonded and senior pets specifically, making it easier for potential adopters to see these adorable pets who could often be overlooked.
Next up on the SEO list this month was adding in some general usability and accessibility improvements to the PetRescue mobile site, such as updating font sizes and spacing. More importantly, the more accessible our website is for our users overall, the faster pets can find homes, and the closer you are to booping your new rescue pets snoot!
Our rescue organisations Members have the ability on their group page to set their default communication preferences to only email or only phone calls, or both - improving the experience for both members and potential adopters! Furr-stratingly, however, for Member organisations creating listings through integration with Sheltermate or ASM Manager, we found a miscommunication between the systems that meant some features weren’t syncing claw-rrectly, and in turn - that group’s preferred contact details weren’t registering. Fret not however - this is now all fixed!
The only type of break our Devvies enjoy here at PetRescue is the dancing type - so when a bug which caused the dropboxes on our platform to break if the ‘down’ key was hit without a verified selection option being selected first, they got straight onto fixing this up!
We looove multiple photos of pets (who doesn’t?) but we don’t love duplicates of the exact same image, over and over, quite as much! When listings were being created, a pesky bug was causing the same image to be uploaded multiple times if the “upload photos” button was clicked multiple times. This is now fixed - freeing up space for even more adorable pet photos. Swoooooon!
It’s super im-paw-tant to ensure that details such as source numbers or microchip numbers are included in listings to comply with state Government legal regulations. So, enter our Devvies - who recently fixed a bug which was causing required field inputs not to show when a lo-cat-ion didn’t register, when they should. This was occurring because the system needs to ‘listen’ to where the pet is located to determine which pet ID’s are necessary when Members input this detail to their pet listing, however just like Whiskers when you tell him to get off the kitchen bench, it was going in one ear and out the other! This is now all fixed by our dashing Devvies, the input is listening to location, and our Members have more time to focus on what they do best - saving lives!
August 2021
This month, our delightful Devvies fixed some MailChimp list issues we’d discovered - which will now ensure our supporters receive the claw-rrect eDM they’ve signed up for! This also helps with delivery of receipts and those im-paw-tant tax time docs to our amazing donors.
We made a spiffy new update to the ‘Our Work’ page, which now sees the overall design lookin’ so fresh and oh so clean. Plus, there’s now the ability to review all of the historical projects and campaigns our team has delivered to previously!
We’ve levelled up our spam protection capabilities, and blocked some that were slipping through - causing some furr-ustrating errors in our chat platform! This means that spam is now caught and sent to the trash before it ever reaches a user conversation, using automated checks.
Time for some release notes inception… we’ve now popped in a link to our pun-tastic (if we don’t say so ourselves) monthly technical release notes updates in the footer of our website for easier purr-rusal. One for the fans!
We gave listing thumbnail images an accessibility glow-up, by making them larger when viewed on mobile. Fun fact for the tech heads out there: an average of 73% of our platform users view our website via a mobile device. We see you! We got you!
To help us better match humans and pets, we have re-purrposed data inputted to our pet listings by Member rescue organisations (which is used in search filtering for potential adopters), such as ‘good with other pets’ and made it more visible on each pet listing page. Highlighting this criteria on the profile ensures that these pets are putting their best paw forward to catch the eye of the right adapter for them.
While we’re here borking about accessibility glow-ups, we also added keyboard navigation for listing thumbnail images and a visual highlight to show they’re selected - making it easier for you to track what you’re doing and where you are.
To help prevent paw-tential adopters going down a long and windy road when seeing listings that fit their pet alerts, we’ve now popped a link to alert matches in the navigation bar. This means that folks can easily see and manage all their alerts and which pets match those filters within their adopter profile, making their pet search much easier (and faster!).
As part of our work to promote paw-some bonded pets available for adoption, we’ve updated our new campaign promo banner so that it links straight to the bonded pet search results page. This means that potential adopters can jump straight into looking for their new bonded furry family members! Once in search mode, there is also a handy link to our campaign highlight article - so you won’t miss out on all the info you need to know about how adopting bonded pets are twice, or perhaps even thrice as nice!
Cats off to our Devvies on this one - they’ve now fixed some issues on our image thumbnails within listing pages which were accidentally scroll-able, meaning you could never escape their sweet faces, regardless of where else on the page you tried to go (not that we’re complaining, really…)! Now, we’re back to regular programming and it’s only the page that can be scrolled.
Breaking mews for our Internet Explorer user friends - we’ve booped in some additional support for code running in older browsers, which in turn will improve the experience of navigating our site for the loyal IE allies amongst us!
And last, but not least, our Devvies have fixed a furry annoying bug which meant the button to open the site side menu would raise an error if it was clicked before the page was properly loaded. This seemingly harmless bug could break the page, so we’re glad it’s now smoothed over to improve the user experience and prevent furr-thur furr-rustration!
July 2021
Mullets are now the official PetRescue hairstyle cause we’re all business in the front and party in the back, baby! We’re celebrating some rad new developer capabilities in the backend including ‘feature toggles’ - which enable us to efficiently turn aspects of the platform on/off in record time so our website is overall much more stable and our Devvies can reallocate their attention to battling the bigger stuff!
We did say business in the front, and we sure weren’t kitten around! New badges and a reinvigorated dashboard for our group profile pages now highlight our Member rescue organisation’s important credentials like their ABN and Vet Reference qualifications. These de-tails are significant in ensuring that the pets are being adopted securely and safely by certified groups. Our new dashboard for displaying adoptions and listings amplifies the ability to showcase the organisation themselves and the pets they’ve helped, too!
Our divine Devvies (gently) captured and released a bug which was causing listings to be able to be created without an assigned user association. Though fret not - there’s now a platform requirement that every pet listing created has to be linked to a system user, which ensures that enquiry emails are now going to the right recipients (the rescue organisation Member looking after the particular pets profile!).
While they were sorting out nasty bugs, our Devvies also located one which was causing our Members’ ABN verification label to not show up on some group pages when it should have been. All rescue organisation Members of PetRescue are required to have an active ABN in their organisation name, as well as a certified vet reference on file, as part of our Code of Ethics and quality assurance for the public and adopters. This is an essential requirement to be a Member of our community, as it proves that our members are genuine rescuers, and they conduct their organisation according to ethical and legal requirements.
When it comes to math, the only pi we know are the cutie-pies listed on our platform. However, if pictures are worth a thousand words, we can quantifiably cow-culate the value of videos on pet listings! Video thumbnails have now been added into the ‘about’ section of listing profiles - all with the intent to further increase pet visibility and truly convey their purr-sonality.
Our demolition Devvies LOVE breaking stuff… only to make that stuff a meow-sand times better. In recent mewes, the Devvies broke some images on the platform, but fret not - in addition to fixing that issue in itself, they also made the system more robust so it doesn’t happen again! Booyah!
We helped make life easier for our paw-some support team (and in turn - you!), by adding user prop-purr-ties to our Helpdesk FAQ’s beacon, so that they have direct access to user accounts registered in the platform straight away. This means that when you submit a query through the bee-con, our team can now see a special section containing a link direct to your user profile or rescue organisation group page - so we can identify you quickly and answer your query even faster. Less time searching for user details + more time for answering enquiries = win!
Sweep sweep! In preparation for Spring, our Devvies also conducted a tidy up of the rendering of special characters in alert emails. When folks signed up to receive adorable pets available for adoption alerts straight to their inbox, sometimes the text was affected by strange special characters. But… voila! This is now fixed - and the only special characters you’ll be seeing from us are your paw-tential new furry best friends!
Tax time is most certainly over but the re-purr-cussions of such generosity have not fallen short on us. Infact, we’ve added the ability for auto-generating EOFY receipt data so that in the future, receipts will be delivered to donors more efficiently. Talk about tax time ready!
Our Devvies also fixed up a furry annoying bug which caused all videos on a profile to play at once when one was clicked on a listing page! Now, the platform plays only the specified video you request, leading to a much more enjoyable viewing experience (break out the popcorn, stat!).
June 2021
Aaaand we’re officially half way through 2021, still with us? Well PetRescue has hit a claw-lossal milestone with the 700,000th pet being marked as adopted - read more about it here! Did you notice the platform banner we put together to celebrate? *queue confetti and good boy boops all round*
Winter has arrived so what better excuse to curl up with a cuppa than to check out our new and im-paw-roved multimedia and pet listing layouts. Videos and images have now been separated for clarity and accessibility for our Members when listing pets (and in turn - for adopters when viewing pet profiles, too!). These layouts vary for Member rescue organisations and adopters to be more user friendly, all based on how you use the platform. Now there’s even a purr-poseful button just to view pet listing videos so you can purr-severe on your search for your new bestie with clearer prompts and navigation controls.
We understand the furr-ustration of deciding how many traffic lights there are when prompted by the Recaptcha security widget (especially when the traffic lights span over multiple boxes *sigh*). Well, we wanted to make this security measure less insu-furr-able for our users (that’s you!) - so we moved the widget to sit inside the payment pages form, where you’d expect it to sit in the first place! We know the previously awkward paw-sitioning niggled away at you a lil bit - so really, it’s the least we could do!
Foster care can be as equally fulfilling as adopting (and is just as needed!), and with the paw-sibility to foster multiple pets - you can help save even more lives. In foster-ing this belief, we wanted to highlight the ‘Foster Carer Needed’ label on active pet listings by pulling it out of the info table, where it could be overlooked, and into a Big. Hairy. Banner! This new banner style aims to draw in more attention and create awareness when a pet is listed as requiring foster care - in hopes that the individual pet can catch the eye of the right human(s) for them!
Pet alerts can be great when searching for the new additions to your family, and easily self-managed via the platform directly. But, what if you need to remove some of these alerts and find you need some assistance? Say, your spouse really means it when they tell you 6 cats, 3 guinea pigs and 2 roosters is enough pets (is it though?) so you probably need to resist the urge to adopt by removing some alerts for now. Whatever the case may be - we also understand that sometimes you may require some help in managing these alerts so now we’ve given our helpdesk team the functionality to do so! Now, our admins can unsubscribe users from any pet alerts upon request entirely - helping you resist the urge while you’re purr-suading your spouse!
Couldn’t find the answer you were looking for on our FAQ’s beacon? Need an answer by... yesterday? While we may not have a time machine (yet!), we understand there’s no time to waste when adopting your furry, feathery or scaly soul-mate so we’ve taken ulti-mate measures to ensure we can get back to your queries faster! Now, when you pet-lovers reach out to our customer service team via the beacon, your email address is automatically generated and aligned to your PetRescue purr-ofile so we can source information we may require to assist, even quicker!
So our member rescue teams are ex-purr-ts in conveying a pet's purr-sonality through their listing photos and kinda like a dating app - it’s always best to strategically order a pet's photos to highlight their best lewks, quirks and uniqueness to really capture the attention and hearts of prospective adopters! We fixed a pesky bug discovered where in some cases, our members couldn’t rearrange listing images. Now pets can put their best paw first to really catch the eye of their soulmate!
Boy do we love our buttons, not so much when they overlay a heading for our mobile users and even less when it’s the SECOND TIME this has happened! tsk-tsk disobedient buttons… Frustrating, we know, but before you rip the buttons off your shirt, we’ve fixed it.
May 2021
The launch of our Tax time donation appeal has arrived! Your generous donations go via the platform towards supporting our big, hairy and audacious work which you can read about here. Not only do your donations go furr-ther in this period from the contributions of some of our pet lovin’ partners, but every donation you make over $2 is tax deductible! It’s taxing work looking for puns... but your continued support is an investment we appreciate.
If you’re the #1 fan of our release notes here at PetRescue (we hope so), you may recall last month when we added an error detector to notify our deputy Devvies of any backend error to claw-rrect before you even noticed it. Well, turns out this update worked a treat - so we pushed for the same error detector in the front end too!
Look, we’re not here to convince you to welcome Ads with open arms and we know they certainly won’t grow on you like Mr Whiskers did on your dad (safe to say it’s *his* cat now). We heard you last time, so now we’re thrilled to report that sticky Ads have a close button - aaaaaand good riddance! Imagine the feeling your pet has after you finally install a doggy door - yep, you can smell the freedom…
Now that we’re nearing the middle part of 2021 (yikes), there’s been some general updates and content changes to the ‘Our Work’ page - just to keep you informed on our current work and areas of focus here at PetRescue. Is it just us or does time feel like it’s flying by in dog years?
The Recaptcha security software integrated with our platform went all Gandalf on us with it’s new ‘you shall not pass’ attitude for all you pet lovers just wanting access to your own PetRescue accounts. The security gate-keeper, as such, started treating everyone like scammy scammers with some of the new Recaptcha code preventing submission of their security form but... we resolved that. Now, your account is accessible by you and still secure.
Technology integrations like that of PetRescue and our external animal management platforms are im-purr-itive in creating happiness and saving lives so it’s pretty RUFF when this integrated data trans-furr overlooks the preferred contact details of our Member rescue organisations (boooo hisssss!). For Members who utilise these external platforms to manage their listings - contact information on those listings now defaults claw-rrectly!
April 2021
An external animal management software PetRescue integrates with received another big backend upgrade, resulting in faster more atomic updates and overall less issues. The software now syncs in bite-size steps instead of one big chonk, so if there are any errors, they are isolated to that step and the rest remains GrOoVy.
Our new enquiry count feature could be quite litter-ally the most im-purr-essive update of the month! Member rescue organisations can view and sort their listings by enquiry counts in their listings management dashboard. Meaning pet profiles with lower amounts of enquiries can ensure they receive the extra bump of love they need to be seen, and if enquiries for a pet profile are high - the organisations’ team can jump in and get responding to enquiries already received. The opportunity for better transparency, better communication and better outcomes for pets - we’d say that’s pretty epic!
Our latest internal tracker notifi-cat-ions can now allow for our team to sniff out errors in some of the work that happens in the background, alerting our deputy Devvies, enabling them to fix most errors on the platform before you even notice them!
While the bond with your furry friend may be forever, we understand your contact details aren’t often as purr-manent. Now when a rescue organisations’ pet listings contact details are updated after it’s already been posted, they are automatically added to existing enquiry conversations. This means when someone enquires about a pet, we grab the new contact information and add that to the existing conversation enquiry sent. So if you are awaiting an update on a listing, you can rest easy knowing that the rescue organisation would’ve received your communication and are working hard on getting back to you with an update as soon as they can.
If you’re not a soulless monster, you most likely love a cute pet video or two… unless of course it hinders the ability to add even cuter headshots to the existing pet listing. Well, we discovered that’s exactly what’s been happening (but the good news is - we’ve fixed it!). Up until recently, if there was an older pet listing with an accompanying video, our Members weren’t then able to upload images to it, but bippity-boppity-boop, now get a look at that snoot! *heart eyes*
*boop* you’ve got a chat bubble message alert! Haha, just kidding. *boop* okay, seriously NOW you’ve got an alert! Haha, gotcha again!... tired of this game yet? Yeah, we feel you. Turns out there was a sneaky lil bug in which our pet-lovin’ platform users were being alerted to a new chat notification only to find out that there were no unread messages (womp womp womppp). Now that we’ve resolved this bug, there will be no more false hope that someone wants to talk to you, we promise!
It’s a requirement that all pets listed on our website must be associated with a platform user from a Member rescue organisation so we have a strong line of communication for every pet seeking a new home. However, it seems some unassociated listings were sneaking through the cracks. So, we enlisted the help of Scooby and the Mystery Gang (otherwise known as our dauntless Devvies) who applied some quick sealant to the cracks of these anony-mouse pet listings, so now a user is required to be linked in order for it to go up on the platform! Hazar!
March 2021
Aaaah! Just like putting that satisfying final piece into the puzzle, our Home2Home program framework is complete; we finished the build of the payment management platform! Now that the program is fully built out, we can shift our focus to be on ways to improve this program for owners, adopters and most importantly, pets in need! Our Home2Home admins can now manage adoption fee and safety net fee payments with an abundance of capabilities making the entire process a heck of a lot smoother.
We know how purr-poseful our pet listing pages are - so they got some lovin’ (cue the big sloppy dog kisses). Additional breadcrumbs (this is the name for a feature which shows you your personal website navigation history, and how to get back home again, we didn’t just make this up - promise!) were created so you can easily see your trail of links that got you to a certain page and find your way back home when you need - no Hansel & Gretel shenanigans here, just cute pet pics! We also redesigned the pet details table so you can easily purr-use the important pet info you need to know.
The external animal management software PetRescue syncs with now claw-rrectly translates pet listings to our platform like the rest of our code, hooray! Purr-eviously, the software translated code in an alternate way that caused a higher risk of error.
With the a-bunny-dance of adoptable pets on our site, have you ever fostered the thought of fostering one (or five) of them? Well, we’ve added a link on ‘how to foster’ to the sidebar and footer for easier accessibility to learn all you need to know!
As our Member rescue organisations have an informed opportunity to provide insights on all things animal welfare, our Devvies inbuilt a sector survey pop-up component to ensure Members are prompted to share their feedback with us. Obtaining Members insights iis critical for us to be able to gather info on the current state of the sector and work towards more targeted initiatives. This prompt helps create as much participation as possible to obtain well-rounded, qualified insights from those in the know, and in turn - allow us to continue to advocate for the rescue sector as best we can. We’re not horsin’ around, here!
If by chance we can’t find any pets available with the criteria you're searching for on our listing search page or there’s a tech error, we’ve now made a more purr-ceptive alert pop-up to provide insight around the type of error you’re facing, to guide you back on track!
Your generosity in sup-paw-ting our mission makes us feel all the warm fuzzies! And due to the general consensus that sticky ads can be somewhat insuf-furr-able, we’ve removed them from our donation page. Just our little way to hopefully make your navigation of the page a little less disruptive. To top it off - this restriction of ads enhances the security of your payment details when donating - preventing scammy scammers from making any unusual purr-chases from the household kitty account!
Jumping onto our platform to look for your new family member? Procrastinating on work needing to be done with all the cute snoots in your vision? Or maybe you’re looking for an article about the best enrichment toys for your dear old Whiskers? Maybe you don’t know what pet related info you’re looking for until it paws you right in the face! Well this is us pawing you ever so gently in the face by increasing the a-meow-nt of recommended posts on our Homepage from two to three - yippee!
Sometimes a fake website posing as ours isn’t as easy to sniff out as a space between ‘Pet’ and ‘Rescue’... unfortunately for these scamming scoundrels, they are no match for our dazzling Devvies! Our team has now locked down site access so only certain pages can be embedded by other websites to prevent potential im-paw-sters!
Look, we can’t bury our heads in the sand with this one… unless you want us to find a bone, an odd sock or that TV remote you were looking for last year? So it turns out we accidentally removed some labels from the little white input boxes around our site meaning you may have been temporarily unsure of what to type into said boxes - “Do they want my name? Location? Phone number?” What a whirlwind… nevertheless, this has now been resolved!
The sidebar is a great tool for accessing quick links and purr-omptly navigating our platform… just not when there’s a bunch of social sharing buttons covering it and blocking your ability to click on links altogether! We’ve now made sure that the sidebar now opens OVER the listing social buttons instead.
There are instances where interstate adoption just isn’t possible or is advised against for the wellbeing of some pets, so identifying an enquirers location from the get-go saves loads of time for everyone involved. Purr-eviously, if you didn’t select the state you’re in when enquiring, our form wouldn’t let you send your enquiry - with no explanation as to why it didn’t submit. Now, an error code will clearly explain that you need to include your state before progressing - aaaand success! We hope this leaves you less befuddled.
February 2021
We bee-leive our shiny NEW sign-up page is the bee’s knees! The more rescue organisations who sign up to our free PetRescue platform, the greater reach and impact we can all make for pets on a whale scale (more specifically the Antarctic Blue Whale!). The sign-up page has been purr-posefully condensed with various text enhancements and linking content. Hello to all our pet-lovin’ rescuers out there! We see you!
Oh but wait, there’s more... we also see you, our pet-lovin’ adopters! Further to revamping our Member sign up page, we pup-dated various text and link content around the entire site. The more accessible our platform is for YOU, the faster we can get pets adopted and into YOUR loving arms - prepare for the belly rubs!
When Member rescue organisations list pets on our platform, they can choose to embed a PetRescue feed on their own webpage so their listings automatically pup-ulate from our platform to theirs - talk about ef-fish-iency! We’ve now introduced a new feed layout, improving the feed com-paw-sition on their webpage and ultimately increasing visibility as well as reach of the smooshable little faces listed for adoption!
Our Cin-Dev-ellas cleaned up a bunch of old janky code to close out the month *duster emoji*. Unfortunately there were no chirping birds, talking mice or glass slippers to be seen.
January 2021
Much like taking down the Christmas tree before the dog plays tinsel tug-of-war or the kitten chases baubles around the house, we had to pull down our Christmas logo and hidden platform surprise for another year. And if you didn’t find the hidden surprise, well, there’s always next Christmas…
Several tweaks were made to sign-up forms and the text inputs all around our site so it’s a smooth ride, from filling out your de-tails to typing keywords into the search filters - all in the effort to connect you to your furry friends faster!
You may not care about minor software updates but I’m sure you DO care about the meow-trageously adorable pet listing photos. That’s why we updated the software in charge of uploading them to avoid any cat-estrophic scenarios for our Members in future.
When Whiskers the cat uses your couch for scratching, you realise it’s time to purr-chase an actual scratching post. Well, similar to this feedback loop, we’ve reformatted and upgraded Google Analytics - so now the way you use our site helps us recognise ways to improve your experience! Of course, unlike Whiskers, you can also always reach out to us with any suggestions or feedback at info@petrescue.org.au!
The difficult decision to rehome a pet should not be further complicated by an insuf-furr-able payment system. With the implementation of our new Home2Home program - we’ve reformatted this system for adoption and safety net fee payments so you can focus on rehoming your loved one, uninterr-pup-ted! Read more here!
Oops, it seems our snoots made a boop! In pup-dating our site, we accidentally removed the ‘Foster Needed’ checkbox from our alerts form. Now, before you send us to purr-gatory - our diligent Devvies were quick to resolve this error, as we know how important the feature is in connecting foster heroes with pets in need!
Can you imagine the confused tilt of your doggo’s head if you were to change requested commands from ‘stand’ to ‘sit’ in the one breath? Well, previously, if you were donating and adjusted your preferred payment method commands (i.e. from PayPal to credit card), our system tilted it’s head in confusion... so, we’ve restructured the system backend in order to take more flexible commands - anything for a treat!
Our platform has thousands of lines of code being updated and adjusted daily and we’ve got a bunch of tests continuously running to ensure all code fulfills its intended purr-pose. There was a tiny subset of tests that furr-got to run this month, but that’s been fixed so the platform is once again undergoing full coverage autono-mouse code checks, around the clock!
Seeing double pet listings on our group listings page? Yes. Tweety birds flying around your head? Probably not. It sounds like the duplicate pet listings you were in fact seeing are our blunder *blush* which we have now resolved. However, if you DID bump your head earlier, we’d advise seeing a medical professional for a cat scan (as if you didn’t see that coming)...
Falling head over paws for a pet on our site is highly paw-robable and often the instant connection can be so adrenaline pumping that you go to enquire before even checking their lo-cat-ion. Depending on a Member rescue organisation’s preferences, they can enable or disable interstate adoption for their adoptable pets so it’s nice to have an alert reminder pop up if the pet is in a different state to you. Somewhere down the line, that prompt was briefly MIA but... it’s back!
Information is certainly im-paw-tant, so long as it’s true and claw-rrect! Sheltermate (one of two external animal management software PetRescue syncs with) doesn’t share quite the same filtering capabilities and in turn, resorts to a default selection. So, to avoid confusion, we’ve removed this info from the enquiry section *if* it is one of the external software’s associated listings. This means the pet’s personality you see in their profile is direct intel from the Member rescue organisation (dog, cat, kid friendly etc.). So if the profile says Garfield loves lasagne, well you can bet he sure does!
Video killed the radio star, aaaaaand our search page… well, kiiinda. When a pet listing’s first image is a video, it previously wouldn’t display on our results page at all. This made us sad as we always want to see all the cute snoots and give them the best chance of being adopted. Fortunately, our dashing Devvies image-ined a solution! So now, instead of displaying a blank thumbnail, it grabs the first frame of the video to use as an image, hooray!
Now, here’s a big-un! We enabled search by Microchip and BIN numbers on our admin pet search tool. Searching these numbers in your precious pet’s paw-tfolio ensures there will be no copy-cats of your cat (or any species, for that matter). Every pet is special and unique and these numbers reinforce that. They also guarantee credibility where we can cross-check and ultimately, ensure a safe listing and adoption space for all pets and humans alike!
What’s better than having a primary contact for each of our Member rescue organisations? Being able to add a SECONDARY contact group details! The logic is simple really - two contacts strengthen the lines of communi-cat-ion and security, while they're busy saving lives!