- Customizable blog titles and descriptions. You'll now see an "Edit Blog Settings" link in the sidebar for your own blog and for the blogs of groups for which you're the moderator (i.e. creator). From there, you can set the blog's title and description (and you can see the result on this blog).
- New skin! I've created a new skin called "Clean 'n Simple". It's currently only for blogs, and you can see it on display in my blog. As the title indicates, it's a clean and simple page design--no graphics are used. It also demonstrates a different way to style the tab navigation bar. There are two color schemes so far:
- Orange & green: http://www.zoji.com/css/skinz/skinSimple.css
- Blue & green: http://www.zoji.com/css/skinz/skinSimpleBlue.css (yes I'm blue-biased, so any skin I make will have a blue version)
- The Now Online box no longer drops to the bottom of the page. This used to happen when the browser window was too narrow to fit it. I found a way around the IE bugs that prevented me from keeping the box at its proper location, so now it will no longer drop to the bottom of the page.
- Fixed a few bugs: an error when trying to view event pictures in some cases, and a bug with the mini-calendar.
- New friends picker when composing emails and z-vites--no more scrolling through pages of friends. The new one is much more compact and convenient.
- The group page has been redesigned and is now skinnable. All of the current official Zoji skins (2col and its hotpink variant) can be applied to group pages now (e.g. this group).
- Tweaks to the profile page--some changes to the order of stuff in the "vitals" box; we cut the "how connected" box, and we changed the box in the upper-right to be a "how am I connected to this person" dealio.
- Z-vite creation page has been redesigned. It's now better organized and easier to manage.
- Skin bug fixes. Fixed a couple of bugs affecting how skins worked for older browsers, and for pages when non-Zoji users viewed them.
- Fixed a z-vite bug where clicking link in an email resulted in an error.
- Base skin: http://www.zoji.com/css/skinz/skin2col.css
- Hot Pink color theme: http://www.zoji.com/css/skinz/skin2colHotpink.css
- My own customized one: http://www.zoji.com/kevin/bin/57951.css
This blog is now using the new official skin, called "blog-2col-base" (damn, I really need to think of a better name for it). You're welcome to use it for your own blog. To do so, go to your blog, click "Skin this Page", and type in the following URL:
Creating Your Own Skinz
As I mentioned, I've created a template file you can use to create your own skin based off this skin. To do so, right click this link (http://www.zoji.com/css/skinz/blog-2col-template.css) and select "Save Link As...". Save the file to your hard drive, and open it in a text editor. You should find all the instructions you need in the file itself. Let me know if the instructions aren't clear enough, or even if you just have any questions.
As an example, I went ahead and tried creating a customized skin with a new color theme and some graphics. Here's the result:
If you're interested in using this theme, here's the URL to use in the Skin page: http://www.zoji.com/css/skinz/skin2colHotpink.css
As another example, of how the base skin can be customized, check out my blog. I just added some background images to a few elements (specifically the headers and action links), tweaked the fonts a little, and hid the blog poster picture. This skin you can find in my shared documents--it's called blogBlueSkiez.css)
If you're interested in learning more about skins and how to create them, I recommend you join the Zoji Skinz group. I'll be posting periodically to the group with tips and tricks, and it'll be a good forum for asking questions.
Lastly
Finally, we've added an "update" feature for documents. If you change a shared document, you can now use the update link for that file (it's in your documents page) to replace the existing file with the new one. Should be handy for skins, if you need to make tweaks to them after uploading them.
Anyway, that's all. Let me know if you have any skinning questions!
-Kevin
With tonight's deployment we've released the first stage of Zoji Audio. This allows you to put an embedded MP3 player on your profile, and stream audio from songs that you upload (legally, of course!) All you have to do is go to your profile page, click "Add Audio Player", and you should see an audio player pop up on your profile. Click "upload mp3s" to send your songs to Zoji. Other people who visit your profile will be able to see this audio player, and the songs they see will depend on the permissions that you set on each song (anyone, friends, only you).
This Zoji Audio feature is in preparation for getting bands onto Zoji in the near future. Stay tuned.
As an example, I've uploaded a couple recordings to my profile page . And I suspect soon that Kevin will upload something to his as well. Assuming you have a halfway-decent Internet connection, the songs should stream out fine. From our tests here it works ok, but do let us know if you're on broadband and still feel that it's slow or choppy.
Another feature released: as a stepping stone towards CSS Skinz, Kevin made it so images you upload retain their original size. Previously we had always downsized images in consideration of storage, but some elements in CSS design require large images, making it essential to preserve the original image.
This should start to tax the bandwidth that we've been paying so much for :)
-Dan
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