Zoji now knows when you're away from the browser window you have open on Zoji.  When you've been away from your Zoji window for 5 minutes, your little person icon in your friends' Now Online boxes will appear with a little clock.  Bad user!  Get back to Zoji right this instant.

Also, check out the new group fans feature Dan rolled out yesterday.  On this very group!  Show us how much you care by being Zoji fans. :)  It will keep us going on these long, lonely nights, coding at 3:00 in the morning.

In the last few days we've been working on UI cleanup and preparing Zoji for full-on Zoji Music and Bands:

• Public calendar on your profile.  Whenever you RSVP to an event that is public (no invitation necessary), you have the option of displaying it on your profile (to friends only, or to anyone).  This is so friends looking at your profile can see that ah, you're going to see a show this friday, maybe I'd be interested in going too, that kind of thing.  If you play in a band, this is handy for letting your friends know which gigs are coming up.  You can also create miscellaneous personal notes on the calendar and choose to have them appear on your profile.
• Public calendar on groups pages.  Whenever a group is invited to an event, the event will now appear on the group's page.  Again, this is handy if, say, you had a band group and wanted to list all your upcoming shows.  You'd just hafta create Z-vites for each show and invite the band group to each one.
• Group Fans.  Whenever you create a group now, an auxilliary related Fan Group is created.  By default this Fan Group is not displayed, since most groups don't need fans, but you can enable it in the group settings.  Bands will have both members and fans.  Since fans are a separate group, you can e-mail them or Z-vite them as you would any other group.  When you add yourself as a fan, you're subscribed to the band's blogs, pictures, and comments.
• Comment deletion.  You now have the ability to delete comments from blogs, Back Talk, and pictures.

A few new features for today:

• Groups now support shared documents and the music player!
• You can now comment on people's profile pages--we've called it the "whiteboard", but I don't think I'm entirely sold on the name (even though it was my idea :P)...Anybody have any better ideas?
• The Blogs page now also displays the 5 most recent publicly viewable blog posts, including those made to groups.  This gives a little more visibility to non-featured posts.  Featured posts had become a bit of a dumping ground for blog posts people wanted everyone on Zoji to see, but that was never the intent of the featured posts list.  The new "recent blog posts" list allows posts that don't make the featured list to still be found by other Zoji members.
• A few bug fixes.

Now go on and comment on Dan's profile and mine and tell us how cool we are...please?

In case you haven't noticed, we've done a major overhaul of the front page.  It's all bubbly and happy and we have complete confidence that it will attract millions of users.  (The feature links right now are pointing to temporary pages which we'll replace as we finish them)

Dan and I just spent the last 2 hours trying to figure out this mysterious problem where the Zoji web server just suddenly stopped serving up CSS files (so pages ended up looking all screwed up).  It turned out to be a head slapper.  After several reboots of the web server, an attempted rollback to yesterday's code, and much frowning and cursing, we discovered there was a line of code dealing with the caching of CSS files that checked for "PST" (Pacific Standard Time) in the next day's date (i.e. April 2)--but of course tomorrow is the beginning of Daylight Saving Time, so our timezone is now PDT.  This eventually ended up resulting in an exception being thrown, thus causing the web server to fail to serve up CSS files.  Has to be the first bug I've seen caused by daylight saving time.

I would laugh if it weren't 5:45 in the morning.  Guess the computer gods have had their April Fools Day fun with us.

Whenever you upload a picture to Zoji, we create several smaller versions of the picture for use in different contexts (e.g. your profile picture displayed beside a blog comment is the smallest size we use, 50 x 50px).

The very observant among you might have noticed that the thumbnails of pictures uploaded to Zoji recently look better than ones that had been uploaded a while ago.  Well, the reason for this is that back in January, we upgraded the algorithm we used for resizing pictures to one that created much smoother, nicer-looking thumbnails.

We've finally gotten around to updating all the older images in the database.  As a result, all of the thumbnails of pictures now should be noticeably improved.  NOTE: You will probably not see the updated images unless you purge your browser's cache.

Here are some examples:

Before:


After:


Before:


After:


Before:


After:


(A dead tapir never looked so good, eh?)