Last night (or this morning, actually) Team Zoji rolled out a couple new goodies:

• New event response views.  Click on any Z-vite you've been invited to, scroll down to where the invitee responses are, and you'll notice 3 new options: "full view", "no comments", and "no comments or pics".  Kev-bo cooked this one up.  This provides you with alternative compact views of the event roster, which is nice if you've ever looked at a Z-vite page, grabbed your monitor and shook it yelling "SHUT UP!!"  because you don't give a rip about people's stupid comments ... uh, hypothetically-speaking of course ...
• Contact List for people not on Zoji.  If you go to the compose e-mail screen or create event screen, next to the e-mail box you'll notice a new checkbox "add them to my contact list", with a link to popup the contact list.  Any e-mail addresses you enter on the contact list will appear in your friends picker, just like your normal Zoji friends.  You can associate a first and last name with an e-mail address too, for easier recognition.  This basically helps you interface with your friends who are not yet on Zoji, it may help so you don't have to keep typing their e-mails over-and-over.  Why are we spending effort to accomodate your friends who are too cool for Zoji?  I'm not exactly sure, but I guess that's just shows how much we CARE.  Anyhow this feature is just the start, it's really the foundation for some other upcoming goodies... Stay tuned, don't touch that dial...

Happy Summer everyone, I think it's officially here ... -Dan

Dan made mention of this in his last post, but at the time, the feature wasn't quite 100% finished. :)  Well with tonight's rollout, it is.

Zoji now provides RSS feeds for most of your important information. (For more information, see my old blog post) Specifically, in addition to personal and group blog feeds which have been around a while, the new feeds include the following:

• Featured blog posts
• Recent blog posts
• "My Private RSS Feeds" - feeds for your homepage notifications, in other words,
  
• Blog notifications
• Picture notifications
• Comment notifications
• Your Zoji inbox
• Your upcoming events
• All of the above feeds rolled into one
  

The first two feeds you can find on the Blogz page, in the Featured and Recent blog posts boxes--to get to them, click on the little orange icons.

You can access your private RSS feeds by clicking on the little orange icon in the "Welcome <your name>!" box on your Zoji homepage.  This will take you to a page explaining the feeds and the security mechanism used to keep them private.

Your Private RSS Feeds are just that--private, since they contain non-public information (e.g. your inbox).  You probably would never want to give out your private RSS feed URLs to anyone else since they'd now be able to read your inbox.  However, say you suspected someone got a hold of one of your private feed URLs.  Well in that case, you'd go to your private feeds page (orange icon on your homepage) and click the "Reset private feed URLs" link.  This randomly regenerates the URLs for your private feeds, and invalidates all your old feeds.  And voila, your feeds are private once again.  You do have to update your RSS reader with the new feed URLs, but that's a necessary evil to keep your stuff secure.

There is also more information about RSS and RSS readers in the feeds themselves.  If you view one of our feeds in a browser that supports XSLT (probably any modern browser), you'll see a page with information and links to more RSS resources.

If all this RSS stuff sounds awfully esoteric to you, don't worry about it.  Zoji will still continue to work the way you're used to. :)  But for the early adopters and tech geeks out there, have fun.

-Kevin

Point-and-click custom skins are here!  With tonight's release you now have the ability to choose from amongst hundreds of different backgrounds to skin your Profile, Group, Blog, and Event pages.  This is a great way to add an individualized touch on a Z-vite, for example.   Just click "Skin this Page" and you'll see what I mean.  For example check out my new skin:

 

http://www.zoji.com/dan

 

Sorry if you're shocked, and yes my profile page is still on Zoji!  You can see how more and more pages on Zoji will look individualized.  You also can change the font color, header font, and normal text font, for starters.  Play around with it, you'll soon find you can spend a LOT of time trying out all the different looks.  We have yet to fine-tune the library of images (there's more to come for sure) so we'd love to hear some feedback about what works and what doesn't.  Of course we still support the official Zoji skins, and you are still more than welcome to make your own CSS skin and link to it, if you really want to customize the layout.

 

Also, a couple nights ago Kevin released additional RSS feeds for most pertinent Zoji information that you'd care to know about:  All your notifications (picture, comment, blog), Zoji e-mail that you receive, featured blogs and new blogs, and probably something else that I'm forgetting.  If you regularly use an RSS client, you should check out these feeds -- you can find them scattered around the Zoji pages denoted by the standard small orange RSS icon.  If all you care about is receiving the most updated information, Zoji's RSS feeds pretty much tell you everything now.

 

That's all for now, good night.  -Dan

 

 

Last night we rolled out several minor but noteworthy features:

• Improved skin picker.  If you go to your profile or blog page, or any group or event you created, you may have noticed the "Skin this page" link.  Previously you had to enter a url to a CSS file to skin the page.  Now all you have to do is peruse the skin previews and click on one you like to apply it.  Should be handier, give it a shot.  Stay tuned for the ability to easily make your own custom skins too.
• Editing Z-vite locations.  This was more a missing feature than anything else.  Now when you go edit a Z-vite and choose a different location, you'll notice all the address and direction information dynamically changes too.  Basically what you see is what you get, if you change any information in the fields, we'll properly update it, and notify all invitees that the location changed.
• Cloning a Z-vite now copies the old Z-vite's picture as well.
• When inviting a friend to an event, you now have the ability to include a message.
• Cancelling an event now properly sends e-mail to all those invited.

thanks -dan

With tonight's deployment you now have the ability to preview a Zvite before you send it out.  This lets you upload pictures and preview how everything looks before the Zvite is sent out.

 

Bug fix: All post-event comments should have a yellow background now.  Previously some were missing the highlighting.

 

thanks -Dan