With tonight's rollout, we bring you Zoji restaurants, bars and clubs! You can now use Zoji to find places to eat, drink, and be merry. Got a hankerin' for some Italian food at a place that's open right now? Head on over to our handy Restaurantz tab and see what pops up.
And of course, what good would all this information be without some way of finding the best places to eat and drink? That's where Tips come in. You can use tips to...well, tip off your friends and fellow Zojiers to a great Thai hole in the wall you found, a bar with lousy service, a good steak joint you ate at the other day...give restaurants and bars your thumbs up or down, and mark your favorites, so your friends can share in your discoveries.
Tips you post will appear on your profile page, and on the restaurant, bar, or club. You can see at a glance which places are hot or cold on the new Restaurantz and Barz & Clubz tabs.
So off and give 'em a try. These features are brand spankin' new--they may be a little raw right now, but there's a lot more we're planning on doing with them. We're also hard at work on populating our restaurant data for other cities besides Seattle, so if you don't see any info for where you live, please be patient, it'll be there eventually.
If you encounter any bugs or have any suggestions on what more you'd like to see, send them our way!
As part of this rollout, we also added a fancy new rich text editor you can use for your blog posts and bulletins (thanks to the folks behind the TinyMCE editor--hard to believe the thing's free).
The new editor is a lot more sophisticated and robust than the old one, but for simplicity, I decided to keep the available button set similar to our old editor. If you're curious, you can try a demo of the new editor with all the features enabled here. If you see some buttons you can't live without, feel free to let me know.
Along the same lines with the comment editor, I'm also curious to find out what your opinion is on whether we should allow pictures in comments. Currently it's enabled, but I'm a little afraid of the possibility of people abusing the feature. Comment on this post to let us know what you think.
Other stuff
A few other things we've rolled out in the last week but didn't mention previously:
- Lots o' new Skin backgrounds. Check out this post for details.
- You can now unsubscribe from comments (this includes comments on blogs, bulletins, pictures, and profiles, aka Back Talk)
- Now Online box is now more robust--if it hits an error trying to refresh, it'll try up to 4 more times before giving up and displaying an error message.
- Fixed a bug where IM sounds stopped working.
Thanks,
Kevin
I figured it was about time for Zoji to have an FAQ. There isn't a lot to put up yet (not saying there aren't a lot of frequently asked questions, just that I can't remember them all right now :), but we'll be adding to this list as we think of things.
- Why didn't my event's guests receive the invitation email?
- Why can I only enter plain text in blog posts, bulletins, and comments?
- Why does <insert Zoji feature or page> look funny or not work properly in my browser?
- How do I embed a YouTube video in my blog?
Questions
Why didn't my event's guests receive the invitation email?
We probably have over-aggressive spam filters (and hence, spammers) to thank for that.
People's email providers (e.g. Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, etc.) do their best to filter out spam from reaching their users. Unfortunately, sometimes their spam filters can be overaggressive, and flag legitimate emails (such as those from Zoji) as spam. These emails typically end up in users' spam or junk email folders. We've spent a lot of time and energy trying to solve this issue, but past a certain point, there's not a lot we can do about it. We hate it, it frustrates us, but it's the reality of email these days.
You can see if invitees have viewed the email or the invitation page itself by logging in to Zoji and viewing the event--if you're the organizer you should see a note beside the invitees that says whether they've viewed the email or invitation. If people are not receiving the invitation mail, one thing you can try is to resend the invitations. Click the "Manage event" link in the actions list below the event picture. You should see a popup and a link that contains a "Re-send invitations" link. Click it, then choose who you want to resend the invitation to and click submit.
Alternatively, you could email the invitees and ask them to check their spam folders for the invitation. We also recommend asking invitees to add "invites@zoji.com" to their address book or safe-senders list--this should prevent Zoji invitations from being filtered in the future.
Why can I only enter plain text in blog posts, bulletins, and comments?
Rich text editing on Zoji is currently only supported and tested on Internet Explorer 6.0 and above, and Firefox 1.0 and above. We've had some nasty issues with the editor on Safari, so we've disabled it for that browser, which might explain why you aren't seeing it. If you'd like to be able to enter rich text into your posts and comments, we'd recommending using the latest version of Firefox.
Other browsers such as Opera and Netscape should support the editor, but we haven't tested them, so we can't guarantee that. Please let us know if you encounter any issues using it on one of those browsers.
Why does <insert Zoji feature or page> look funny or not work properly in my browser?
It's probably because you're using a very old version of your web browser or it's a browser we don't support. Each browser and browser version has its own bugs and quirks when it comes to rendering web pages. It can be a very tricky and time-consuming thing to create a website that supports a wide variety of browsers.
Currently, Zoji supports Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5 and above (1.0 should work OK too, but no guarantees), and Safari. According to our statistics those are the browsers most commonly used to visit Zoji. Naturally, we recommend using the most recent version of your browser that's available (that's IE 7 and Firefox 2.0 for those of you that are paying attention).
Honestly, we wish we could support every browser, but hey, there's only two of us, and we can't be spending all our time testing and fixing browser issues or nothing else would get done. So if stuff is looking funky or not working right for you, go here and fix all your problems. :-)
How do I embed a YouTube video in my blog?
It's pretty simple. On the YouTube/Google Video/whatever page, you should see a box that lists some HTML code you can use to embed a video. It should look something like this:
<object width="425" height="350">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_2S68tw7JSA"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_2S68tw7JSA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed>
</object>
Copy the code. Create a new blog post, and in the rich text editor, click the "HTML" button. This should bring up the HTML source view for your blog post. Paste the HTML code into the window and click "Update". You should now see a big yellow box in the editor. This represents the video player that will appear in your post. Edit your post as you normally would, then click Submit. Voila, you should now have a video embedded in your post.
Enter the "Go to Friend" box! Give it a try: click on your nifty "my Z" menu in the upper left. Now click on the "Go to Friend" box. Now start typing the name of a friend--if all goes well you should see a nifty little autocomplete dropdown displaying your friends whos names match what you've typed. Select one with the arrow keys and hit enter (or use the mouse). Bam, instant profile.
Neat?
The other main feature rolled out tonight is something many people have asked for--previously when you clicked on a picture notification, it'd just take you to that person's photo albums. I now admit, it was rather a pain in the butt to find the new pictures from that view. OK, ok, I heard the complaints. Now when you click on a picture notification, it'll take you to a virtual "all pictures" folder--a flattened view of ALL of the person's pictures ordered from newest to oldest. If you still have trouble finding the new pictures with this new scheme, sorry I can't help you, and it's doubtful anyone can. :P
Among the other minor fixes:
- Added a javascript debug output window for figuring out those pesky Now Online and IM bugs. A free beer for the first person who can figure out how to activate it. ;-) I'll give you a hint: you can access it from any Zoji page.
- Fixed an IM issue where you could see a duplicate of a message you sent.
- Fixed some visual issues with the Blue Skiez and Zojiriffic skins.
- Fixed the hidable event info toggle on the z-vite page so it works properly in IE.
- Fixed a bug where sometimes you wouldn't get a picture notification for a friend's new pic.
But anyway, looks like things are back up and running. Big thanks goes to Flora who even stayed home from work to help me get things going again. For that we're making her an honorary member of Team Zoji. :-) (On the other hand, a couple of suspicious looking guinea pigs were found near the scene of the crime...)
Oh, and I forgot to mention, last night I had this nightmare that for some reason the FBI showed up and confiscated all the computers at Zoji HQ...I was trying to figure out if it was a symbolic premonition of the problems that happened today, or if that's just the next thing that's going to go wrong...
If you don't see the restaurant/bar/club you're looking for, and can't figure out how to add it, it's because that capability doesn't exist yet :)
I'm on it, and hopefully it'll be done by monday night, so hang on tight... (oooh that rhymed!)
1. [Display] Title tag for the launch page for restaurantz is "zoji - null". "zoji - restaurantz" might be more applicable.
That's what you get from a former QA Engineer. =)
P.S. I loved the "DanDan" stuff. Change it back!
purely a Tuftean comment -- I would use 'green' for highly-ranked places, and 'red' for ones with low scores. I like grey for "so-so" though, props! Maybe go from green to grey? Or, green to yellow to red?
(i like your idea of red = hot, blue = cold, but red is not a very friendly color though. otoh, it does get one's attention...)
bug (?): i search for something, click a restaurant, read/rate it, then click back, and it goes to the main restaurantz page. where are my search results? as of now, i have to re-search every time i read a listing.
yep patrick, we're on it...
Until we have a real fix (i.e. your search results remain when you go back) you can work around it by middle-clicking it (assuming you're using Firefox) and opening the result in a new tab.
Matt--yeah I wanted one, but couldn't think of what was a good representation of "not bad". :) If I see a toe icon around somewhere, I'll be sure to use it. Though maybe we'll do the sideways thumb. :P