You'll find the links on individual event pages, and on your calendar and event list pages. You can probably figure out how to import the files into your calendaring app of choice, but if you can't, comment here and I can probably give you a hand.
Is that quick turnaround or what? :-)
Then we added bulletins...bulletins were implemented essentially as a special type of blog post, so it made sense to group them with blog notifications even if they weren't really the same thing...But then came along tips (aka reviews). Did we really want to add a fourth box of notifications? That seemed like too much.
And so you have before you the new, consolidated notification system. The new notification system treats all notifications equally--all new stuff now appears in the same box, in order, be they blog posts, comments, pictures, bulletins, or tips. If, for example, you want to view only comments, just click on the appropriate tab to filter your notifications appropriately. We have filters for each of the different types of notifications.
Also new in this release are tip notifications. A big thank you to everyone who's given this new feature a try--it's been more popular than even we anticipated. Well, now you can see what restaurants, bars, and clubs your friends are posting tips about. Sorry we didn't have this done when we rolled out tips in the first place, but hey, there's only two of us to do work around here, so get used to it. ;p
Finally, the last nifty thing about the new notifications box is that it remembers where you were when you reload the page. One slightly annoying thing about the old notification system was that if, say, you viewed page 6 of your picture notifications, then clicked on it to view the pics, then clicked back, you'd be back on page 1. Well, the new notification box will remember that you were on page 6 of the pics tab and put you back there when you reload your home page...unless there's a new notification for you to see, in which case it'll put you back on page 1 of the "all" tab so you don't miss it.
Aside from that, we've rolled out a few bug fixes and performance improvements in the last couple of weeks.
And that is your Zoji update.
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.
whaddya think you're doing man?? doing research, prototyping, development, polishing, and release of a feature in one evening?? are you NUTS? you know what kind of expectations this is setting us up for with our customers?
this is getting out of control, i'm gonna hafta hire a project manager to slow this shit down.
(DOH!) :P
I've never imported an .ics file before, so how do you make the events show up was "Busy" in Outlook? I guess that's more of a silly M$ question rather than a Zoji one.
(Don't feel too bad about it, Kevin. Beer is on the way, although my turnaround may be a little longer than yours.)
- Export your calendar as you normally would.
- Save the zojiCal.ics file to, say, your desktop.
- Go to your Google Calendar, and click the Settings link in the upper right.
- Click on the Import Calendar tab.
- Select the zojiCal.ics file you saved
- Click Import
And that should do it.Results:
- Events show w/ time marked as busy (even the ones I said "Maybe" about... don't have any "No" responses in my calendar right now :-P).
- I like how the export on my personal master event list is smart enough to only export future events.
- Importing same ics file still duplicates entries.
- Outlook shows all events as being an hour long (when we know that a real Zoji event goes til at least 3am...)
Now I just need a smartphone for an excuse to be using this feature all the time :-P