First off, apologies if you were affected by our downtime earlier today.  Apparently, it was our regularly scheduled "Dan is out of town so let's throw some never before seen problem at Kevin and watch him flail" outage.  We're back, though I take no credit for it.  Dan still managed to fix it all the way from Hong Kong. :P

Anyway, I thought I'd mention the new feature we just rolled out, picture search.  For those of you who have been playing around with picture tagging since we deployed it a few days ago, this is one of those things that makes tagging even more useful.

You'll now see a couple of new links when you're viewing someone else's (say, Dan's) tagged pictures: "Search tagged pictures" and "Find pictures of Dan and me."  The latter (you guessed it) will show you all tagged pictures of you and Dan.  But that's not all!  You can add and remove people to the search list--so say you wanted to find all pictures of you, Dan, and Bob.  Just add Bob to the list, and voila!  You can include up to five people in the search.

(The "Search tagged pictures" link goes to the same page as the other link, but it starts off blank)

Anyway, hope you find it useful!

Last Friday we rolled out a major new feature, picture tagging!

If you've never seen this feature before, basically what it means is being able to link a person to a picture, and vice versa.  For example, you organize a party on Zoji and afterward post pictures from it to the event page.  You can now tag the people in the pictures--after you do that, the picture will have a link to the people's profiles, and from those people's profiles, you can see all the pictures they're tagged in.

If you've never seen this feature before, you might be scratching your head wondering what this all really means.  Well how about I just show you?

Check out this picture.  Now try moving the mouse around the picture.  Whoa, gnarly, you can see exactly who everybody in the picture is.  So those are the links from the picture to the people in it.

What about the link from the people to the picture?  You can click on my link in the picture to go to my profile, and in my pictures box, click "Pics of Kevin."  And there you'll see all the pictures I've been tagged in.  You can change the size of the pics to display 100 per page, and you can sort the pictures by event or by the person or group owner of the pic (for non-event pics).  Once all your pictures are tagged, you'll find it's a great way to find all those pics of you (or your friends) from events long past.

Wow, that's a pretty nifty feature, you might be thinking (we hope).  But how do I tag someone in a picture?  Pretty simple.  You just click on a person in the picture, and type in their name.  Zoji will give you a list of matching names from your friends list and the event invitation list (if it's an event picture).  Just choose one and voila.  Note that you can only tag pictures from events you've been invited to, friends' pictures, and group pictures for groups you're a member of.

What if you don't want a certain picture to appear in your tagged pics list?  No problem, just go to the picture, hover over your face to display the tag, and click the Remove link.  The taggee, the tagger (the person who created the tag), and the owner of the pic all have the option to remove a tag.


What else can you do with tagging?

Well as of this moment, not a whole lot more. :)  But coming soon are some nifty features:

• Picture tag search: say I wanted to find every picture of Dan and me--I'd simply go to Dan's tagged picture page, and click the "Find pics of Dan and you" link.  But that's not all; you'll even be able to search for more than two people in a picture.
• Tag alerts: You'll get an alert on your Zoji homepage (and optionally, your email) when you've been tagged.  You'll see all your new tagged pics, see who tagged them, and have the option to remove the tags.
• Friend tag notifications: You'll be notified when your friends are tagged in pictures.

Well, that's about it.  Questions?  Comments?  Suggestions for more tagging features?  Let 'em rip.

Heads up!


Zoji's going to be down tomorrow night (Saturday 8/11) from 11pm to about 3am!


Why, might you ask?  Cuz we've made it BIG TIME and so we hafta move the servers to a REAL DATACENTER!  OK maybe not big time just yet, but we're gettin' there, and this is a step in that direction...  Yep, you heard right, the servers are moving outta my garage to a new air-conditioned home with a big fat pipe right on the Internet backbone.  Real power redundancy, real generators, real fiber optic lines, gotta love it.


So apologies in advance for the inconvience, but with any luck you'll wake up Sunday morning and FEEL that Zoji is faster and more reliable.  My fingers are crossed!


Wow, tonight is the last time I'll go to bed listening to the faint hum of the servers... I'd better cherish this moment!  :P


-Dan

With today's release, we bring you an early version of what we hope will be a nifty new feature--tagging pictures as "favorites".  By "early version", I mean the feature is in a working state, but there is still a fair bit of work left to do on it.

Basically what favorites let you do is create a sort of scrapbook of your favorite pictures on Zoji.

Before, say there was a picture that was posted to one of your events.  You really liked the picture, and you wanted to have it in your personal picture set.  So you'd have to download the picture to your computer, then re-upload it to your personal Zoji pictures.

Now you can now simply tag the picture as a favorite, and it will appear in your pictures.  Notice the new "Kevin's Favorites" tab in my pictures.  It's a great way to pick and choose your favorite pics from all of your events past and put them in your personal collection.

A handy offshoot of this new features is that you now have the option to sort a set of pictures by the number of times a picture was favorited.  Might be a handy way of jumping to the most popular pics in, say, a large set of event pics.  Also new is the ability to sort by number of comments on a pic.

Like I said, this feature isn't finished, so there are some rough edges, and (gasp) maybe even a bug or two.  Eventually you'll be able to view a person's favorites grouped by person or event rather than just a free-floating bunch of pics as it is right now.  We'll probably also add some form of notification for when people add to their favorites (in such a way as to be non-annoying).

Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

Woohoo!  Our first batch of new z-vite skins is here, courtesy of our new graphic designer, Jacob Haskins!  Check them out below, and have a look at our newbie lunch z-vite for a closer look at one of the slick new designs.

If you're creating a new z-vite you can find the new designs in the "Designer Skins" tab of the skin picker page (click "Skin this page" to get to that page).

Anyway, hope you like 'em.  There's more on the way!