It's been an eventful week here at Zoji HQ.
It actually starts last Friday, where, thanks to Dan's efforts, we got our first mention in a widely read, mainstream tech blog, Mashable. That was pretty cool, we got a few hundred hits out of it. I figured that'd be about it when I started to see visitors trickling in from other blogs and websites that I'd never seen before. Checked them out, and was surprised to find more and more blogs and website indexes were writing about Zoji! It was kind of surreal to see our logo plastered on all these sites we'd never contacted.
All in all, I've counted 12 other sites so far that have featured Zoji in a post or an index entry. Fascinating how exposure begets exposure, a side effect I hadn't considered. Interestingly enough, a large number of our hits came from a Belgian site, more than any other site aside from Mashable, I think. I guess those Belgians are a wired bunch!
Fast forward to Monday, where we got written up by John Cook, who covers startups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That blog post gave us a bit more exposure in the Seattle area, and we were contacted by more people after the PI post than the Mashable one. Though I would guess that Mashable's readership is larger than the PI's venture capital blog, I think people pay more attention to a startup when it's local. It seems less faceless, less anonymous, I suppose.
That takes us to yesterday, where we had a mini-version of last winter's windstorm. Dan lost power at Zoji HQ as did I at home in Kirkland. Dan, in an ill-advised burst of hubris, said to me, "Good thing we moved the servers from the garage to a real datacenter with triple power redundancy. For once we don't have to worry about outages." Bad move, Dan. Naturally, the words were barely out of his mouth when Dan discovered that Zoji had gone down.
I won't go into the complicated details of why the datacenter lost power, which I might add, happened to be the first outage in that area in seven years according to an electrician Dan spoke to. Regardless, Dan spent the rest of the day working feverishly to get Zoji back up and running. Just our luck for this to happen right after getting our first press coverage. Anyway, that's about all of the interesting news I had for you.
Now for the less interesting stuff. :)
We just rolled out a slight change in behavior to your homepage. In an effort to reduce homepage clutter and bring the "Your Events" box higher up on the page, we changed the behavior of the "Recent Messages" box.
Whereas before, it would simply display the last five messages in your inbox, now it only displays the last five unread messages. If you've read all your messages, the box will display no messages. To view your old read messages, simply view your inbox. In that regard, the homepage functions less as a mini-inbox now, and more like a "new stuff" notification center.
"Whoa, now I have a ton of old unread messages on my homepage!" you might say. Fear not, you can easily mark all of your unread mail as read, simply by going to your Inbox and clicking "Mark all messages as read."
Among other recent changes:
It actually starts last Friday, where, thanks to Dan's efforts, we got our first mention in a widely read, mainstream tech blog, Mashable. That was pretty cool, we got a few hundred hits out of it. I figured that'd be about it when I started to see visitors trickling in from other blogs and websites that I'd never seen before. Checked them out, and was surprised to find more and more blogs and website indexes were writing about Zoji! It was kind of surreal to see our logo plastered on all these sites we'd never contacted.
All in all, I've counted 12 other sites so far that have featured Zoji in a post or an index entry. Fascinating how exposure begets exposure, a side effect I hadn't considered. Interestingly enough, a large number of our hits came from a Belgian site, more than any other site aside from Mashable, I think. I guess those Belgians are a wired bunch!
Fast forward to Monday, where we got written up by John Cook, who covers startups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That blog post gave us a bit more exposure in the Seattle area, and we were contacted by more people after the PI post than the Mashable one. Though I would guess that Mashable's readership is larger than the PI's venture capital blog, I think people pay more attention to a startup when it's local. It seems less faceless, less anonymous, I suppose.
That takes us to yesterday, where we had a mini-version of last winter's windstorm. Dan lost power at Zoji HQ as did I at home in Kirkland. Dan, in an ill-advised burst of hubris, said to me, "Good thing we moved the servers from the garage to a real datacenter with triple power redundancy. For once we don't have to worry about outages." Bad move, Dan. Naturally, the words were barely out of his mouth when Dan discovered that Zoji had gone down.
I won't go into the complicated details of why the datacenter lost power, which I might add, happened to be the first outage in that area in seven years according to an electrician Dan spoke to. Regardless, Dan spent the rest of the day working feverishly to get Zoji back up and running. Just our luck for this to happen right after getting our first press coverage. Anyway, that's about all of the interesting news I had for you.
Now for the less interesting stuff. :)
We just rolled out a slight change in behavior to your homepage. In an effort to reduce homepage clutter and bring the "Your Events" box higher up on the page, we changed the behavior of the "Recent Messages" box.
Whereas before, it would simply display the last five messages in your inbox, now it only displays the last five unread messages. If you've read all your messages, the box will display no messages. To view your old read messages, simply view your inbox. In that regard, the homepage functions less as a mini-inbox now, and more like a "new stuff" notification center.
"Whoa, now I have a ton of old unread messages on my homepage!" you might say. Fear not, you can easily mark all of your unread mail as read, simply by going to your Inbox and clicking "Mark all messages as read."
Among other recent changes:
- Renamed the "My Zoji" menu to "My Stuff" and gave it a more prominent icon. Maybe people will actually notice it now. :)
- Your event drafts now appear on your homepage so they're easier to find.
- Improvements to the picture picker:
- You can now click on your profile picture or an event picture in order to choose a new one. We think this is more discoverable than the previous way of having to view the picture and click "Make this your profile picture".
- You can now upload pictures directly into the picture picker. This is useful for the times that you're writing a blog post, and want to upload a pic to use in your post. Now you just bring up the picture picker, upload the pic, choose the pic you just uploaded, and voila.
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Over the past few weeks some of you may have noticed delays in receiving Zoji e-mail here and there... most of the time mail would arrive promptly, but at other times a Zvite would strangely arrive hours later.
At first we weren't sure if it was our problem or, say, Hotmail's, since the Internet can be a finicky thing to debug. A lot of times you throw something out there and feel like you're not quite sure what's going to happen. Well then we started noticing the delays more frequently, which made it more likely that we were the ones holding the smoking gun.
You'll be happy to know that we think we finally licked the problem -- it turned out to be a slight misconfiguration in the mail server which arose when we moved to using Ubuntu Linux. We've been keeping an eye on this and things look good so far. But we still need your help, if you still encounter any delays, give us a shout.
Please give a warm welcome to Josiah, who started doing work for us last week on Zvite skins. Josiah previously worked at Nintendo in game testing, which was fine and all, but he felt he needed to use more of his creative skills with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and CSS. Stay tuned for some really cool skins, Josiah-style!
In other news, you're going to see increased action on this blog, not only with feature releases and bug fixes, but with other Zoji-related happenings that are relevant (press, publicity, challenges and concerns for the company, new faces, etc).
Happy Friday everyone!
-ShennyD
At first we weren't sure if it was our problem or, say, Hotmail's, since the Internet can be a finicky thing to debug. A lot of times you throw something out there and feel like you're not quite sure what's going to happen. Well then we started noticing the delays more frequently, which made it more likely that we were the ones holding the smoking gun.
You'll be happy to know that we think we finally licked the problem -- it turned out to be a slight misconfiguration in the mail server which arose when we moved to using Ubuntu Linux. We've been keeping an eye on this and things look good so far. But we still need your help, if you still encounter any delays, give us a shout.
Please give a warm welcome to Josiah, who started doing work for us last week on Zvite skins. Josiah previously worked at Nintendo in game testing, which was fine and all, but he felt he needed to use more of his creative skills with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and CSS. Stay tuned for some really cool skins, Josiah-style!
In other news, you're going to see increased action on this blog, not only with feature releases and bug fixes, but with other Zoji-related happenings that are relevant (press, publicity, challenges and concerns for the company, new faces, etc).
Happy Friday everyone!
-ShennyD
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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!
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!
Visibility: Anyone
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:
Well, that's about it. Questions? Comments? Suggestions for more tagging features? Let 'em rip.
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.
Visibility: Anyone
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
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
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congrats on getting all of that crazy publicity! :) thanks for the shout out about updates too. i logged onto zoji this morning and thought.. oh man! where are my zoji mails?
Aside from that, congrats on the publicity.