We just rolled out a redesign of group pages, something similar to what we did to your Zoji homepage a couple of months ago.  Basically we rearranged what column various boxes appeared in, and gave a new look to the side column.  We figured it would make more sense to move all of the group content (e.g. events, photos, blog, etc.) to the larger main column, and all group information (e.g. description, members, admins, etc.) to the gray side column.  With our increasing focus on Zoji as a tool to organize events for your groups, the group events box now takes center stage.

One side effect of all these major layout changes is that all of our designer group skins are...er, well kind of broken.  So for the time being, designer group skins are disabled, until Josiah can finish updating them for the changes (have fun with that, Josiah! ;P).  Once that's done, we'll turn them back on, but for now, if you were using a designer skin for your group, it will appear unskinned.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Anyway, hope you like the new layout.  Let us know if you have any feedback!

Guten Morgen!

Up until now, we've only supported the Latin character set, which supports English and most European languages.  The vast majority of Zoji users have been writing in English, so this has worked out just fine.

However, we've noticed an increasing number of non-English and bilingual speakers using the site, which is great!  Except for the fact that if you're, say, Chinese, and enter some characters, you'd quickly find out that Zoji garbled them all up, displaying a bunch of question marks. Not exactly the most friendly user experience, in fact, outright annoying!  Especially considering there are technologies and standards for handling this ... so there's really no excuse for us not to get on the ball.

So for the past couple weeks, we've wrestled with getting international character set support working. The technical name for this all-encompassing character set is Unicode, which you may have heard of.  To get Unicode to work, it took some figuring out on our part:  How to convert existing stuff in the database without garbling anything, how to transmit information through all the layers of software we run, and how to ensure that data YOU enter gets stored properly on our end.

After some pretty drastic changes, including upgrading our web server, we're happy to say that we finally got things to work.  For most of you, this probably won't make one iota of difference.  But for those of you who have been dying to write in other languages, things should be way smoother now.

Vielen Dank,
   沈华仁
a.k.a. ShennyD

P.S. If you're running Windows and have trouble seeing Asian language characters, you may have to go to start->settings->control panel->regional and lanugage options ->languages tab -> install files for east asian languages.

It's been a while since we've blogged, so I'd figure I'd shoot one out to satisfy the throngs of people who have been clamoring for our next post. :P

You might have noticed a new box on your homepage titled "Favorite Groups".  Assuming you're in a few groups, choose the ones that you're most interested in.  They'll appear in on your homepage, and you can use it as a kind of bookmark/shortcut to your favorite groups.  The other neat thing is that whenever the group is updated, e.g. a new member joins, someone posts to the group blog, sends a message to the group, etc., you'll see it in your Favorite Groups box.  We think it'll help you keep up with your groups better than just plain "What's New" notifications, which often scroll off the screen if you haven't logged on in a few days (shame on you!).


Let's see, what other interesting things have we rolled out since our last post...

• Completely redesigned the front page (props to Josiah)
  
• Reorganized the account settings page to make it more user friendly (and prettier)
• Added a new category of "What's New" notifications: Friend Updates.  These currently include notifications for when your friends add friends and join groups.  The new friend notification replaces the "New Friends in Your Network", which we thought was kind of a waste of space for something that didn't change much.  If you're the secretive, paranoid type, feel free to turn these notifications off in your account settings, and your friends will be none the wiser when you join a group or make a new friend.
• Groups are now included in the Search box autocomplete list, so you can use it as a quick way to get to your commonly used groups (but come now, why haven't you made it a favorite group?)

Enjoy!

Tonight's roll-out includes the much-anticipated feature of Custom Status Messages, a feature that has been heavily-discussed in the Zoji Suggestion Box .  Thanks to Kev's good work, you now have the ability to conveniently jot down a short note describing what's on your mind, your current mood, pretty much whatever you want (how much you love Zoji? :)    Your short note can be seen by all your online friends.

You'll also notice an overall redesign of the Now Online box -- with the additional UI elements of custom status messages, it made sense to condense certain links into icons, and move other elements around.  Hopefully you'll get used to the new arrangement quickly.

Now that you're able to vent your mood swings online, I fully expect all of you to be noticeably more pleasant in your daily person-to-person interactions :P

-Dan

If you go to Profile -> Your Friends, you'll notice we rolled out an updated view of your friends list that's quite different from what it used to be.

The original idea for this came from one of our own Zoji users a few months ago (thanks Nikita!)  His complaint with other social networking sites was that there was no compact way to display all the pertinent information about your friends on one screen, and also no easy way to export the information.  And he's right, for some reason, having an efficient address-book view of your friends is just not in fashion, from everything we've seen.  Well, it made sense to us, so we did it, and hopefully it makes sense to you as well.

But what about friends that you barely know?  In some cases you don't want them to know your phone number, for example.  That brings us to our next feature.

Friendship Classification

You can now classify your friends into 3 categories: acquaintance, friend, and close friend.  This is specified at friending time, but can also be changed on Your Friends page.  Acquaintances will only be able to see your e-mail address, friends and close friends can see your phone number and address (if you entered them in Edit Profile).  Don't worry, your classifications are personal and your friends will not be alerted to them.  For those of you with a lot of friends that are acquaintances, stay tuned for more features related to this.  We intend to make it easier to invite friends and close friends to events, so you're not forced to sift through a bunch of acquaintances.

As always, any and all feedback is appreciated to steer these new features in the right direction.

-Dan