A little over a week ago I was browsing through one of my new favorite sites for inspiration Consumating.com and had a great idea for Pligg, “let’s use graphs”! Oh sure, when you first think of a graph you immediately compare it to your TI-83 calculator and high school Algebra class. But graphs are some really great ways to display data in a very informative and easy to see say. Many web site statistic scripts like Google’s Analytics program (Free) and Mint ($30/domain) use graphs to display large amounts of data in easy to interpret ways. The reason they do this is because graphs are excellent ways to determine purportions and people tend to like pictures better than words. Pictures help describe the overall idea of something very fast, rather than reading and interpreting numbers from text.
Back on to my original mention of Consumating… I won’t go into detail about Consumating.com because the site deserves an entire blog post about what it is and all of the great ideas that they have come up with. The basic idea of the site is for social networking nerds seeking other nerds to date. The site however isn’t purely driven by the typical dating site profiles and match-making software. It rather lets users answer from a list of whacky questions (one new question each week) and other users rate that users with a thumb up or down depending on their answers. The answers are also able to get a thumbs up or down, for every thumbs up you get 2 points and for each thumbs down you lose 1 point. This then ranks you on the site and the basic goal is to become the most popular person. My favorite feature is their Popularity tab, which shows you how popular you are and graphs out how people have been voting for you recently.
Wouldn’t it be great if Pligg used graphs to display data for both stories and profiles? Imagine being able to see the voting pattern for an article to help detect spammed articles, or to watch the popularity of an article rise and fall. Or imagine being able to show how popular or active a user is on their profile. By putting these types of graphs onto user profiles it gives them an incentive to use the site more. AshDigg pointed me to an article about CSS for Bars and Graphs when I mentioned this idea to him a week ago. The tough part is figuring out what data we need to start building into Pligg so that later down the road we can extract the data for things like this.
April 11, 2006 | Comments Off
I’m sure that many of you reading this already have a Gmail account with Google and perhaps a few of you have tried out Google’s IG page. Basically Google IG is a personalized homepage for Google that lets you organize and add content in any fashion that you would want. Digg recently released a Google IG module to add Digg to Google’s IG page. Unfortunately, you can’t vote directly from the Google page, the vote button will take you to the individual article to then cast your vote. The script also suffers from vote lag and the numbers will not accurately reflect new votes. You can set the refresh rate to no refresh, 1 minute, 5 minutes or 10 minutes to keep the stories up to date. You can also select whether you want to display the top stories or your friend’s dugg stories. Let’s face it, you are pretty much putting a customizable RSS feed for Digg on Google IG with this module. It’s nothing to hoot and holler about, but it’s a nice feature for those who use both Digg and Google IG frequently.
I was about to sit down and start working on some new flash video tutorials to help users learn how to use Pligg, but I realized that I don’t know what people want to learn about first. If anyone has a specific question that they would like answered in a flash tutorial please leave a comment and I will try to respond to it if it’s a worthy topic. Hurry up and post comments everyone so I can start working!
I woke up this morning with a weird feeling that Pligg was nearing it’s hundredth day of existence, so I checked how my domain registration date and found out that Pligg.com is 101 days old. In the 3+ months that Pligg has been around we have made some major improvements to the original Meneame code by adding all sorts of great features and improving the user interface. Pligg has also caused quite a bit of controversy and at the same time a lot of excitement in the first three months. Pligg’s popularity has been growing at an extremely fast rate, so fast that we have no passed my personal favorite CMS Geeklog on alexa.com’s ranking system. What surprises me the most about Pligg’s popularity is how much it has grown without much effort. A large percentage of Pligg.com visitors come from other existing Pligg sites, so I thank those who keep Pligg.com links somewhere on their sites after installation and customization.
100 days down, but now what? Some of the next big projects for Pligg will be (in no particular order) a spell checker, a new (better looking) administrator panel, and social networking tools (message users, friend lists, friend RSS, groups). We will probably throw in all sorts of other small features and bug fixes along the way, but there’s a general idea of what we will be working on next. As always I’ll post updates on the blog to let you know what’s currently in production and I’ll announce the new features here first. By the way, the Pligg Blog has a new look to it if you haven’t noticed. Let me know how you feel about it or if you think it’s overkill. That’s all for now, here’s looking forward to the next 100 days.
I saw that Meneame has a Frappr map to display all of the different locations for Meneame.net users. This gave me the idea to create a Pligg map to show who has installed Pligg across the globe. Do me a favor and take a moment to push a pin into our Frappr Map to show us where you’re from if you are using Pligg.
Yesterday AshDigg released Pligg Beta 7, a bit ahead of schedule (we were aiming for March 19). The version released is a bit trimmed down from what we were aiming for, but it was decided that it would be best to fix a lot of the bugs that came up with Beta 6′s introduction of Smarty and to get a head start on templating. Not all functions are working just yet, for example sending other users messages, but they will be finished by the next release. The admin panel hasn’t been touched in a while, so that won’t be out until the next big release. The next release will also include the Mollio template as promised. I have been spending most of my spare time working with Mollio and it has been fitting Pligg like a glove. I’ll have more on that later. Today will be a bug day for bug reports and glitch fixes. Make sure that before you ask a question in the forum you search for an answer first. It frustrates us when we see several of the same questions asked over and over again.
March 15, 2006 | Comments Off
Two posts back I talked about 3bubbles, a very useful third party chat script that makes it easy for anyone to create their own chats for individual posts. Today I will talk about Gabbly, a similar program with some fresh ideas. 3bubbles and Gabbly differ enough so that they really aren’t competing for the same spot, but Gabbly seems to really have the best features available for a third party chat script. One of the best things that Gabbly has going for it is that it doesn’t require a user to register to benefit from the script. You simply enter your own url after gabbly.com/ (ex. http://gabbly.com/pligg.com) and it will take you to your own domain, mirrored through their site, and overlay their chat program on top of your web page. Pretty snappy right? Well, this is only useful if you are willing to redirect your users to the gabbly.com/yourdomain.com page. Lucky for us, Gabbly offers us the ability to embed their chat rooms into our sites. Sure, this doesn’t allow for the same functionality as the popup version, but I’m not going to complain. The only downside that I have noticed so far besides not being able to run a popup version using your own url is the slow load times. When you load a page with the embeded code it takes several seconds for the chat room to show and load. The embeded chat also keeps you stuck on one page because you can’t navigate away without losing the chat room. The popup version sticks in your browser window until it’s closed or a new url is entered into the address bar.
On the plus side, Gabbly is well organized program. What I mean by this is that the user names are color coded well to help distinguish users, the ability to dock the popup on the top, bottom or right side of your browser is a plus and last but not least conversations are logged in a RSS feed for every chat room created. This is probably one of the best features, especially since RSS is starting to become a more commonly used tool. It would be great if down the road they allowed users to register or associate web links with their user name, but as is Gabbly still tops my list as my favorite third party chat script. Unfortunately I don’t see it as being the right kind of script for Pligg in it’s current form, but perhaps down the road with a couple more features I will be able to reconsider that.
Late last night I began work on what will be the fourth Pligg template to be created. The third template, created specifically for Beta 7, is well coded but doesn’t have that certain “Web 2.0″ flare that captivates visitors. This fourth template will be one of two offered with the Beta 7 release. The other template will have 2 variations: a 2 column version and a 3 column version. The fourth template will be based on the Mollio.org type D template, which should please just about everyone out there begging for a layout more similar to Digg’s two column layout. Not only will it be two column, but it will have a navbar up top to make page navigation easier and it will reduce the amount of links put in the sidebar. I only played with this new template for about half an hour last night, but it seems that designing Pligg templates gets easier with time. It also helps to start with a well written template that seems to perfectly suit Pligg.
There’s still no word on when Beta 7 will release. I have hinted that it will be out by the end of the month, but we keep adding more and more features. This is actually a good thing that we are pushing back the next release because we are trying to get Pligg in a very stable and feature-filled release. The Pligg Developer Group will get an advanced copy of the files before the official release to help troubleshoot, translate and bugfix. We are still in need of some volunteers for several areas of design, so if you have the skills to pay the bills please contact us.
