We are working hard to improve Mizozo

While we have not been updating our blog too often, we have regardless of fact been improving Mizozo over the past few months. Our regulars have likely long ago noticed that our Advertising has been removed, and that we added Social Networking widgets to our Story Pages. This is merely the tip of the iceberg.

We have also updated our WYSIWYG editor to work better on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. This is something that we have been considering for a while now, but haven't had the time or resources to handle it. While we are not yet offering WYSIWYG support for these devices yet, primarily because the devices don't support WYSIWYG editors in a browser as of yet, we have made it easier to use these devices on Mizozo.

Another request that users often made was to keep them up to date with comments posted to stories that they have already commented on. We were originally hesitant, not wanting email servers to label Mizozo as spam, but enough requests were made for this feature that we decided to try it. So, if you want to remain up to date on comments posted after yours, simply check the box "Notify me" and emails will be sent after every subsequent comment posted.

We have also updated our handling of Images and our Gallery. Many of you have complained that we do not support high definition images on the site. Since this was repeated often, we decided to take action. Our story pages now support larger images, and when clicking on any of the images we will display it in its full glory as an AJAX popup. We hope that this pleases our users, it definitely pleases us at the moment.

These past few weeks have been spent on optimizing our site more. With traffic almost tripling in the past 6 months, we are noticing that our servers are experiencing severe strain. Some of you may have even noticed our server went down a few times when traffic suddenly spiked. We are working hard to fix this, but there is still much that needs to be done. Over the next few weeks we hope to have this problem fixed.

Of course, much has also been done on the back end as well. We now have in place spamming filters on our comments and stories, helping to automate the removal of spam as well as prevent individuals from further spamming Mizozo.

Please keep the suggestions coming, and please be patient with us. We are trying our best to provide a solid foundation for our big product coming in the not so distant future. Expect more social networking features, a faster page load and better publishing capabilities soon.

Site Optimization and Memcache Complete

Mizozo has been growing steady for the last year, and now with 3000 articles in our database a little site optimization was required to keep our servers from crashing. Our latest attempt at optimization trimmed down our database, improved some of our functions responsible for database management, and most importantly we implemented Memcache to keep an even greater strain off our processor in general.

We are very happy with Mizozo's progress and are looking forward to more and more members joining the Mizozo community to bring the latest news stories to the world. Several bloggers have realized that Mizozo is also a great SEO tool for their site and a great way to drive additional traffic to their site. While this wasn't our initial intention, we are glad to see that the internet community is teaching us numerous other applications for Mizozo.

It is also unfortunate that our Beta product is dragging for so long. We had hoped to get it to full production long ago. Our hopes is to complete development well before years end and bring a sleeker, more social Mizozo to the world. Stay tuned, and thanks for making Mizozo what it is today.

The Latest Enhancement are Complete

We at Mizozo are constantly striving to provide the most user friendly experience to our visitors and users. While we are still in the Beta phase, we are working hard to get all the little bells and whistles working.

We have just completed a small development effort geared at providing users more access to more content. For example, on the home page we have added 2 videos so that visitors will have direct access to our most popular videos. We have also aggressively pursued our SEO tactics, hoping to drastically increase our traffic.

Now that we have opened registration, our goal is to involve more and more people in the Mizozo Revolution. We want to see people commenting more, posting more stories and creating more Mizozos.

Unfortunately, we have decided to likewise place advertising on the site to help cushion some of the expenses involved in developing an application of this magnitude. We have tried to keep the advertising unobtrusive, but if people feel that it is ruining the aesthetic quality of the site, we will work hard at repositioning or possibly removing the advertisements from that particular location.

We have recently setup Mizozo Labs, currently hosted on mizozo.net. This is not to be used for publishing content, but for those that are curious what we are working on next, we invite you to check out the Labs and provide suggestions for improvement.

We hope you like what you see at Mizozo. Lets keep the articles coming, the comments flowing, and the arguments heated. Without you, Mizozo is a meaningless effort.

Registration Now Open

After a short pause in development, we have started once more in enhancing Mizozo. We have done a small number of minor enhancements around the site such as the way our Photo of the Day works, Quote of the Day, and have done some minor tweaks throughout.

Two things that are immediately apparent, however, i the fact that Registration has now been opened to the public, and we have added a Share feature on all of our story pages. So, invite your friends and contribute to the next generation news source.

We are also working hard on SEO, so we are looking forward to many more visitors soon. There are many more enhancements coming in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Join the revolution ... Mizozo!