Friday, March 27, 2009

This Weeks Update - Site Optimization

There is little to report on this week's update. As usual, we have fixed numerous issues within the site and made various minor design changes. The primary update we accomplished is optimization of various modules.

We have decided to optimize the site as a prelude to our new server. Next week we will be setting up Mizozo on a new server, so we decided that we should optimize the code before hand in order to get the maximum performance out of the site.

We have begun optimization, and have drastically improved site performance, but there is still much to do. We plan to implement a cache structure, and finalize some of our more common pages next week. With the new server move, optimization may take more time than we had expected.

To give a preview of our next major task at hand, we plan to rewrite our WYSIWYG editor for our Publishers. Many of our Publishers have complained about our weak editor, and we have no excuse. After careful deliberation, we have decided to completely rewrite it using TinyMCE. We hope you like it.

Friday, March 20, 2009

The New Publisher Profile Page

Last night we released the new Publisher Profile Page. It is our goal to create the Publisher Profile page to be similar to a Blog. This will allow people to advertise their Profiles as they would their blog, giving visitors a recognizable interface. While the current version of the Publisher Profile isn't up to par with blogging software like Blogger or Wordpress, while this isn't our goal, it is also important to realize that this is our first version of the Publisher Profile page and there is still much in store for it. This will be the base platform for our social networking module, so its presentation needs to be familiar to users while at the same time functional enough to allow for easy social networking.

As usual, we have also done many little changes throughout the site like adjusting the Home Page images, comment submission, algorithm adjustments and various other details. There is one thing, however, that I am personally happy with, our new Admin Interface. We have been working with a very bland administration panel from day one, and I am happy to see our admin panel go through a quick design change.

This upcoming week will be spent optimizing the code to ready us for our new server. We plan to move to a faster server by the 1st of April, so we need to make sure that our code is running at optimal speeds to properly test the new server. This upcoming week may be very bug laden, so please bear with us.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

RSS and Signup Now Available

While we are trying to work quickly to provide as many features as possible for our Beta Publishers, this week's progress has been more back end and site details.  Two larger features that we are happy to provide is our RSS feed and our Signup Feature.  

The RSS link is very straight forward, http://www.mizozo.com/rss.php.  Please take the time to add it to your RSS feeder and send it to all your friends.

We have also set up a signup queue for people that would like to Publish articles on Mizozo.  Since we are still in Beta, we would like to control who has access to Mizozo's publish feature.  However, we will lift this restriction once we are confident that it is in perfect working condition.  If you would like to Publish on Mizozo, please signup and join the queue.  We will be selecting a few new publishers every week.  If you have a blog, or have published work elsewhere, please provide links so that we can review them.  Those with good work will be placed at the top of the queue.

As a smaller feature, we have enabled Publishers to modify the Title and Tags of Response Articles.  Admitingly, this was poor judgement on our part in the beginning.

Keep checking back for all the latest Mizozo updates.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Our New Home Page is Ready!

We are very excited to announce that the New Home Page is ready. We have been working hard on coming up with a design that would properly display our stories in an easy to understand fashion. We have decided on this design, which should push us through the Beta stage completely. We may make some adjustments to it, depending on user demands, but we are very happy with it. Of course, modules will be added to it over time.

We have also updated our Logo and Slogan, which have been long present on this blog. Our new Slogan for the site "Your News, Argued by You!" This, we feel, reflects the essence of the sites goals. Seeing as how our mission is to provide the world a medium to not only report the news, but to find the truth behind the story through argument, we are also very happy with our Slogan. If you feel differently, we are always happy to hear what our users have to say.

As always, we have also fixed a few known issues, most important of which was our Main Menu update from last week. Our Main Menu is now fully operational with a nice new design. Likewise, when testing the Algorithm engine on our test machine it worked one way, but in a live environment it worked completely differently. We had to tweak numerous algorithm variables in order to ensure that stories are properly displayed. If you feel our algorithms push your stories asside, or you have some ideas on how to improve them, we are always happy to hear your thoughts.

This is an exciting time at Mizozo. With countless updates coming, we are very excited to be able to provide this service to the public. Good luck, and Happy Mizozoing!