Tuesday, June 29, 2010

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.