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Optimization of commenting system

In an effort to speed up Mo'time, so that the pages load faster, we are trying to lighten the strain on our servers. Some of the heaviest lifting comes from inquiries to the database whenever you click on a "permalink" to a post or view the comments -- both in the popup version and the "inline" version of same-page comments.

Later today, the following changes will be made, with the sincere hope that it will speed up the blogging and commenting experience...

The inline comments will be most effected. Instead of seeing the text area for comment writing right underneath the comment list, there will be another button to click ("Leave a comment") and the comment editor will appear in a little popup window. Write your comment and click the publish button.

Your comment will be added immediately to the blog. Naturally, anybody visiting the blog after you click publish, will see it immediately. You will be able to see it the next time you refresh that page. 

Comments in popup will be changed even more minimally. When you leave a comment, you'll see it immediately in popup. To see the rest of the comment thread once again, just click the link to do so.

We are hoping that these changes will result in a much snappier blogging performance.

posted by: howard at 15:12 | link | comments (1) |
news, technical, beta, features, advisory

New features comin' down the road

Over the next week(s) or so, we'll be introducing a host of new features and some changes to the interface. The interface changes always are a bit disorienting at the start, but I think most of you will agree that after a short time, it starts to feel like home again.

The most visible change will be the reorganization of your home page, integrating a better snapshot view of the latest posts, who's online, latest pictures, videos and sound files right on the home page. The blog and account control panel will be reduced in size and will contain the most frequently used commands.

The editor part of the interface will remain very similar, with the addition of some new buttons and commands giving you more control over your blogs, including the advertising interface that we discussed earlier. We listened to your comments and are trying to design a system in which all of you can have all the "Pro" features, covering our extra costs with advertising. And those who really don't want the advertising will have two options – a low-cost no frills account or a Pro account at the current pricing level with all the do-dads.

The feature list looks something like this:

(1) Optional "moderation" of posts and comments:  your comments (and group blog posts) will not be posted until you actually OK them for publishing. This is especially useful for school and business-related blogs.

(2) "Open" group blogs that allow any Mo'time members to voluntarily join as contributors without having to be specifically invited by the owner. I'll use this for the help and template blogs, for instance.

(3) Advanced post controls, allowing you to save drafts, to set posts to automatically be published at a time and date in the future, to allow or disallow comments on a post-by-post basis and batch editing of posts and comments from a single page in the editor section of your blog.

(4) Static pages associated with your blog on which you can place more permanent content, such as CV's, biographies, artwork or anything else that you want. In other words, you'll have a complete personal website with both static and dynamic content.

(5) Customized advertising interface that will allow you to choose where to place the ads on your blog, and whether to display text ads, graphics ads or a mixture of both. We will even let you choose the color scheme of the text ads.

(6) Revised template library with a few new ones and much needed updates and corrections to our old ones.

Just to keep ourselves busy, we will be restructuring the server farm to handle the increased loads that we expect. As a result of all this work, there will be a few scheduled downtimes and probably some weird glitches and periods of UNscheduled downtime as well. We ask you to bear with us and trust that we will do everything we can to make it as painless as possible.

I want to thank you all for your contributions in keeping Mo'time active, welcoming new people and in giving me your comments about what things you like and don't like about the platform.

posted by: howard at 00:21 | link | comments (3) |
updates, features, scheduled down time, advisory