Archive for the ‘Sites’ Category
New Pligg.com Advertiser: Plant Change
Thursday, April 5th, 2007I would like to take a moment to thank our newest advertiser for joining the Pligg.com advertiser group. Plant Change is based out of Australia, but it will definitely gather a global audience considering it’s popular niche and great custom design. This years environmental issues have been a hot topic in the media, thanks a lot to Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth that helped spread awareness of global warming. Ever since hybrid, ethanol and carbon reduction have become common words used by advertisers to help sell products. If you enjoy Plant Change, be sure to also check out another environmental Pligg site Hugg.
“Plant Change allows all people interested in the Australian Environmental debate, to submit articles that are interesting or significance, this could be a news article, a blog post, an official report or even a video.”
PlantChange.com
Itzle Beta 2
Sunday, May 21st, 2006I’m a huge fan of online social networking applications like 3bubbles (blog post) and Gabbly (blog post), and today I registered for a beta account with Itzle, a new app that provides much more than just a chat room. Itzle provides a virtual identity for chatting, including the ability to create your own custom character to represent you online. Right now you can only alter the characters hair, skin, pant, shirt and shoe colors and you’re stuck with it being a male. Besides having your own personalized character on screen for each page you also keep a profile and friends list. The profile can list lots of great data like your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, your web page, your blog, your bookmarks and a lot of other options. The best profile field has to be the Flickr support that will display your latest thumbnails from flickr in your profile. The presentation for Itzle is slick and innovative. Before I get into the details let me explain how Itzle works.
To use Itzle you must be using Firefox and register an account from their site. Currently they are in an early beta stage and are only have 653 spots left. Second, you use the Itzle bookmarklet and place it on your toolbar for easy access. When you’re visiting a page that you want to chat on click on the bookmarklet and it will ask for your login details through an Ajaxy transparent popup. After you log in it will redirect to the Itzle link for the page you are on. For example, pligg.com’s would be http://www.itzle.com/http://www.pligg.com/. This page will have the usual pligg.com page in the background and at the bottom an Itzle toolbar for chatting and managing settings. On the top part of the page with the web page appears any characters currently visiting that site. You will see your own character also on top of the page and you can direct him to stand on other parts of the page by left clicking anywhere on the page (besides where the links are of course).
From here on out are all of the innovative ideas that Itzle came up with. Let’s say that your on a big time website (lets say Digg.com for example) and there are 80 other characters talking. The page could become cluttered with chatters pretty fast for lots of the larger sites so Itzle came up with the bright idea of letting users create channels for sites. This way you could split up a site like Digg into sub-topics rather than one large general lobby room. You could have 16 channels, one for each of Digg’s categories, and never have to worry about the rooms becoming cluttered with people. You can also create private, invite-only channels where you can invite just your friends to talk. The third tab in the Itzle panel is for recommending sites. If you are on a website that you would like to recommend to all of your friends click “recommend this url” and it will recommend the current url to all of your friends.
Making friends with Itzle is pretty simple, when you find someone you like talking to just left-click on their character and “befriend” them. The friendship must be mutual though, so don’t expect to befriend the entire Itzle community. You can also view user’s profiles from this left click drop-down menu that appears when you click on characters. Your friends list is kept on one of the tabs on your Itzle panel and it divides your online friends from your offline friends. You will also see a link to “add a friend” from this panel tab and when you click on it it asks for a user name. If the user is currently offline he will be presented with a message the next time he logs in asking if he wants to be your friend.
Need a Developer? Try oDesk
Sunday, May 7th, 2006oDesk.com provides a really easy way to hire and manage developers online. The idea is pretty brilliant because it really streamlines the process for finding and hiring developers. The site pre-screens applications before they are able to be hired out from the site, helping guaruntee that you don’t get stuck with a total noob. oDesk also keeps a resume online, called Assignment History, that shows the developers previous assignments on oDesk, their skills, quick facts, education and other details.
After you’ve hired your workgroup you can manage your team through the “My Team” page. From here you can manage each developer and take a look at their work diaries. The work diary keeps tabs on your developers work habbits and displays useful information such as screenshots of their desktop every 10 minutes along with webcam screenshots when available and most importantly how many clicks and keystrokes have been made every 10 minutes. This makes sure that your team remains on task and helps you gauge how productive they are. When it comes time to pay for your developers, oDesk bills you once a week and charges your credit card on file for the hours worked by your team. Nothing could be easier.
I suggest that anyone interested should check out this flash tour to learn more about oDesk. Here are some hourly rate examples to give you an idea as to how much developers might cost you.
Skill Average Hourly Rate No. of Providers .NET Developer $14.95 431 ASP $15.59 349 Access $16.72 335 C/C++ Developer $15.20 374 Delphi $12.99 224 HTML/DHTML/J… $14.90 878 Handheld $15.20 143 Java Developer $16.64 305 MS-SQL $15.03 514 Oracle Datab… $16.47 312 PHP Developer $14.71 375 Perl $16.40 198 QA $17.33 84 Tech Writer $20.35 87 Visual Basic $17.19 257 Web Designer $15.20 233 XML $15.18 556
CrispyNews: We’ve Got Company
Saturday, May 6th, 2006While reading up on Webby’s World blog I found an article that frightened me for a brief moment. It was about a fresh new site called CrispyNews that offers a service vaguely like Pligg to beta testers.
The good news is that we don’t have to be worried about them and making all of our hard work obsolete because their goals are seperate from ours and their style is distinctly their own. Rather than letting users take their script onto their own domain, they are stuck as subdomains of crispynews.com. The site is aiming to be more like a Digg divided up into many dozen sub-categories (eventually hundreds or even thousands) that all share the same database of users. This lets you go from a page for sports to a page featuring american idol without having to re-login. Besides just the ability to post and vote for stories the site gives users the ability to upload images to attach to the stories and they also have a very simple forum on each site. The major downside is probably the layout and visuals for the site. All of the subdomains have the same look, and a plain one at that, and every section is pretty limited. Check out the site on your own, or even sign up to beta test your own CrispyNews site and let us know what you think of it. There might be some great ideas that the site has that you might want to let us know about.
Gabbly
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006Two 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.
The Secret Homepage
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006I have a secret to be told to only those reading the blog. There’s a secret page to help make each visit to Pligg’s forum much more organized. It’s the Pligg Home page. The page is pretty much a streamlined version of the forum that shows the most important items like the newest posts, private messages and hot topics. Some people might find this page useful if they check the site daily for updates most of the posts should fall into the Recent Threads area. If you plan on creating a lot of new threads rather than replying the regular old forum would best fit you.
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