We’ve just released a pretty major upgrade to BUMPzee. Here’s a quick overview of what to look for:

HOTSPOTS!

Hotspots are blog posts that are getting a bunch of traffic right now. Not necessariy related to BUMPzee, but from anywhere. So, for example, posts in your community that are getting dugg will shoot to the top, even without any bumps.

For example, in the picture below, the Darren Rowse entry at Chitika got dugg a few days ago and is still seeing residual traffic. A ShoeMoney post with hot women in it. Number 1 right now. Go figure.

Blogs must have a bumpzee widget to be tracked as a hotspot.

We’ve added this feature up near the top of the community homepage. Speaking of which, it’s getting pretty crowded, so you can now hide any of the major sections by clicking on the ‘hide’ link in the header. Give it a try, you can always get it back, and it remembers your setting across all communities and sessions.

Blog Statistics
If you have of the BUMPzee widgets on your blog, you now have access to visitor and page view stats. See the blog stats page in your profile, accessible from your Blogs tab.

In fact your profile has a whole new interface, so be sure to check it out.

Visibility For Your Blogs
Now when you add your blog, you get much more visibility, even if it doesn’t appear in a community. Check out the new blogs page and surf around. It’s available under the “Explore” menu.

Widget Updates
Be sure to get a widget for your blog and use the new Widget Generator to configure all the widget settings.

There are a few more widget features.

The widget can now show the number of viewers who are online right now.

Also, the widget now has customizable width. If you use the wordpress plugin, you’ll need to grab the new version 0.20.

The wordpress plugin has the added benefit of tracking your blog’s comments on Bz.

Navigation
BUMPzee is growing fast in features, and we’ve updated the navigation to make it easier to manage your blogs, view your stats, participate in your favorite communities, and find new blogs to read.

We hope you enjoy the changes. As always, please let us know if you have feedback.

We’ve made some small changes to the bumpzee recent posts widget that you may have noticed.

1. If you show top posts, the bump button no longer has a “halo”. This will look much better on those that have set up a dark background, like Dane.

2. We’ve tried to clean up some of the CSS, being more explicit on some of the settings so the widget doesn’t pick up too much from the site’s CSS and look funny.

We’ve got a few cool new things coming soon, like an online color configuratror, customizable width, and more. Stay tuned…

Iterations and more iterations

Since we’re a small team moving fast, we don’t have the luxury of doing major design plans for months and releasing some big new website. Instead, we’re learning as we go and making small incremental changes. The good news is that you get to see fresh new stuff almost weekly. The bad news is that you have to see fresh new stuff almost weekly

I feel like we’re zeroing in on a decent design and feature-set, so things should slow down. I hope so anyway. I haven’t been able to jump into WoW for like three months now.

So, what’s new?

Interface Changes (again)

There’s a shiny new header and navigation. And community owners can now customize the color scheme on their community. You’ve probably noticed a stark difference in the Affiliate Marketing community. The other guys will hopefully be doing the same.

We hope this will help you better recognize what community you’re looking at.

I also reversed the New and Top entries columns on the community homepage. Just to keep you on your toes.

RSS Groups

An RSS Group is a “Lite” Community. Think of it as a small BZ community of your very own, or a personal feed reader around a niche, or just the stuff you like to read, without the pressure of owning a “community” and having to worry about getting members and stuff. An RSS group has blogs, top and new entries, and comments. The other stuff like members, blog submissions, events, zees, etc. are community features.

It’ll still show the bumps and comments from the other communities.

RSS Groups can be changed over to a community at any time, so if you later feel like making a go of it running a community, you can do that.

RSS Groups and Communities are Open!

Anybody can now create an RSS Group or Community. We’re still hashing out the interface details so apologies if you run into some issues, but go ahead and create your own group. You need to add at least three feeds to it before it becomes “live” on the browse RSS groups page. Until then, only you can see it from your dashboard and managment screens.

There’s probably a bunch more small stuff that I’m forgetting. I’ll comment on those as I remember.

As always, please let me know if you have any problems or feedback and we’ll work through them as quickly as possible.

Oh, and be sure to listen to the tonight. I’ll be on.