The following enhancement will be appearing in the next few hours on BZ…

As BUMPzee has grown in the past few months, the increasing set of features has caused some fragmention in functionality. The biggest issues have formed between “zees” and the discussions that happen on blog entries. We’ve recently converted zees into full-blown discussions and we’re excited that they’ve become quite active. This, however, has distracted and detracted from the blog entries and the comments that happen on those. There are just too many places to track the conversations.

So, in an effort to simplify this, we have combined the two. Now, when you post a new discussion, it is created as a new entry, just like the blog entries. So now, the core element is again ‘entries’, whether it is created from a blog post or from a local entry. They all appear together in the same lists, so the attention and discussion should be much more focused.

We’ve migrated all existing zees to entries and comments and removed the separate “zees” tab in the communities. Now all conversations can be tracked in the “discussions” tabs.

Discussions still happen in the context of communities. Non-community topics happen in the “BUMPzee” community.

Check out the top level “Discussions” page for a global view of all the discussion activity on BUMPzee. You can filter the list to see just what interests you.

Or, keep a close eye on one community by viewing a community’s discussions tab.

Local entries will have the picture of the member to the left. Blog entries are a different color and have a blog screenshot.

There will undoubtedly be some initial chaos from this significant change, but I hope that once things settle down and you feel your way around this will be much easier.

Please feel free to provide feedback and ask questions. I’ll start up a discussion on BUMPzee and keep track of comments on this blog post.

Just a quick note to highlight some recent development we’ve been doing. BUMPzee got its start as a community platform and quickly grew into a place to get your blog listed, regardless of whether it fits into a community.

We’ve recently focused our energy on improving visibility to all blogs and launched some redesigned pages today.

The blog profile pages are now packed with info, such as recent viewers, recent blog posts, and if you have a widget installed (for tracking), we’ll show your most popular pages as well.

Also, for the blog owner, you can see some great stats on your blog visits as well as recent hits on individual pages.

But as one of the best parts about BUMPzee is just finding new blogs and new bloggers. We’ve reorganized the navigation to help you find plenty of new stuff to check out. I’m having a blast with the “New to You” page, under the Blogs menu (see picture below.) Go to that page to see a random list of blogs that you haven’t visited before. Go check them out.

Or sart on the BUMPzee homepage to see all sorts of brand new stuff.

We implemented “zees” a month or two ago on a whim. We emulated Twitter on the notion that people in a community might share random thoughts. A zee is a quick thought, what’s going on, make a statement, or ask a question.

As the days go by, I’ve been witnessing some interesting behavior. Zees certainly haven’t taken off like twitter has by any stretch. The times that zees get used, usually turn into a short conversation. But the conversation gets stunted. This is probably because of the format. And like in Twitter, I find that I often want to reply to a previous post but I feel like it’s not really the purpose and I’d be just messing up the place.

Zees feel like conversations wanting to bust out. So who are we to stop that?

Therefore, I give you zees, version 2. Or zees on steriods.

Zees can now be replied to, and these replies appear under the zee in a message board like fashion.

You can view all Zees, only the zees in your communities, or in a single community.

You can post a zee in a specific community or in a general discussion area.

You can sort by date of entry or last reply date. You can search.

You can have fun. Go on. Post away!

Probably the oldest feature request on the BUMPzee to do list is was search.

We’ve launched a search page today. You can search entries, comments, blogs, communities, and members.

It’s actually a really fun way to hunt around and find new blogs and communities. You’ll notice some recommendations on the right side as you search.

The member search is username-only right now. We cannot allow search on any other info without permission. We’ll be looking at the best way to get there.

You’ll find the search box in the header, or via a link under the explore menu.

(Note: It’s NOT the search box on the right margin of this blog. That’s just the wordpress blog search.)

Here’s a link to the new search page.

We’ve added some brand-new features to the BUMPzee sidebar widget.
Cool stuff that tells you more about your own blog traffic.

Stats

There’s a new section at the bottom of all widgets, even without reconfiguring: Quick stats. Visible ONLY to the owner of the blog if you’re currently logged in to BUMPzee, are some simple stats for the page you’re looking at and your blog as a whole, comparing today and yesterday.

We’ll be launching this in all sidebar widgets soon, so keep an eye out!

This will appear at the bottom of every sidebar widget regardless of configuration. Again, it’s not visible to your visitors, only you. See over to the right, the green widget for this blog, no stats.

Top Posts

Let your users see the most viewed posts in the past 7 days. You can configure this to show up to 20 recent posts.

Visitors Online Now

See how many people are looking at your blog right now.

And the old stuff…

Recent Visitors

You can configure this to show a few or many visitors in a list or in a grid.

Top Entries

See the most bumped entries in all the communities your blog is included in. You can configure this to show as many entries as you want.

Widget Generator

Customize the widget to your hearts content with the widget generator. Choose colors, which items to show, how many in each. Make a big wide widget. Make a narrow one.

If you use the Wordpress Plugin, you’ll need to upgrade the plugin to version 0.21 to get the new features and use the widget generator. Download the new plugin here.

Or if you prefer to grab some javascript, you can get it right on the widget generator page in addition to the custom plugin function call.

Have fun! Pimp your widget!