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.

Less than 48 hours since the last update and we’ve got a whole new one.

Some Fixes

First, the new features from over the weekend required that we revamp some stuff. Most importantly, when blogs and their posts spanned more than one community, the comments could get fragmented. Since our growth is branching out from existing communities, we’ll have a lot of overlap. So this issue became apparent very quickly.

So, we’ve updated things and now entries show all comments, regardless of what community they were posted in. I hope that’s better. We’ve also fixed a bunch of other stuff that you may or may not have noticed. I’ll pretend you didn’t notice.

New Stuff, and “Zees”

While we were in there fixing stuff, we acted on some new ideas and feedback that we’ve been receiving on the new communities. This resulted in a new community homepage that brings the new posts and top posts together on one page.

We also added a brand new feature, “Zees”. Zees are short posts, mini-blogs if you will, that are useful if you’ve got some quick news, a comment (that doesn’t belong on an existing entry), or something on your mind. There is undeniable Twitter influence here, and I think combining this twitter model with communities can be pretty killer.

An Introduction

Finally, I use the word “we” a lot when describing the work we’re doing on BZ. Lest anyone things that I’m using the “royal we” and this Bumpzee thing is all me, let me introduce my long-time business partner, Damien. He’s the quiet one, keeps to himself, and gets work done. He’s “bobosse” here and BZ wouldn’t be nearly as far along as it is without his excellent work.

Feedback

Thanks to everyone who provides bug reports and feedback. Many of the things that we do is a direct result of the feedback that we get from you guys. Keep it coming through email, comments on blog posts, whatever. Thanks!

New Interface
After the last update, I expressed that we could have done better with the user interface. The major part of the last update was actually mostly invisible. It was a database architecture update to enable multiple communities. While we added some shiny graphics with web 2.0 highlights and reflections, the multiple communities did a number on usability.

So we jumped right back in to fix that, and what you have now is the result of a couple of hard weeks of development. We’ve made the user interface easier to use (I hope) and much more efficient on use of space. We’ve widened the page dramatically and streamlined the navigation.

New Communities
But that’s not all. The most exciting new feature is that we’ve released functionality allowing members to be designated as community managers. By the time you are reading this, we’ll have two new communities managed by two of our BUMPzee members. These members will have full control over their managed communities and will grow them in a similar manner that we have grown the existing Affiliate Marketing and SEO/SEM communities:

Jim Kukral will be managing a new How to be Successful Online Community, focusing on blogging and all-things making money online.

Sam Harrelson, publisher of CostPerNews.com will be managing a Next Generation Marketing community with a focus on Web 2.0 and new marketing technologies and strategies.

Thanks to Jim and Sam for helping us into the next phase of BUMPzee’s growth. If you have any interest in these areas, join them. And if you have a relevent blog, submit it.

Managed Communities
We’re excited to open up BUMPzee to members for the creation of their own communities. However, communities on BUMPzee are currently invite-only. We’re doing it this way to ensure quality of communities as well as quality of service. Controlled growth will help ensure both of those things. If you are interested in starting a community, please contact us with your ideas.

In the near future, we anticipate that we’ll have individuals creating many different types of communities such as:

• An individual’s personal community based on the blogs that he or she reads. Essentially, this person would be sharing his or her RSS reader and may form a community of people with the same interests.
• Communities based on Interest Groups: Online Marketing has been the focus of the initial communities, but the sky’s the limit. Any topic of interest can be made into a community, whether it’s photography, American Idol, cooking, or Internet Marketing.
• A community of friends and family. A community may be created around the interests of a group of friends and/or family.

Please stay tuned as we ramp up the service allowing the creation of more and more communities.

A poor design decision (actually it was a non-decision) from the the beginning has us doing a mid-stream correction on the timezone used for storing dates in BUMPzee.

As of this morning, all dates and times will be stored in UTC. And at least for the time being, they’ll be displayed that way as well. We may implement a way for users to specify the display timezone, but we’ll see if that’s necessary.

I have not converted the old dates (not sure if I’m going to bother tackling that). If you see some strange sorting until we can get a few hours past the mix of EST and UCT, that’s why.

I should have slipped this in under the cover of the early Daylight Savings cutover this past weekend. Oh well.

We had an outage today for approximately two hours due to a DNS problem.

I’m still sorting out the details, but we’ll be working to prevent that from happening again.

I apologize, especially for the effect the slow-loading widgets have had on your own visitors.