Summary of Recent Updates

Posted by Ninua, Inc. | Filed under features

If you've been keeping up, you probably know all about the updates we pushed in the last three weeks and the discussions around them in our forums (links below). But if you haven't visited NetworkedBlogs recently, here is a quick update for you. We also pushed a few small updates today that I summarize at the end.

Why Change?

The original code for NetworkedBlogs was written a long time ago when we had few users. As time passed and the application grew, a lot of changes were made. Also, the platforms we connect with (such as Facebook and Twitter) changed a lot too. The code was extended beyond it's original design to support all these changes, but that came with a price. Fixing errors took a long time, and adding new features was really hard. In order to continue to innovate and be able to fix problems faster, we had to make big changes. And, hence, the recent updates.

This initial release was not intended to add new features, but rather to replicate most of the features we had in the old system and remove features that were rarely used to free up space for new things. We did improve the user interface, though, and tried to make it easier to use and navigate. We also introduced a few bugs as well. Not on purpose, obviously, but as you'd expect with any big update, some errors are bound to slip beyond the best testing effort. In the last two weeks, we fixed most of the errors we found or reported to us, and we're continuing to listen and fix bugs every day. If you're aware of a problem that's unsolved yet, please let us know.

List of Changes:

  • Blog profiles have a new design. For example, check out the NetworkedBlogs profile. This follows our previous updates to profile pages and the welcome page.
  • If you use our 'Blog' tab on your fan page, you'll notice that it has been updated as well. The update makes it easier to edit and customize the tab without having to navigate to another page. We also removed the syndication settings from the tab because they were confusing. All syndication settings can be managed from the syndication page.
  • The blog directory was simplified. Some of the listings such as "popular blogs by region" and "popular blogs by company" were removed because changes in Facebook made it much harder to create proper rankings. Since these lists were rarely used, we prefer to focus our efforts on other features.
  • We removed the "friends" menu because the functionality it offered is now provided by the welcome page.
  • The blog registration page was improved to make adding or editing blogs easier.
  • The part of the app that was served inside Facebook is now on the Website for consistency.
  • If you've upgraded your blog to Premium Listing, you'll notice that the highlighting of premium blogs in the directory is gone. This is temporary. We removed it to replace it with a better system that promotes premium blogs in more places in addition to the directory to give you more exposure. Other premium benefits, such as fast feed updates and the option to upload images to your blog profile have not been changed. We want to give you more value for your money, but we also understand if you don't like the change and would like to request a refund. Just open a ticket on our help site.

The changes did not affect syndication and publishing to Facebook/Twitter (except for a few bug fixes).

And, today, we pushed a small update to fix bugs and to address some of the issue we found or were brought up to us. This includes a few style changes to make it easier to see the blog details, and to fit better for blogs with longer names. We also started showing a brief summary of blog posts on your blog profile just like it was in the old design. Other than that, no major updates, but many bug fixes.

In the next few weeks we're focused on fixing errors and filling the gaps in features. If you encounter any issue that we haven't addressed yet, please let us know on one of these forum threads:

Thank you for all the feedback and comments you sent so far. Please keep them coming.

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OCT.20

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