When we initially launched this site, it was on a less than stellar hosting system. In addition to being pretty slow, it would often crash, and it would do this in the middle of the night for us, which was the middle of the working day for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa. Not good. Not good at all.
So, we've upgraded to a faster, more reliable system. So far, they've been pretty good. The move has been relatively pain free as these things go. For me, the site seems to run immensely faster, but I'll let everyone else be the judge of that. Hopefully we'll be nice and stable as we keep getting more members with more articles being written. Down the road, we'll probably need to do another upgrade, but for now, I think we're in a good spot.
As always, let us know if anything goes berserk on you while using the site in what would seem to be a normal fashion.
Along with the invitation system mentioned yesterday, we have been finishing up functions for the main Articles pages. When we launched the very early version of the site, there was this blank space on the right of all the article pages. No, that wasn't a design goof. It was a placeholder for future functions. Well, those functions are now here.
For starters, you can put in your Twitter username to have your last three twits pull in to the page. Just remember to use only the part that comes after twitter.com/. For example ours is http://twitter.com/maneno, so we just use the 'maneno' bit. After Twitter, there is an open Widget field. This is for anywhere you can cut and paste code to bring a function of another site to your site. For instance, in the Siteblog, we've got our Flickr feed. You can put just about anything else in there you like as long as it it's less then 165 pixels in width. Lastly, we've got the Archives functioning. These automatically categorize a person's posts by month and year for easy browsing to the past.
These are just a few functions that we're putting out now. Over the next few months, there will be more and more for people to use as we develop the site. As always, we're always open to user suggestions, so contact us if you think of something that would make the site even better for users in Sub-Saharan Africa.
After a bit of tooling around, I'm happy to say that we've got author invitations fully functional for blogs. For many people who have a one to one relationship with their blog (they're the only person writing on it), this won't matter so much. But, for folks who want to have a few people lending their voice to a single blog, this is a very important feature to have in place.
If you're sitting there wondering, "Huh, why is this news?", it's because, as we've stated before, we're building Maneno from the ground up. This means that being true to our goal of having a lightweight, multi-lingual site, we had to create an invitation system that was in line with that. I think we did pretty well and made it a bit flashy in the process. Give it a try if you're looking to have a few people write on your blog.
I'd like to mention that while this was on the to-do list for awhile, we jumped to finishing it up when the folks at Social Media for Social Change said that they wanted a group blog for an upcoming event in Kenya. We were happy to give them what they needed and hope it all works out. We really look forward to reading the articles that come out of this event next week!
