One of the main pillars of Maneno is to have a small download footprint due to the fact that the target group of users will either be on a) slow land connections of b) slow mobile connections. Obviously, both of these points will change over time (with point b being the most likely one to improve, which is why a mobile version of Maneno is in the works), but for now, we've got to work with what we've got.
While always designing the site with this factor in mind, we've just leveraged a bit of the inherent technologies available in code to make the site even smaller. What we're doing is compressing the site. This takes all of the text that's coming to your browser and mashes it down in to a machine-readable format which is then unmashed when you open up the page.
The net result of this is that all the pages are at least half the size that they were previously. The home page is quite below 50kb as well as the main page in the admin where you write your articles. While this should provide even faster access to the site, it has two potential downfalls. One is that there may be browser incompatibility issues. While we've tested this thoroughly on everything that we can think of, there is still the off chance that someone out there could have problems. Obviously, we'd love to know if that's the case. The second issue is that this taxes the server more. Because there is the "mashing" work to do, every page on the site takes just that much more horsepower to create. This just means that we'll have to monitor the site and see what comes about and adjust things as they happen. All part of the whole Beta process.
While the holidays have been going on, we took a chance to sit back and look over what we've built with Maneno. As is often the case when you're rapidly prototyping and building out a brand new system, you're often more worried about getting it working for user rather than getting it working the best that it can for the user. This was the situation with entering and editing articles on the site.
As was cited in Erik Hersman's email interview with me, this site was originally built on components for a blogging system that I had created for use while traveling. It was designed to be extremely lightweight and simple for slow internet connections and dangerously out of date web browsers wherever I got web access. This worked quite well for Maneno's purposes when we set down this part, but then there were the functions such as: localization, multi-author blogs, GMT orientation, and country categorizing to deal with.
When everything got tossed together, a bit of the user experience was lost in the process. I was not happy with this and so, we all sat down, looked over what we had and thought up ways that it could be made better. The end result is a much more streamlined, focused, and intuitive interface for writing and editing articles on the site. The system now takes in to account all the items that needs to be there and orders them in a manner which seems to make the most sense based on how a user would approach the site.
I'm feeling quite good about it and I hope that folks will take a chance to write a bit and see what they think of it (of course, you have to join to get at these pages.) In the process, we managed to shave a few extra kilobytes off the download footprint, which is always good. And most importantly, there is now room for future features that we're currently working on, which will make that 'task panel' in the admin quickly become a very useful friend to authors on the site.
Hello there everyone, glad to see you're with us at the start of 2009. For us, 2008 was a great year what with starting up the site and getting the basics all fired up. We're very happy to have the bloggers that we have so far and we're looking to add more in the near future, exposing African voices that were previously unheard.
Obviously, the next year is going to hold a lot of changes for Maneno as you can see there is still that Beta bubble in the upper left which will need to be removed once we're feeling solid that the site is out of the initial development phase. Getting to that point is going to mean that in the next 2-3 months, we're going to be rolling out a number of changes we've been working on. One is that the translation system is going to get an overhaul. While it (along with most all the functions) will remain the same in essence, it's going to be made more user friendly. Since we're one of the few sites approaching translation in this manner, it means that there will be a lot of trial and error, feedback and rebuilding before we get a system that we know is the best.
Also on the list are smaller things like cleaning up Themes to be a bit more involved, deeper, and plentiful. Along with this, we're going to set it up so that people who are more technically inclined can upload their own 'CSS' file to fully customize the look of their blog above and beyond what we provide. We know how important having ones own signature is on the web.
Once we get all of these items and a few more minor ones taken care of, we're going to move on to the "big tomato" elements of the site which will involve the mobile aspect. For the second half of the year, we're going to really focus on having a system that will allow people to blog from their mobile phones. We'll have a mobile version of the site available for those on smartphones, but more importantly, we're planning to have a mechanism for people to blog via SMS and eventually MMS. This will allow the site's focus on being a platform for Sub-Saharan Africa come to light. We're very aware that while localization, a lightweight system, and a focus on Africa are great, it's the ability to submit data in a non-internet based form that is crucial. In case you were wondering, we're looking in to the system that Ken Banks and team developed for Frontline SMS. Ushahidi has made great use of it in their notification system and we're looking to have similar success, but in the much different format that is Maneno.
That's a quick rundown of the year ahead. We'll have other items to announce in the coming weeks, so as always, stay tuned!
