We are happy to announce the release of this version. With it come a great many new features as well as improvements upon older ones. The updates are as follow:
- Overhaul of Blog Settings layout
- Consolidation of Themes
- Color Picker for adjustment of background, links, titles, text, and subtitle.
- Overhaul of blog Page management.
- Ability to add in FeedBurner RSS link for all blogs.
- Ability to add in Google Analytics for all blogs.
- Ability to add in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and/or Bing Webmaster Center for all blogs to allow better indexing of individual blogs.
- Ability to display up to 10 latest comments on blog in right hand column.
- Ability to edit blog Section Webname for hosted blogs.
- Ability to turn Open Translations on or off for all blogs
- Ability to turn Comment Approval on or off for all blogs
- Ability to turn the Toolbar on or off for hosted blogs
- Ability to turn off comments for an entire blog; available for all blogs.
- Introduction of extensible graphics for interaction
- Update to admin section header layouts
- Ability to add an article Summary for display on the main lists as opposed to entire article.
- Removed Platform Version on all individual blogs.
- Standardization of Load indicator through all admin.
- Streamlining of Join page to be simpler.
- Translate to: now displays for hosted blogs.
- Return path for non-logged in function access switched to /login/
- Update to browscap.ini functions which weren't running. Now deflecting Firefox < 2, Explore < 6, Chrome < 3, Safari < 5, and all Netscape.
- Primary Language default was not functioning.
- Password maximum length standardization at 24 characters.
- Re-indexing of Featured Articles to increase speed.
- Fix of infinite loop when attempting to load deleted Section in hosted blogs.
We've been in Beta for some time now as we work to develop the Maneno platform towards a number of goals such as more powerful domain hosting, an open template architecture, and most importantly, an Open Source release for anyone to download, use and contribute to. The only problem with Beta is that it's been overused a great deal in the web community and it really doesn't tell you anything except that a piece of software isn't a finished product and that's not really very exciting.
With that in mind, a few days ago, we removed the Beta from all our pages. No, we're definitely not in a full release yet, but we wanted something better than having that tag there until Version 1.00 comes along. Instead, we're using a numeric version system that you'll now see at the bottom of the pages. That number is the current production version of Maneno that you're using, which is starting at 0.50. We're looking to give more insight to our development upgrades and include people in on the news as we'll post the Release Notes here in the Siteblog every time we have a release.
Shortly, we'll be releasing Version 0.51 "Alloco". This will be a very exciting release as it is a complete overhaul to our admin section to allow easy management of members' blogs as well as include a large slew of helpful widgets and functions. There will also be some new blog design functions that will allow anyone from a new internet user to a seasoned web developer take any of our basic templates and add a degree of their own spice and personality to them. This release is looking to be a lot of fun.
Google AdSense (the other side to AdWords) has something of a hit and miss deployment when it comes to Africa. While it would be an excellent method for African bloggers to get a bit of money to cover their internet expenses, Google doesn't offer payment options for any country in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is rather nasty on their part and hopefully over this next year, we'll start to see some momentum towards a better solution in that department.
By way of a test to see how clicks and more importantly, content, shapes up on a site that only has African content, we've deployed a small AdWords box to the home page of Maneno. This wasn't done to create some kind of massive monetizing scheme as we expect the overall payments from Google to be quite small. It was done purely as an experiment.
We want to see what happens when AdSense is confronted by the multiple language versions of Maneno. We want to see what happens when the Google servers see that you're coming from a different country outside those in North American and Europe. And most importantly we want to see what type of ads will be displayed.
The beauty of the AdWords system is that is displays ads based upon contextual relevance, which is a large part of the reason why it became so popular due to the ads being related to what users read on the page. Maneno authors write in a more balanced manner about Africa talking about a great breadth of topics that go beyond the doom and gloom angle. This is very much different from what is portrayed in traditional media outlets such as CNN and BBC. Because of this, will the AdWords be more like what you see in the US or say, France, or will we just see ads for charities about saving children, animal safaris, or voluntourism?
We're putting forth all these questions because we want to hear from everyone who views these ads and work to get a greater pictures of AdWords in Africa, since it is currently one of the most dominant ad delivery systems on the web. Please feel free to leave comments or contact us directly to share your thoughts.
And naturally, as these ads are a bit of a bandwidth hog at 25kb, if you set your bandwidth throttling to Very Slow, they won't display. We don't want this trial to be a bandwidth burden.
If you've visited any of the top, www.maneno.org pages then you've probably seen that something is a bit different in the top-center brown area. What was just two rather plain main links before is now a number of options.
All Articles is still there if you want to view everything that has been written on the platform. By Country is still there as well, but it's been made more "friendly". The layout is now four columns and instead of writing the rather overly-truncated E. Guinea, we now have Equatorial Guinea in there. The goal was to invite people in to this area a bit more and integrate it in with the design direction that we've been taking as of late.
Two new items have appeared up there as well. The first is a link to Focus pages under By Focus. Remember the page we created for Maker Faire Africa? Well, now there is direct access to it as well as others that we plan to have in the future. The other up there is the Search. As we've finally rolled out a proper internal search for the platform, we thought it was about time to integrate it on the top level areas for ease of use.
Another small item is that the link for the RSS feed has been embedded in to the graphic to make it a more integrated piece of the display as opposed to an icon that was just hanging there.
All of this is just one more thing we're doing to provide a cohesive and integrated platform that promotes the content of the authors who write here.
As mentioned in the previous post, we've been working on an easier system for editing the text on the site. This is primarily due to the fact that not everyone on the internet knows HTML. In fact, the vast majority don't and any site that wants people to create links and style their articles for emphasis needs to have an easy way for them to create this code without actually having to code.
Today we're happy to say that we've put out the first iteration of this new system. You can see it in the comments for articles. We deployed in that area first as it is a brand new system and the comments get a great deal of activity. We want people to mess about with it and see how it works. If it's hated, then we'll go back to the drawing board and make it better. If it's loved, we'll quickly deploy it on as many places as it makes sense. So please, give us feedback! We want to know what you have to say.
It should also be noted that this 'WYSIWYG' in the comments won't show up if you have set your bandwidth settings to Very Slow (the lowest setting) as it does take up some small bandwidth space (about 10kb to be exact.) If you are indeed using this setting, simply bump up your setting to Slow to higher to test it out. We've worked to optimize it as much as possible.
Additionally, you can see that there is option to toggle between the two different views, but for those who are members, you have the ability to turn this on or off in Your Profile page. If you eat HTML code for breakfast with a side of CSS, then choose the HTML option in there. This will streamline the interface so you can add code as you please. If you'd rather not deal with the code, then choose the WYSIWYG option and eventually, you'll see this system across all of the site once we're happy with how it functions. The WYSIWYG view is the default when people first sign up.
If you want to see some of the technical journey to get to this point, read my article that goes in to much more technical detail, although I'd say that it's not the most enjoyable thing in the world unless you're a very technical coding person.
Over the last two months, we've been announcing a number of new features or improvements to the Maneno platform. These have ranged from community management of comments, trackbacks, and media files, to custom CSS, to custom pages, to bandwidth options. We feel that we're at a very good point with the site where all the functions that need to be there for someone to manage, modify, and publish their articles are happily humming along. But, we're not going to stop there.
Over the next few months, we will be rolling out some new features as well as improving others. The editing system for HTML on articles is going to get an overhaul for instance. Also, blog management is going to be completely reworked to be more friendly and intuitive. This is especially important to note as we've been working with to incorporate all the new features we've been adding in and now that they're there, the system needs to be made easier for those who are new to blogging or just want an easy interface to work with.
Another item we're going to be integrating in to the standard blogs quite soon is a one column design. You can see this being used on the hosted blogs already, such as Wanjiku. It's another option that people will be able to switch between as well as customize with the custom CSS function.
All of this is aiming to create a platform that is simple to initially use, but then has more advanced features as people become more advanced users and need more powerful tools at their disposal. We've been really enjoying all the people who have been working with the system to date, as well as their feedback and we look forward to the others who are to come in the future!
In addition to the multilingual abilities of Maneno, one of the big things we talk about is the low bandwidth aspects to the site and the fact you can set varying levels of bandwidth throttling. To date, this function required that you join the site in order to use it as it is part of a member's profile. While we still recommend that people join to take advantage of various site features, we've now opened up bandwidth selection to anyone who visits the site to try out or use while reading the site. From the home page or any other top level page, you will now see on the right, a Connection Speed selector. Feel free to play around with it and see what we've done with the site to make it as light as possible depending on your needs.
If you try out each setting and analyze it with something like the Page Speed analyzer from Google, you will get results similar to these:
As you can see, the number of elements on a page (the left column) decreases with the actual size of the page (the right column). The last two settings of 'Slow' and 'Very Slow' might not seem all that different, but these settings make a very big difference when you are a member and access other areas of the site. But note that at the lowest setting our home page is a mere 9.4kb to download!
In the center column of this chart you will see that we are big fans of compressing the site to make it even smaller before you view it. This helps us to make the site anywhere from 50% to 70% smaller to download.
You will also notice that we've changed the home page a little bit. We've worked to make elements of more importance have a greater visual impact. We also worked to get more data on the page, while giving it a visual appearance that is lighter overall.
In addition to this, all language selectors have been moved up to the top of the screen for all top level, blog, and hosted blog pages. It clears up a bit of space, gives you the full name of each language in an easier format to select from, and most importantly, it gives us more space to add more language as we get them available.
We hope you like all the changes!
We're happy to announce today that we've just enable static pages for all the blogs on the site. So, if you want to have a page that isn't an article, you can go to your 'blog settings' and add whatever you'd like. For the time being you can code in a good deal of HTML in there. So, for instance, if you wanted to have an About page, then this would be the place to do it.
While the feature was accessible for awhile in the hosted blog setups, we've now made it accessible to all blogs, as well as a lot simpler to use and incorporate whatever someone might like to put in there including such items as: embedding a flickr stream, Google Map, a party you're having, or just about anything you'd like. You can create and take away these pages as much as you want and as necessary, so enjoy.
In the near future, we'll be adding in translation capabilities so that they work just like the articles as well, since there are many authors on this site who are multilingual and might want to be able to have something like an About pages in two or more languages.
What is CSS? The full name is Cascading Style Sheets and it is the code that constructs a web page. The Themes that you can invoke on your blog are new CSS files that override the basic look of the site and create a page that displays differently. Now, in addition to these themes and uploading a custom header image, Maneno users can tweak the CSS on their blog. They can either employ a theme and change its appearance or they can just start with the utmost basic theme (which the Siteblog uses) and build out something new.
CSS is definitely complex and has a very, very steep learning curve to it with a lot of things that can go work are you work with it, so we don't recommend that people start mucking around with this function unless they have some idea of what they're doing. So, why include it? Because it's a function that isn't available on a lot of blogs, or where it is, you either have to run the blog on your own host or pay an additional fee to get access to it. We're not charging for people to use it because we want this platform to be open and available for people to mold how they see fit. If it helps to encourage more bloggers and web developers, that's great. And if you create a custom CSS setup that is quite complex and cool that you'd like to share, let us know and we can set it up as a permanent theme for other people to use.
All of this taken in to account, this is a very new feature. We've put very few restrictions on it as we want to see how people tinker with it. As issues arise or as we see that something could be done better, we'll work on it accordingly. So enjoy it and see what happens. Just keep in mind that any changes you make will immediately show up on your blog (we will be building a 'sandbox' function soon) and also that you don't need to include an opening and closing 'style' tag. If the system detects that you've made use of this CSS function, it will automatically place your code where it needs to go in 'head' of the document with the appropriate tags around it.
Here's to hoping people have a lot of fun with this!
Those who are regular users of Maneno will have noticed by now that we've added a number of new items to the admin menu. These were all sections that have been around for awhile, but we were beta testing them in admin before releasing them to everyone else so that we could make sure that they worked well. Now, we're happy to announce that anyone with a blog can manage their comments, trackbacks, and various media files that they upload to the site.
Obviously one of the most powerful features on any blogging site. Users are free to delete comments that they feel are not appropriate or edit them if there are typos. Both of these items should be used with care, which is why we've made it easy to contact the person who submitted the comment if they listed an email. You'll see that in the comments admin pages, next to their name. Most of them time, people shouldn't have to do too much with this function, but it's there if it's needed.
This word has been problematic to translate as it's an artificial word in English. For those who aren't familiar with this function, Maneno records all the sites that link back to an article you've written. These links are then displayed below the article. It's generally considered to be something of a badge of honor if other people pick up and link to your article. Of course, some people may not want to have this in their blog, which is why it can be turned off in the 'blog settings' section if so desired.
Managing trackbacks has gotten to be something of an ordeal as there are endless spammers and bots who have picked up on trackbacks as an automated way to promote their garbage links. That being the case, we at Maneno do delete trackbacks that are outright bad from the start. There is also a delay built in to the system where once a trackback is recorded, the site waits for a period before displaying it so that it can be determined if it is valid or not and if it isn't, it can be deleted by the user in the admin section where it displays immediately.
Another tricky thing with trackbacks is to make sure that they link to a permanent source. It's often the case that someone will click on a link to an article of yours when that article is on the main page of another blog, recording a direct link to that blog. This is bad because in a short period of time, that link will not be on the front page of a blog and be an invalid trackback. It can take a bit of time to sort all this out, so please contact us if you have any questions.
This section is there for you to manage images you submit through the multiple image uploader. You can also grab the code from previously uploaded images if you want to link to one of them in a post. Lastly, you can upload a new image over an old one if you want to update it.
In time, we will be adding a lot more features (such as managing your sound files) to this section as it's a really powerful tool to control your assets on Maneno.
