To reward those who submit new templates for public use on Maneno, we're extremely happy to announce a contest with a cash prize of $250 USD for the winner in addition to the accolade of being chosen and featured as a top-notch, world-class designer. The runners-up will receive Honorary Mentions as well because we know it's going to be incredibly hard to choose just one winner.

It's quite simple to enter. Just download the development kit, work on your design, and once it's ready upload it in the "themes" section in the Admin section of Maneno. Obviously, in order to upload the theme and to test it on The Sandbox, you'll need to sign up on Maneno to be a registered user, which will only take 10 seconds. You'll also have to mark your template as "public" to enter the competition.

The contest is open to anyone (including teams), but it does close on May 1st So, while there's still plenty of time to work out something brilliant, act now to make sure you get your design in on time and are eligible for the award that we can't want to hand out. Please feel free to contact us as well, to let us know how excited you are about the design or if you have any questions.

Last but not least, we've been concocting some cool sessions at the 3-day BarCamp Abidjan that starts tomorrow. We've had several discussions with some of the organizers, namely Frederic Tapé, and lemme tell you: it's going to be great! They've worked really hard to make this event an even bigger success than the first edition of BarCamp Abidjan last July.

The organizing team, these incredibly energetic, creative-minded, geeky people, are all members of a group called Akendewa. Akendewa, which was born out of the first BarCamp Abidjan in July last year, is an Akan word that means web (or spider web, more precisely). Needless to say, its main objective is to promote the knowledge and use of the internet.

Maneno is honored to be one of the media sponsors of the event, so we'll be doing a great deal of live-blogging and live-tweeting about the different sessions and great people that will be there. So stay tuned here, Africamp and on Twitter with the hashtag #bcbabi (Babi is the nickname for Abidjan). We'll also be tweeting from the @africamps account, and probably also from our @Maneno account. There will most definitely be some crowdsourced CoveritLive happening as well, which will be announced on Africamp.

Since it's a BarCamp, we can't really give you many details about content of the program, but our participation is going to focus on blogging in Africa and localization efforts in African languages. Côte d'Ivoire is one of the countries in Africa with the biggest linguistic diversity and because of that, French is the most dominant language of all. We're excited to be bringing this discussion forward and curious to see what the feedback from the local developers will be.

More generally, we're also very excited about this BarCamp as it will allow us to meet a great deal of Ivorian developers and geeks. So far we've been really impressed with the tech scene in Côte d'Ivoire, and with all the techies we've already met, so this will be a great opportunity to learn, exchange ideas, and hopefully to collaborate.

And if all that wasn't enough, at noon on Saturday, we'll announce a competition we're very excited about. Then Saturday evening will be an even bigger future event announcement. Stay tuned, it's going to be big.

Features

- 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.

Bugs

- 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.

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.

T-shirts, yay!

We're happy to announce that we now have Maneno t-shirts! We aren't selling them, though. If you love what Maneno is doing and want to get one, then you should make a donation to Maneno. Why are we doing it this way? Because then who sees you wearing it will know that you're one of our great Maneno supporters. But, most importantly, it allows people to pay what they would like above the cost of our shirts in order to help us fund the projects ahead for Maneno:

BlogCamps

For the first half of 2010, Maneno is going to be based in Côte d'Ivoire. From there, we will continue to work on building out and promoting the Maneno platform, as well as introducing more people to the world of blogging and citizen journalism by facilitating BlogCamps with our local contacts. These camps will work as casual gatherings to train people on the ins and outs of social media and to work on promoting blogs and articles from their daily lives.

Due to the upcoming, historic national elections, Côte d'Ivoire will need more camps than ever before. But we will also be conducting BlogCamps in the neighboring West African countries of Ghana and Mali where the blogging communities are growing.

Citizen Journalism in Guinea

Additionally, we are working to coordinate training and Maneno platform deployment for Konakry Express, which is a blog portal working to spotlight information on Guinea in the aftermath of the September 28th massacre. For those who aren't aware, there was a coup d'etat in Guinea last year with the political transition and impending elections proving difficult, violent, and non-transparent. This portal will work to amplify local voices who are on the ground, getting reports directly from them.

So, if you want to help us fund these initiatives, donate for your shirts today. We do need to impose a minimum donation of $20 (+$5 shipping) to the US & Canada and $20 (+$10 shipping) to Europe. For anyone else in the world, work out the best estimate and if you ask us to send it, we will. Note: for orders of up to 3 t-shirts we'll only charge you shipping once!

And if you can donate more to provide seed funding for these projects in our second year of operation, we would be eternally grateful.

When you submit your donation, just write in your mailing address and size needs in the notes box or contact us directly. The 100% preshrunk cotton shirts are available in US Men S,M,L,XL,XXL and US Women S,M,L

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.

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.

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 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!

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.

A dusting off

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!