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The official Jiglu blog, with announcements of what's happening on the Jiglu service.

This space was created on 11 June 2006. Feed

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Cleaning up the Jigluhood part 4: inviting people

Now let's look at some of the improvements we've made recently to help those of you who run spaces.

Jiglu has always supported invitations, sending out e-mails on your behalf to people that you'd like to join your space. However, once you sent your invite all you could do was check the list of members to see if they had joined. You told us you wanted better feedback, so we've added a new page where you can see exactly what's happened to each invite.

See your invites

If you're the admin of a space, in the members index you'll find a new link in the sidebar 'View recent member invites'. Click on that and if there were any invites in the past month then you'll see something like this:

invites.png

The status lets you see exactly what's happened to each invite: whether they accepted or declined the invite, whether they haven't yet done anything about it or whether they took so long to do anything it's now timed out. We'll also shortly be adding to this whether the e-mail to them bounced or not, so you can find out if you made an error with their address.

Accept an invite on Jiglu.com

As I mentioned before, if someone's a user of the system already then they'll get a notification that they've been invited to a space on their home page and can now accept (or decline) the invitation via their taskbox.

See other activity

We've also made some other improvements to make it easier to see the activity that's going on in your space. On the discussion message, knowledge, tags and members indexes you'll find a new 'View the activity for...' link in the sidebar. Follow that and you'll be able to precisely see all the recent changes that have taken place.

Cleaning up the Jigluhood - part 3: embedding YouTube and more

You told us that you wanted to be able to include content from elsewhere on Jiglu, such as videos from YouTube or slideshows from Flickr. And so we did. Just like this.

You can embed external content in discussion messages and knowledge entries as you'd expect. Just click on the cog icon in the HTML editor toolbar and then paste in the code from the other site.

This also works for your profile too. Choose the My preferences link at the top of the page, then the User profile option. Then in the About me section add the code the same way by clicking on the cog icon in the HTML editor toolbar. This could include your status on Windows Messenger (go here to get the code) or your calendar from Google Calendar.

If you run a space you can also embed external services in its home page. Go to Settings, then choose Home page and add a new text section. The HTML editor will now appear and you can use the same cog icon to add what you want.

Currently we support embedding content from the following services:

We need to approve services first in order to safeguard everyone's security on the site. However, we're more than happy to add other services on request. Just drop us a line to admin@jiglu.com and we'll do the rest.

Cleaning up the Jigluhood - part 2: pictures

You've always been able to attach pictures to discussion messages or to entries in the knowledge wiki. However, they always used to be shown in full after the main text and that wasn't so good when you had a lot.

Now we've added a gallery carousel instead, showing you thumbnails of all the pictures in a message or entry. Clicking on an image then opens it up in full, lightbox style. If there's more than three images attached then you can scroll through the images using the arrow buttons.

carousel.jpg

Inserting images into your messages or entries

You can still make an image appear in full in the text of your message or entry. First, make sure you're using the HTML editor for writing contributions - go to My preferences and choose the User basics option then make sure you have the right editor selected.

Now go to add or edit an entry or message and select the attachments you want to upload by clicking on each Browse button in turn for each attachment and then select the Attach files button to upload them. To add the image into the text choose the image button from the editor toolbar (the one that looks like a tree). When the pop-up appears, choose the image from the Image list field and click the Insert button. You should now see the image in the main text area. Note that when you insert an image into the text it no longer appears in the carousel.

If you want images to appear on the home page of your space then you'll find the full instructions here. They now only appear on your home page if you insert them into the text.

Profile photo

Since we started we've let you add a photo to your profile if it was hosted elsewhere. Now we've finally got round to letting you upload your own photo on Jiglu as well. Just choose the My preferences link at the top of each page, select the Photo option and upload your photo. It's as simple as that. Every time you change your member profile in a space it your picture will also now appear in the activity stream.

profile-thumb.png

As always, we'd welcome your feedback on the service - let us know if this is working for you.

Cleaning up the Jigluhood - part 1: My Home

If you've made a home for your community in the Jigluhood then you've probably noticed we've been busy with lots of improvements recently. So I thought it was about time we brought you up-to-date with a new series on the blog to tell you about the new features, beginning with your personal home page.

Activity stream

You told us that it was hard to keep up with what was going on in all your spaces unless you visited each one individually. So we've brought in a new activity stream that lets you keep track of what's happening in real time.

activity-stream.png

An activity is added to the stream when someone starts a new discussion in one of your spaces and we'll then update when people reply to a thread. We also keep track when entries are added or updated in the knowledge wiki and when people make changes to their member profiles.

For knowledge entries and for new threads we'll show the tags we found in the text along with any links or attachments they contain. That lets you get a better idea of what they're about direct from your home page so you can decide if they're important to read or not.

You may not want to get updates for some of your spaces, perhaps if you're just an occasional visitor. If that's the case, just select My preferences from the top of the page and then the My home content option. You can then choose which spaces should be included in your stream.

There's also a new Atom and RSS feed so you can keep up-to-date with your favourite feed reader. Just subscribe to http://www.jiglu.com/+atom or http://www.jiglu.com/+rss. Note that your reader needs to support authentication as obviously we don't want anyone reading your feed apart from you.

My taskbox

You told us that it was sometimes difficult to manage the tasks in your taskbox as they were all mixed up together. So we've now added a summary on your home page. This lets you quickly see all the different types of tasks, such as drafts of messages that you've started working on or new members to approve in your spaces.

my-taskbox.png

When someone invites you to a new space, you'll also now find an invite in your taskbox as well as receiving it by e-mail. This makes it much easier to deal with when you're a regular user of the system.

My spaces

We also of course still list all the spaces you run and the spaces you're a member of. And don't forget you can quickly jump from one space to another by clicking on your name at the top of each page and then selecting a space in the pop-up.

Jiglu's big March upgrade

Thanks to all of you for your patience while we upgraded Jiglu.

Unfortunately it took a bit longer than we would have liked to process all the data to its new format, but everything's up and running again now. No matter how much preparation and testing you do there are some things you can't tell until you actually do it...

I'll be posting entries on the blog in the coming days about some of the changes we've made, but if you'd like to know more now we've got a full list of changes for Jiglu Tags and The Jigluhood over in the support space.

We'd also welcome your feedback on the new version and what else you'd like to see from Jiglu.

Jiglu upgrade on Tuesday 10 March

It's been a while hasn't it...

Just to let you all know that we'll be upgrading Jiglu.com next Tuesday from 10am UK time (that's 11am Europe, 5am US East Coast, 2am US West Coast).

Because of a large amount of data that needs to be converted for this upgrade, we expect the site to be down for as much as 24 hours unfortunately. We're hoping it will be less, but there's a lot to do.

The reason for this is that we've finally made it possible to manage the names of people and the dates of events as if they're ordinary tags. However, because we've got a huge amount of data from Jiglu Tags sites and Jigluhood spaces that needs to be converted there's a lot of processing work to be done. It will at least mean that we're unlikely to have task as big as this again.

We'll have more details of the new release after we go live with the upgrade.

Jiglu Tags adds widget analytics

One of the things we've always said about the Jiglu Tags widget is that it can boost the traffic on your blog. Now we've added analytics to the service to prove it.

On an average blog adding the Jiglu widget gives you around a 1.5% to 2.75% increase in traffic. If you have more content, better written content and better designed pages then you can get higher figures - we've run one test with a newspaper that was giving them closer to a 5% increase where Jiglu was the primary navigation between stories.

Around 3.5% to 6% of users visiting a blog click on a Jiglu link to open up our navigation overlay. With our commercial widget that's a new place where you can run your own advertising or embed your own content or search results. If you're interested in trying that out then get in touch.

If you're already a Jiglu.com user with a widget running on your site then you'll see the analytics figures on your home page underneath each site you've registered. You'll find four numbers for each site covering the previous 30 days' traffic:

  • How many times the widget was shown - which on most sites should be the same as the number of page views, although different analytics services count slightly differently.
  • How many times someone clicked on a Jiglu tag to open up the overlay.
  • How many times someone chose a link in the overlay that took them to a page in your site.
  • How much extra traffic you got as a result of using the Jiglu Tags widget.

We hope you'll find the extra information useful - do let us know what you think.

We don't just do it for nothing

Today Jiglu has launched a new microsite giving details of our commercial products.

Visit www.jiglu.com/about/ and you can read more on our offerings for publishers and corporates, or just follow the new links on the new Jiglu home page.

The New Jiglu Widget

After we launched our original Jiglu Tags widget last October we listened to all your feedback on what you liked and didn't like about the first version. Then we went away to make Jiglu much, much lovelier:

  • You wanted better quality tags. So we've completely rewritten our tagging engine and added extra smarts to make it cleverer at recognising the good ones.
  • You wanted a better user experience. So we've totally redesigned the widget to give it a sleek new look and to give users the most relevant pages first.
  • You wanted more customisation options. So we've added them - and if you become a Pro user you can use your own branding and even embed your own content driven by our tags.

It took a while, I know, but there was a lot to do...

Already using Jiglu Tags?

If you already have our previous widget then you don't need to do anything at all: the new one will automatically appear in the old widget's place.

The first time you post a new entry on your blog you'll see a slight change in the tags as we reassess which ones we think are good. Over the next couple of weeks our spiders will then recrawl your site to get some additional information that will enable us to make them better still and to give the most relevant results when people search for a tag.

overlay-example.png

Using the Jigluhood?

If you use one of our community spaces then you'll also find your automatic tags will be updated. Anything new that's published will get better tags immediately, while old messages and entries will take a little while to be updated.

What's this about Pro users?

For those users who want more control over Jiglu we're launching a Pro version. These are the benefits:

  • Use your own branding in the pop-up overlay rather than Jiglu's.
  • Choose which sections you want to appear in the widget or remove it from certain types of pages.
  • Change the look of the pop-up overlay to your own site style.
  • Choose what else you want to appear in the pop-up overlay, including running your own Google AdSense ads or embedding your own content. When you do that we send through our tag scoring as parameters to the iframe so you can bring in your own relevant content.
  • Get much higher limits when using our Atom Publishing Protocol-based tagging API.

We'll be launching credit-card signup for Jiglu Tags Pro shortly. Until then, if your site has more than 100,000 page views per week write to us at sales@jiglumedia.com and we can talk.

If you don't want to go Pro, don't worry - the free version is staying and remains ad-free.

What happens in the panel on the right of the pop-up overlay?

  • If you've got more than one site tagged then visitors will continue to see results from both, but with the current site shown in panel on the left and pages from the other sites in the panel on the right.
  • If you've got a Jigluhood space linked to your site, then you'll also see discussion messages and knowledge wiki entries from that space in the panel on the right. You can even add knowledge entries for a particular tag and have their content appear in the right panel.
  • If you've only tagged one site, or there aren't any matches for a tag in your other sites or in a Jigluhood space, then in the panel on the right visitors will see the top five other sites in Jiglu with that tag so they can explore further.

What else has changed?

  • If you've added manual tags to your blog then we'll pick those up now too and present them alongside the ones that were automatically found. That also means that if you've manually tagged something once but forgot about the tag when you wrote another relevant blog post then we'll link it to that one too.
  • We've shrunk the JavaScript for the widget and added extra cacheing and hardware so it should appear much faster now.
  • We no longer index URLs from tagged sites and don't show event dates any more.
  • The previous new tags and tag map widgets have been removed. If you haven't yet taken them off your blog please do so.

What's next?

We're now about to start work on a release we're targeting for September. This will finally make it possible to edit people tags like ordinary topic tags, let you categorise your tags and make some further improvements in tag quality.

Anyway, we hope you like the new version. Do let us know.

The New Jiglu Widget (and some Jiglu downtime)

Next Wednesday we plan to launch the brand new Jiglu Tags widget and make some big improvements to our automatic tagging. We'll have more on this later, but first I need to announce some downtime.

In order to put in place a new database server and carry out this major upgrade we need to have two periods of downtime:

  • On Monday 28 July from 11am UK (12pm Europe, 6am US East Coast) for approximate 4 hours.
  • On Wednesday 30 July from 10am UK (11 AM Europe, 5am US East Coast) for approximately 6 hours.

Apologies for the short notice of this work, but it will make Jiglu a whole lot lovelier.