JoeUser Development Updates

An over view of recent and upcoming features on JoeUser

from JoeUser Forums

Ok, I admit that I am not a writer and I am no good at keeping my site up to date. So I apologize for delay in between each of my updates.
Unfortunately last week's progress was a bit slow as much of the work we did was on the underlying structure for JoeUser. So there is not too much to report so I will also recap a few things that were done the week before.

Create your own Blog
This is just a recap for anyone who may have missed Brad's announcement.  JoeUser.com allows for you to create your own free blog site.  It's very simply and fast to do.  If you have not created an account already you must do that first.  After you have completed the process of creating an account and have logged on to joeuser.com, visit the "Account" page.  (The link is located at the very top of the page in the Tab section).  On the Account Page you should find a link to "Create your own JoeUser.com Blog".  Click there and enter the name of your blog. That's it.  You're done.  So if you selected the name "deltaforce" then  JoeUser would have automatically create the site http://deltaforce.joeuser.com for you.

Private Groups
This was just added over the weekend.  What are Private Groups you ask?  Private Groups allow you to post an article and specify who you want to be able to view it.  By default your articles are public for everyone to see.  But lets say you wanted to do a family news letter and only wanted family members to view your article and not display it to the whole world.  You would create the group "Family" and then enter all your family members into that group.  After the group has been completed and you go to create a new Article you will now  have the option to either allow "Everyone" to view your article or just your "Family" group.  You could create a group with just yourself as being the only person in it, which then would be great for being able to post your own Diary entries.

Point System
A point system has been put in place where every site, article and user will gain points in various ways.  A user can gain points by posting articles, replies and by having their own worked rated.  And an article gains points by how many views it receives, each reply to it and if the article is rated.  We will use this point system to show you lists of the top rated articles and users.

The point system is still under development and will most likely require tweaking as we go along but in most part it is functional and working.  Some time in the near future we will create a more comprehensive document that explains all the parts of the points system.

Top Articles & Users
With the point system now in place we have the ability to track the most popular Blog Sites, Articles and Users.  As you probably have already seen we now have sections in the right bar of JoeUser.com that displays the Top 5-10 entries for each category. 

Watch List
The watch list has actually been around for a couple of weeks but we really have not talked about it before now.  If you see an article that you are really interested in and wish to follow it as other people comment on the article then you can enter the article into your Watch List.  When an article is in your watch list and it receives a new reply and Email will be sent to you informing you that there has been new replies to the article since you last read it.  This can be a very useful feature and save you time from  having to check back periodically on an article to see if anything new has been posted to it.

To add an article to your Watch List just click on the magnifying glass icon that is on the top of each article.  To view or delete articles from your watch list click on the "Track Watch List" that is in the Login Toolbar.

Blog Groups (Coming soon)
Coming up in the next day or two you will have the ability to create a Blog Group.  Blog Group's are simply a group of blog sites joined together to create a single site based on the content of all the sites that belong to the group.  Let's say there are several bloggers who are all interested in auto racing.  You could create the site autoracing.joeuser.com and it would combine articles from each of your sites creating a common ground for anyone interested in auto racing to visit.

 

6,038 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
The blog groups aren't working for me yet. Looks like they need more tweaking.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
Suggestions, Suggestions, Suggestions. Here's a bunch of things I'd like to see on JoeUser. I imagine many of them are already planned but not yet implmented.

- A little too much real-estate used at the top of the page before you get to the meat. I think some of it could be merged into the header graphic. Like the channel list maybe.

- A link to the person's full Blog when someone reads an individual post from any of the side menus

- An Summary of recent posts for my personal blog (like the one it shows in the Channel Index)

- A links section on my personal blog to link other web sites or other blogs.

Great work with the user groups! Love it! The blog groups will probably work out very well also.

Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
Jeremy, yes, most of your suggestions are on our to do list. It's still a rather large list. Now that we have managed to get some of the core technology in place I hope that we will be able to start cranking out some of the little features.

Brad, I tweaked the security levels a bit, you should be able to create your Blog Group now.