Tagz / whatsnew /

For those of us who haven't been following us on Twitter, here's a quick recap of the stuff that we implemented since our last whatsnew entry.

We first added thumbnails for youtube videos, and pretty soon followed it up with thumbnails for all posts.

Then, we added support for user avatars, using gravatars.

Here's mine:

We also implemented support for the OpenSearch format. This means that you can now search for tags on Tagz from the search bar in Firefox and a couple of other browsers.

And now for the features not announced on twitter.

You might have noticed a couple of conspicuous icons on the screenshot above. We added support for detecting when a URL has also been posted on delicious, digg, reddit, hacker news and twitter. These links are shown on the comments and history page for every publicly posted link. Here's an obligatory screenshot with all kinds of links.

We also added an outbox page to let our users track all the private messages they send to other users.

Finally, we've implemented a new meta tag "meta:dead" which shows all dead links within your bookmarks. This only works on a user's own bookmarks and not on the hot and new pages. We also filter out dead links from the hot and new bookmark listings.

Haven't posted an update in 2 months now. Too busy coding and foraging for food :)

For those who haven't noticed, we'd rolled out a feature about a month ago to enable sharing links over email, twitter and with friends on tagz (that one's alway been there). Obligatory screenshot follows.

And 2 days ago, we're rolling out another feature, Autocompletion for the tag search input on the hot and new pages. It'll be there for the saved page soon, but since it involves a whole bunch of optimizations, I chose to release it after the optimizations are in place. As usual, here's a screenshot of it in action.

Now, before you ask, "WTF, 2 months and only 2 features?", Here's what I've been spending most of my coding time automating spam control, optimizations and performance tweaks. Spam seems to be a major big problem, fortunately, we've been able to automate spam control to a great extent. If you spot something which escaped our filters, please be sure to click the report link.

Next up, some visual changes, and a couple of more features. And I'll post updated more often, I promise. For any suggestions or feedback, please click on the blue feedback tab on the left.

Ever made a typo while searching for a tag in Tagz ?
I seem to be making them all the time, so I decided to fix it, like Google does it :)
The following screenshots should explain most of it.

This works on hot, new and saved pages. But it doesn't work for tags found only in your private bookmarks.
So, post less private bookmarks and more public ones!

• Liked and Dislike bookmarks can be used to upmod and downmod links without visiting Tagz.
• The random bookmarklet takes you to a random unseen post on Tagz

Now, there's a hidden feature in the random bookmarklet link, which isn't exposed by the plain old bookmarklet. Instead of going to http://tagz.in/random/ you can go to http://tagz.in/random/python/ which gives you a random link tagged with the tag python or http://tagz.in/random/python+django/ in which takes you to a page tagged with python and django and so on.

BTW, http://tagz.in/random/book/stemmed/ also works. :)

We've added support for inline playback of Youtube, Metacafe and Vimeo videos on Tagz.

Just click the watch link below a video to watch a video without leaving Tagz. This feature has been around for a while now, we just forgot to mention it :)

Additionally, we've also added 2 pages to the user profile, (liked and disliked).

We're added a recommendation engine in Tagz

For the uninitiated, recommendation engine makes personalized recommendations on links to users based on their voting history. Besides the votes, the engine also take into account the user's saved links and tags. The more a user participates on Tagz, the better the recommendations would get. Well, at least thats the idea ;)

Since the recommendations are personalized, they're only available to signed in users. Click on the recommended tab on the main page to check out your recommendations.

Haven't posted an update in the past 10 days.
Here are some features we've implemented since then.

• Friends. You can now add users as friends, send links to friends.
• We now have a stats page.
• Related tags computed and shown globally, we previously showed this only on a per user basis on the user's saved links page.
• Modding posts and comments now works on browsers with javascript disabled and text mode browsers like Lynx and Links.
• Various minor improvements to the UI to make it a little more intuitive and snappier.
• More microformats love. We now support the Vote Links microformat on some of the pages.
• We also partially implement the XFN microformat on the friends page, by marking links to mutual friends' profiles with rel="friend".
• We now have a presence on twitter.

• Optional email notifications when someone comments on one of your posts, or replies to one of your comments, or sends you a private message.
• Its now possible to send private messages to other users. Just click on the "PM user" link on the user's profile sidebar.

Before you can receive email notifications, you'll have to confirm your email address first.
Once your email address has been confirmed, you can setup your notification preferences from your account settings page.

Here's a summary of the changes

• We finally have a logo for Tagz.
• meta:private, a meta tag to filter private links in your saved links.
• We've implemented the xfolk (and thus, also rel-tag) microformats.
• We now show the top tags for popular domains on the domain detail pages.
• Another minor detail, all pages are now 100% HTML 4.01 Strict compliant as per the W3C Validator.

The logo is from Richard Tallent who has graciously released it into Public Domain.

Added the ablility to rename and delete (look for the Manage Tags link on the Saved Links and User Tags pages) tags en mass.

• You can now import and synchronize (click on the preferences link on the top right after logging in) bookmarks from delicious.
• You can also import the standard netscape bookmarks file (supported by most browsers).
• Fixed a minor bug in the whatsnew rss feed.

• A whole bunch of unicode related bugfixes.
• We finally have comment notifications with Inbox. All logged in users will see an inbox link on the top bar.
• Every time somebody comments on a link you posted or replies to one of your comments, it gets listed here.

• After a string of invisible changes, here's something visible.
• Based on a suggestion by kamathln, tag clouds now are stemming aware, which makes them a little neater.

• The rss feeds have always been there, just added icons on the relevant pages to make them a little more conspicuous.
• One more thing, All the feeds are dynamic, so they know everything about tags and stemming. (Again, nothing new)

• Added a global tag cloud (Previously, we only had per user tag clouds).

• 2 new settings (Hide upmodded and Hide downmodded) added to the preferences page

• Subscriptions, a much awaited feature.

• Added a recent comments page.

• Added 2 new settings to the preferences page.

• Support for exporting bookmarks.
• Added a javascript based quick tour of features for new visitors.

• reddit style self posts (i.e Polls), now supported.