proposed a solution to the problem of seeing
unwanted content on Muti. (I dont want to call it "spam"
because I see spam as something different.)
There was quite a bit of discussion around it at the
time and in subsequent discussions with Stii we
have decided to try out a "friends" feature in Muti.
Those who use Twitter a lot will be very familiar with
this concept as it works in a very similar manner.
If you view someone's profile on Muti, by clicking
on their name below a submission, you will see
a new button marked "Follow xxxx". If you click on
it you will now have added this person as a friend.
In the right hand column, if you are logged in, you
will now see three new menu options,
"Friends", "Friends Posts" and "Followers".
Clicking on "Friends Posts" you will get a filtered
view of only posts made by people in your friends list.
Stii's original proposal was for "ignore lists"
instead of friends lists. These work much the
same way but filter in the inverse. "Ignore" lists may also
be implemented in the future but lets see how
the friends feature works out first. Its still very
basic and of course we will need to add the ability to
search for friends and so on but that is for
another day! Thanks Stii, for the suggestion and
thanks also for all those that I discussed this with
and gave me ideas.
10 Feb, 2007
Thanks to the amazing talents of Greg Porter,
muti readers no longer have to undergo the
severe pain of the 'salmon' theme. I know
this is long overdue and there will be more
changes to come. The views available on the
top navigation banner have been rearranged a bit.
You may notice that 'most liked', 'most viewed'
and 'what's new' are no longer there. Whats new
is now linked to from the bottom footer.
The other two views 'most liked' and 'most viewed'
will reappear as soon as I can figure out where
to put them.
The hunt is also on for a new logo. A few talented people have
already sent in some excellent samples and
I will shortly put up a page displaying them.
Then one of them will be selected based on user feedback.
Feel free to send in any others, I know there
are talented artists out there!
8 Feb, 2007
Thank you to the overwhelimgly great feedback
and response on the new tagging feature. Many people
have done a great job in tagging new submissions
as well as sifting through older stuff and tagging
those as well. I have been rediscovering some great
old posts that I had forgotten about!
There is now a brand new search routine in place that
also takes the tags into its scoring and the
search results are now dramatically improved.
There will be improvements coming in the tagging
as well. I have a couple of suggestions, shall
we keep the tags in the singular? Already we
have 'forum' and 'forums'. Lets choose one
or the other and as a general rule use that, I
am leaning towards the singular.
4 Feb, 2007
In keeping with the
release early, release often
mantra of 37signals and others, I have put on line
a very early version of the tagging capability in muti
in order to show what is coming down the line.
The basic functionality is there although there
are many features missing such as a cloud view,
similarity checking, tag suggestions, my tags
view etc. Even though it is incomplete I believe it has
the potential to add value to muti.
Please read the Tagging Guidelines
section in the
about document.
Feedback as always is very welcome, and I have
has some great suggestions already from Gerhard
over at
blik
and from Hash at
White
African.
22 Jan, 2007
A few astute readers may have noticed that
Muti now has comments. On the informational
line below each submission you will see
a new link which will open up the comments
page. Comments may also be voted on in exactly
the same way as submission are.
There are currently two different sort orders
for comments, new and top. More will be on
the way. The comments are displayed in
a 'threaded' view meaning that replies to
a comment are indented below their parent
comment. When entering text in a comment, urls
and other basic markup are possible using
the
Markdown
language. The comments functionality is very new
and there may be a few glitches here and there.
If you experience any problems, please use
the
feedback form as always.
23 Nov, 2006
Registered users may notice several look and
feel changes when logged in. This is part of
a gradual makeover of the look and feel of muti
that will be happening over the next few weeks.
From time to time you may notice a glitch or
two! Please bear with us.
22 Nov, 2006
Some time in October 2006 muti reached its
2000th submission. The site continues
to grow at a slow but steady pace. The stats
view now sorts by number of submissions and
then by 'kudus' (karma) gained or lost in the respective
week, month and all time list. The top submitters
overall is now limited to the top 30. This month
also saw the launch of a Singaporean news
site based on the muti code. You can find it
here:
2sg.
10 May, 2006
Firstly, sorry about the long silence and
long delay in any new features. There are
a few small changes. Firstly, the USD/ZAR
exchange rate that used to appear in the
top right corner has gone. Nobody ever wrote
to me saying they absolutely loved that so
I am guessing no-one will miss it and
it was always kind of ugly!
Secondly, the search feature is now a bit
more useful in that it will also try to match
by url and by submitter name. Several people
have submitted searches using either of those
which previously came up with nothing so I
think this will be a welcome feature.
Thirdly, and this is the biggest change although
its not very visible, there is a complete new
cacheing algorithm in place that should make
page loads much faster particularly as the
number of submissions increase. Its currently
only enabled in the 'new' view but if all
goes well I will be enabling it throughout.
If anything stange starts happening please use
the
feedback form.
Thanks to all of the regular submitters who
have been keeping muti alive!
26 April, 2006
Muti got its 1000th submission today!
24 February, 2006
A few small changes: The stats page now shows
kudus earned within the current week, within
the current month and total overall. I also
finally got round to automatically swapping
the url and title if submitters accidentally
filled them in the wrong way round.
20 February, 2006
In your profile you can now select the number
of items per page.
19 February, 2006
A few minutes ago, muti reached a new milestone,
after little more than a month of being online,
the community reached 50 registered users! Of those
50 users, about 21 have also submitted articles.
Thanks to everyone for their support and kind
words in the feedback. Also thanks to all those
bloggers who have blogged about muti. Soon we
will have a links sections where we acknowledge
all of these bloggers and also the sites that
are linking to muti.
16 February, 2006
There is now an experimental
recommended
view. It shows items that have been voted up
by people with similar voting patterns to
yourself. Also new are the rss feeds for
the hot, top and new views. You will have
noticed that I am also experimenting with
the colour scheme. How do you like the new
design?
14 February, 2006
From the
stats page the user name is now
a link to that user's profile, if they have allowed
their details to be viewable by others.
Some people have asked what
kudus means and
if it is a typo. Well, no it is not a typo,
it is the karma system of muti. It was a suggestion
from ANT:
I had a
thought you should call your points system kudus as a pun on kudos- or
perhaps call them kudos but with a little picture of a spiral horned
antelope.
If you don't know what a kudu is then you can
read about it
here.
13 February, 2006
If you are a registed user, and you are logged in
you may notice that in the right hand side box
there is a new action available called
profile.
Please have a look at it and fill in some details
if you so desire. If you check
allow others to
view my details then your details, with
the exception of your email address, will be
viewable by others. (Well soon anyway!)
This is a new feature currently undergoing testing so
as always please let us know if you encounter
any strange errors!
12 February, 2006
Well muti has reached a new milestone. Over
the weekend we surpassed the 500 submissions
number! Thanks to everyone that has been
submitting and thanks to all the readers too!
The more astute of you will notice that the
nvaigation in the top banner and the right side
box are much more consistent now.
30 January, 2006
Due to the high number of posts yesterday (Thanks everyone!)
the ranking formula for the hot view has been
adjusted a bit to give a faster turnaround time.
29 January, 2006
There is now a basic search capability. Firefox users
please clear your cache in order to fully take
advantage of these new features. If you are having
problems logging in clearing your cache and/or
muti cookies will resolve the problem.
24 January, 2006
The ranking formula for the
hot view
has been completely overhauled. It now works on
several windows of activity each with its own
weighting and is independant of the actual
score of a story. The "click" count is also
not being used to calculate the "heat" ranking
and it may fall away from the score calculation
as well. As a consequence there may be
higher scoring articles lower down in the listing.
23 January, 2006
I have noticed from the logs that many users
are not making use of the alternative views,
"new", "top", "stats" etc etc. This is probably
an indication that it is not obvious at all that
these are clickable links, so the look may change
a bit.
The formula for calculating the "hotness" of
a story will also undergo several changes over the next
few days. Firtsly
the "click" count will probably fall away, for
a number of technical reasons that I will explain
later. Secondly the "hotness" will not be calculated
on score alone, ie the score and the "hotness" will
be two completely distinct formula's.
21 January, 2006
We now have
karma. It is a simple system
at the moment based on number of votes a story
submitted gets. At the moment nothing is being
done with the
karma value so its only
good for bragging rights. However soon it will
be used to affect the initial score a newly submitted
story has.
20 January, 2006
There is now a "mine" view available when you are
logged in. This view will show you all of the
stories that you have submitted.
Soon there will be a
karma system, but we don't want
to call it
karma. We need a more african term! How
about
pula which is more literally translated into
rain or luck than karma. Any ideas? Use the
feedback form if you
have a suggestion.
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