The BlogShares Blog

In the midst of this week's fierce competition, David "Rutty" Rutt held raffle ticket 87421 and wins the shirt. Rutty, email me your address and indicate which BlogShares admin you want to sign the silly thing. Next week's raffle is for a million text ads on our front page. BlogShares has a new proxy server running in front of Apache, which should help us avoid the wedges we've seen this past week. As always, the whole team is kicking butt to keep up with exponential growth.

Posted by jay at 12:44 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

More than 1 MILLION HITS and 100,000 UNIQUE VISITORS this month. Whew! Update: Make that 150,000 visitors and 2 million hits. Double-whew. If you would like to help BlogShares improve its help system, see this bulletin board thread. In case you haven't seen them, there are now micro-surveys with chip rewards in the right-side toolbar when you're logged in. More on surveys here.

Posted by jay at 02:26 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

Congrats to sprimal, who bought the pot and won this week's raffle for a HaloScan premium account. Update: He's auctioning it off for chips. Everybody else got a one-time 25 chip credit for fun. Members of the BSEC and Math Team have received their first weekly 1000 chip stipend. Don't spend it all in one place.

Posted by jay at 12:09 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

SubWolf is making progress on the search function, and chip transfers should work in IE now. Vote moderation also got some compatibility fixes. Moderation now requires 100 karma (up from 25) and new voting standards documentation is in the works.

This may sound repititious, but we've made another slew of performance tweaks, resulting in a system that's faster on average, even though it does more and the database has doubled in size -- BlogShares now tracks over 1.1 million blogs and 4 million interconnections.

Posted by jay at 12:14 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

"Just kidding... I'm not pregnant, it was just a ball" -- Jamie83, winner of the last caption contest. Runner up: Luis was the only one who had seen where the ball rolled out of bounds. "There's no cup worth getting dog crap on my head," he thought. -- Guither Honorable mention: "Get in my belly!" -- Zim Winners, leave your BS ID on the thread for your chip prizes.

Although we never planned exchanges between B$ funny money and BlogShares chips, a market has sprung up on the bulletin boards. Laila is offering B$1 Billion per 1000 chips, up from earlier bids of 10k each.

Seeking opinions: Shorthand symbol for 'BlogShares chips'? B# Bc c# wot?

Posted by jay at 08:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (10)

The original winning ticket number was 15259, owned by Kyrah Jade Kayles, but her name is thrown around so much around BlogShares I couldn't keep a straight face to announce her as THE winner.

So, we'll give Kyrah the prize (extending her existing membership or granting it to another member) and do a second drawing.

(1 minute later...) Charlie is our second winner today. He recently became an Industries moderator and has shown great enthusiasm over this past week, as evidenced by his holding about a third of all the tickets bought. Thanks to everybody who participated! Play another raffle.

Posted by jay at 05:09 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you link to BlogShares, put your userid in the URL to get five (5) free chips when you send someone new to our site.

http://blogshares.com/?referer=YOUR_BLOGSHARES_USERID

For instance, to give SubWolf chips, http://blogshares.com/?referer=6448

You can spend these chips on ads on our front page and various raffles, with more in the works.

The system tracks IPs, so any given user will only be able to give you (or any other BlogShares member) one award in any 8 hour period.

Posted by jay at 11:25 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

For several months, registered members have improved BlogShares by voting on which categories ("Industries") a particular blog belongs in. When moderators review and approve those votes, the members have received karma points. Till now, the only use for karma points was to become a moderator yourself after accumulating 25 points.

Now those karma points also give you chips, at a rate of 25 chips per karma point. You can spend these chips on the text ad block to the upper right. More ways to earn karma and spend chips are in the works.

You now also earn karma (and chips) by moderating votes, which had previously been a completely volunteer task. Moderating will result in 1 to 3 karma points (25 to 75 chips).

Point values and exchange rates will fluxuate according to the site's needs and we'll probably make keen little graphs of it.

Update: Win a BlogShares premium membership in this week's chip raffle. Good luck!

Update 2: Win chips in our caption contest.

Bonus: A javascript view of the industry hierarchy is in beta.

Posted by jay at 10:04 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

1. All outstanding BSEC resolutions have been... well, resolved. Apologies for the delay.
2. Sorted out a few shortcuts this morning. Try the following examples...
   
   Keyword Search (cheeseballs): http://blogshares.com/cheeseballs
   Keyword Search (princess): http://blogshares.com/princess
   Blog Listing (Mine): http://blogshares.com/?http://www.subwolf.org/v2/
   User Profile (6448): http://blogshares.com/?6448
   
   To clarify - keywords, just throw words after the main site address. Blogs, a question mark followed by the blog URL. User profiles, that same question mark followed by the User ID. Laziness has new meaning. ;-)
3. We fixed an old email bug, so message bodies in your system notices should be OK now.
4. Much more to come...

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 09:52 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)