CAT | sL News
New year, new… layout?
It’s about time SoLinkable got a little sexier, so over the next few months expect some updates to our look.
The first batch of changes have already come. You should immediately notice the new “Featured Link” at the top of the page. This replaces the ugly “About Solinkable” box, which never really fit with the rest of the layout anyway. This will be updated by admins, though I haven’t decided whether it will be at pre-determined intervals (ie. every week, 2 weeks, etc…).
Gone are the 4 sidebar advertising buttons. They’ve been exchanged for one less obtrusive (and less busy) 250×250 square. Hopefully this will result in a higher click-through ratio and make us a little more money 
The “Recently Active Stories” sidebar module also got a makeover. Firstly, I’ve upped the total number of stories to 10. And secondly, the whole story should get a blue hue when you hover over it. I really like the look of this one.
Some of the changes you can expect in the near future:
- New Logo
- New Blog Template (I’ve had enough of this ugly one)
- More categories! (Finally!)
- New category layout
- Removal of the Gravity function (I won’t completely code it out, but there is no need for it at this point)
Conratulations to us!
It’s been an interesting few months, building and promoting solinkable, but it’s starting to pay off. What started off as an experiment into the functionality of Digg has turned into a wonderfully fun website creation experience. We have had some up sand some downs along the way, a few trolls, a LOT of spammers, but it’s all been worth it.
A few other interesting statistics:
- Links submitted: 1404
- Links promoted: 745
- comments made: 255
- total votes: 2539
- Spam removed: 1932
- Average UVs/month: 2500
- Average Pageviews/month: 13000
- Technorati Rank: 274,434
- Alexa Rank: 152,167
- Pagerank: 3
Thanks to the many who have helped along the way. Here is hoping we make it to 10,000 users!
Good news everyone! Two big updates have taken place at SoLinkable in the past few days. You may not have noticed, but we were busy working behind the scenes. The two main areas of focus were security and spam filters.
First off, SoLinkable has been upgraded to SWCMS v1.1. This update offers numerous security and stability fixes, but little in the way of increased features. So, as a user, you shouldn’t notice anything at all – SoLinkable should keep working as it was before. If you have noticed anything strange going on lately, be sure to notify us.
Though security hasn’t been an issue on SoLinkable as of yet, we like to remain proactive in this respect. With the recent high-profile hackings of other notable pligg sites (ie. Design Float), security around the pligg community has been of utmost concern. As a reminder (if anyone read my old blog post about it), security fixes were one of the most important factors in our decision to switch to the SWCMS system.
Secondly, we have implemented the Askimet wordpress plugin. We have high hopes for this one. It has become one of the leaders in comment spam prevention, and we hope that transfers to social bookmarking spam as well. It is still in testing, and not completely implemented as of yet. If we find that it’s catching spam, we will turn it on fully, allowing it to automatically hold back links which it deems spammy. This, combined with the submit anti-spam tool has the posibility to greatly reduce the number of spam submissions here on SoLinkable.
Thanks and keep up the linking!
We have now completed the move from Pligg to SWCMS. This update shouldn’t be noticeable on the front end, but it’s a major change behind the scenes. It involved migrating code/databases between the two systems. So please, if you happen to find any lingering bugs – report them to us.
There are many reasons for this change. First and foremost, we believe that SWCMS is moving in a better direction than Pligg. Pligg has not seen many good advancements in code for the past number of months, and SWCMS was started by the previous head Pligg developer. Secondly, with their first release, SWCMS saw numerous security fixes that were missing and overlooked in Pligg. And finally, while we enjoyed our time with Pligg and the community, we felt as though it was just time to move on. The final decision to change was difficult (and time consuming) but we felt as though it needed to be done.
Hopefully with the switch to SWCMS, SoLinkable will see many improvements and added features throughout the upcoming months.
This will probably be the last post before the holidays, so enjoy your holidays and we will see you in the new year!
Is prettied up a word? Well, if not, I don’t care – I’m still going to use it. Anyway, more importantly, a few of the pages around SoLinkable have been cleaned up. They are as follows:
The feedback and bug report pages have been consolidated into one and (more correctly) renamed to “Contact Us“. The form has been cleaned up a bit (expect an integration with the Niceforms text fields in the near future). A drop down list of “contact reasons” has also been added in order to increase clarity and will hopefully help us to serve you and your requests in a more efficient and quick manner. The Contact Us page is always the best way to contact SoLinkable regarding any questions, comments, or criticisms.
The advertisement information page has also been redesigned (for the better). It now contains more information aimed at potential advertisers. The new page has information about what SoLinkable is, who reads SoLinkable, and why a partnership would be beneficial to both parties. The plan for this change is to fully monetize SoLinkable, which we will then use to get our name out there and ultimately help the community grow. If any of our users have any ideas or thoughts on finding advertisers, we would love to hear them.
In other news, the Top Karma sidebar seems to be working. I’ve noticed that quotations and Baldydog have both taken advantage of the free contribution bonuses (ie. a free link). Keep up the great work guys.
Just a quick note on what I’m working on releasing in the coming weeks:
- The number of submissions allowed will be directly dependant on a users Karma. This is an attmept to curb spam by users who, upon registration, immediately proceed to submit a bunch of blogspam, and then never visit SoLinkable again. I want to keep this site clean and relevant for the regular users.
- A new Statistics page (alongside the Top Users page). This will have a more in-depth view of the recent (and hisoric) activity on SoLinkable. Maybe we will even have fancy pie tables and graphs…