Tizags Nizews



27 February 2008


The site ahs been chugging along, slowly gaining suers, most of whom seemed determined to use Tizags for link building. If it even looks like a keyword link building effort, I whack it. And guess what? No dupe URLs allowed, so once you sub it and I whack it, you won't be able to sub it again.

I tinkered with the tag cloud so that it pulls tags by date, so older tags will drop off as they age even if they have a lot of posts against them. I like it better than the pull using pure tag count.

20 October 2007


The site has been pretty stable - been working on promoting it. Added in a couple of more character scrubs to get rid of non-standard characters. Also added tab indexing on the submit for so it wouldn't tab to the character counters. Hope that will make it easier for people who like to tab to the next field in a form.

27 September 2007


Finished the Tizags rss feed. The feed serves the top 10 Tizags links from the home page. If the site continues to get more users and the demand is there, we'll add RSS to member's save lists.

21 September 2007


Tinkered with the ranking algo; wanted a little less emphasis on the number of votes and more on time.

Corrected formating error in search results page, both with the links listing and the tag cloud. Bunch more tinkering on the search page because the shiznit just plain wasn't working right..... seems to be fixed.

20 September 2007


A user asked for the capability to easily open links in a new window, so I added an icon at the end of each link listing that allows just that.

Changed maximum individual tag length from 20 to 25 characters. Individual tags exceeding 25 characters in length aren't added when a link is submitted.

19 September 2007


Found (and fixed) a coding error; was calling the wrong function to return the name of the poster when creating the 'add [username] to friends link.

17 September 2007


In a comment post on reddit, a user wished for a way to hide links, since, in that user's opinion, the report a link feature was a joke. So now on Tizags you can hide a link; simply click 'hide' on any link and the page will refresh with that link no longer showing. To manage your hidden links, click on 'profile' in the upper right, then the 'manage hidden links' (in case you hid one you didn't mean to).

13 September 2007


Added a favicon

12 September 2007


Tinkered with tag sizing to get more contrast between sizes.

Reworked the 'clear tag feature'. Now shows what tag you are filtering on (if any) and gives the option to clear it. Feedback from visitors indicated they didn't understand what it (the 'clear tags link') meant, how it was used, or what was happening when they clicked it.

Changed the new link insert to automatically add a vote from the person who submitted the link. The supposition is if you're submitting it, you're voting for it.

Added title tag to tag links; title includes number of posts that have that tag.

11 September 2007


Added a 'clear tag filter' link in the tags section so users could more easily revert back to the default link listing.

10 September 2007


Added a redirect script to always resolve the URL to http://tizags.com. 1) Keeps the URL shorter, 2) reduced risk of dupe content for www versus non-www version.

Worked out a method using an synchronous AJAX call to increment a click counter for the links, while at the same time keep direct links. So when you click a link, the click gets counted, but it doesn't have to go through a redirect to do it. Future plans include incorporating number of clicks into the ranking algo.

8 September 2007


Tinkered with the ranking algo to keep newly submitted links on the front page longer. As time passes (a super double secret probation amount of time), the links will drop until they're supplanted by links with rizank votes. As links start getting more votes, I'll have to see if the algo holds true. Goal is to avoid the situation that seems to plague other social bookmarking sites, where submitted links can pretty much be instantly downvoted and effectively 'banned' from the home page.

Changed the default from 10 links on the home page to 25. Ten just didn't seem to be anough.

7 September 2007


Tizags is live!