Make Yourself Known With A Bio

I just finished implementing another new feature -- bios.

Now when you look at your public page, in addition to your identities you will see a tabstrip above your identity list. Clicking on the Biography tab will take you to the newly created bio page.

What Can I Put In My Bio?
You can use this bio area to tell whatever you'd like about yourself. All I ask is that you keep it clean -- that is, please remember that this is a public page so don't get too raunchy and make me have to play policeman so that my site doesn't get shut down. Sorry that I had to say that, but it's better to be safe...

As for what you can technically do in this area, the answer is pretty much anything. You can type regular text (even UTF-8 unicode for our chinese members!), you can bold, underline, link to webpages, link to and display images...the HTML editor that I found and implemented is pretty robust. It does make use of Javascript, so trust me that life will be much easier if you have Javascript enabled for this page.

A Response To Requests
I fielded a few questions in the past about being able to have more than one website listed in your profile. If you look now, I've actually removed the "website" field (the profile page used to have name, location, website...) and I've moved that text into everyone's bio area as a starting point. Now that this bio text area is available, you can tell everyone about all the other websites that you own by putting that information in here.

How Do I Get Started?
In order to edit your bio, you have to be logged in. When you log in, you are still taken to your identity maintenance page, and you'll notice that I have changed things around a little bit again. Now in the right-hand sidebar you will see some links to take you to various pages. From here you can click on Profile and you'll be taken to a familiar looking profile page. It made logical sense to include the bio editing capability on this page, so that is exactly what I have done.

To edit your bio, just click inside the editor area and start typing.

Remember, your bio and all other profile information is completely optional! However, if you provide information there, it will be displayed. There is no "private" profile setting. So if you want to share this info with others, then go ahead and fill it out. But if you do not want to share any personal information or bio information, then just leave these areas blank.

Enjoy!

Feature Update

Yesterday I added a couple new features to onXiam. They are two "gadgets" that appear in the right-hand sidebar, one on your public user page and the other on the site directory page.

Similar People
On your public user page, you should notice a gadget called "Similar People" in the right-hand sidebar. Take a look at my page for an example.

I'm starting to have enough data into the system that I can attempt the creation of interesting queries to see what the data can reveal. This is the first one that I've made. The way it works is this:

I check to see on which sites you have an identity -- excluding any you have set to private.
I compare this to everyone else's site lists to see if there are any "perfect matches" and then display to you the top ten "most similar" people to you along with a count of how many sites you share.

My hope is that this may get you to explore these other people's profiles and find that while you may share 10 of the same sites, perhaps they are active on a site that you had not heard of, and as a result of this you may find something really interesting that you want to join.

Most Popular
This one is exactly what it sounds like. I've simply written a query to count which sites have the most identities associated with them, and I'm displaying the top ten results here along with the person count.

I think that in the future, I'm going to be able to make some more interesting connections between the data, so consider this just the first pass. Is there anything in particular that you would like to see? Use your imagination and think about how this data could be tied together and presented in interesting ways. If you come up with anything, please leave me a comment!

Until next time...

New CSS

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reworking the CSS layout for onXiam. I've incorporated a more traditional style two-column layout which will greatly help me in the future in regards to screen real-estate for upcoming features.

While I was restructuring the layout, I also worked on unifying the look and feel of the pages a bit more. Usually when I do something like this I miss a spot or two, so I'll be keeping my eyes open for this and any "stragglers" will be fixed soon.

One thing to make a note of is that as part of this update, I have also changed the People and Sites pages to now behave as directories. You'll also notice that in the sidebar, I now have the lates people and latest sites displayed in their new home. As such, the link in the primary navigation to the "latest" page was just not needed any more, so it has been retired.

Take a look around and feel free to leave comments about the layout. Hopefully the "why" will become more apparant once I get some of the new features built and released. But for now, just know that this new layout is just step one in a multi-step plan.

Oh yeah, I ran out of time and I didn't finish a new look for the homepage, but that is coming too. I need to bust out a graphics program...

Growing Pains

You may have noticed that I've been a bit quiet lately. Well, that is pretty much due to both my day job and my evening / weekend activities. But last night I found myselft staying up way past my bedtime working on the site.

Over the next day or two, you may notice some visual changes to the pages. I'm reworking the general layout of the site via CSS in order to prepare for some of the upcoming enhancements that I'm currently working on. So if you notices some strange appearances from time to time, rest assured that all will be well soon enough.

The positive comments and acceptance of the site has really motivated me to keep pushing forward to make it even better. I only wish there were more hours in the day that I could work on it! I'm anxious to get some new features rolled out, so this CSS rework as well as some behind-the-scenes things that I've been doing are just necessary parts of moving forward at this time.

Put A Face To That Name!

Ahh summer...the time when I spend my days working, my evenings training for a marathon and my weekends out of town attending weddings. But I am back in town and I was able to spend a little bit of quality time with the source-code, and I am happy to announce a new feature for onXiam.

You've chosen your name, you've tied your identities together, now you can now upload a photo to your onXiam profile! For an example, you can check out my profile. Ideally this would have been ready when I first turned the site on, but it was a time-crunch and it just slipped down the priority list. But now it is ready to go, so get to uploading, people!

FYI, in order to simplify my life in the future, I decided to use a pre-determined size for all user photos. That size is 150x150 pixels. Big enough to see, but small enough to fit in columns should I create a new CSS for the site. If you want your user photo to be absolutely perfect, you could crop it beforehand to be the desired 150x150 dimensions. However, cropping beforehand is not absolutely necessary. Here's how it works:

The image you want to upload:

• Is smaller than 150x150
• The image will be displayed at its native size in the middle of a 150x150 area
  
• Is portrait and taller than 150
  
• The image will be automatically resized to a height of 150px, preserving aspect ratio
  
• Is landscape and wider than 150
  
• The image will be automatically resized to a width of 150px, preserving aspect ratio
• Is bigger than 150x150
• The image will be automatically resized to fit the 150x150 area, preserving aspect ratio

I hope this works ok for everyone. I'm anxious to see everyone's faces!

More to come...

New Badge: The 80x15

For those of you who have websites and blogs and enjoy the clean look of 80x15 pixel badges, I created an 80x15 onXiam badge just for you!



Feel free to copy this image, make it a link that goes to your onXiam profile and put it up on your sites! It really seems that a good number of people that have been joining onXiam are doing so through discovering about it via blog posts, sidebar badges and people including links to their onXiam profiles in their message board signatures (check out the signature for lightsup55).

This badge is also available on the onXiam Promote page. For those interested (or those who want different colors), I created this badge using this cool service.

Unknown Tales

I wanted to take a moment to thank TheWorldofDan for his help yesterday in testing the new "add a site" functionlity. TheWorldofDan (or Daniel Hollands) contacted me in regards to a new site that he was launching and asked if I could include it on onXiam. I said "Sure, but maybe you help me out by testing out the "add it yourself" functionality. Daniel obliged and we shared a nice email correspondence afterwards.

Daniel's new site that he added is called UnknownTales. It is a site where users generate "interactive fiction" -- I likened it to a "choose your own adventure" type game, except that the users actually author the adventure. It is a really neat idea, and I wish him luck.

One really interesting piece is if you look at the user profile page on UnknownTales (here is Daniel's), you'll notice that he has a place for you to link to your onXiam profile. I want to thank Daniel for including that!

One onXiam user, Baba, has already emailed me saying that he found UnknownTales through onXiam and he loved that there was a place for him to put his onXiam username in his profile. So there you go, Daniel! People like you site, and they like having the ability to add their onXiam username to their profile! Everybody wins! YAAAY!!!

So if you haven't yet, you should go take a look at UnknownTales. It really is a neat idea, and it will be interesting to watch the talents of writers everywhere help it to grow. If you like it, go Digg it! And don't forget to subscribe to the Latest Sites feed to keep an eye on new online communities that are added to onXiam. You too can discover fun new websites and communities to join!

New Features: Sites and Site Details

Last night I launched the much-overdue add a site functionality. In addition to this, I also created a couple other pages. These have actually been up for a few days now, but this is the first chance that I've had to write about them.

In the top navigation, you will now see two new links: Sites and People

Sites
Previously if you wanted to know what sites were available on onXiam, you had to do some searching. Literally. If you went to the search page, you could see all available sites listed in the site dropdown box. But that wasn't the most intuitive place to learn about what sites are available on onXiam. Something else was needed.

I decided to create a site directory of sorts. This is a simple alphabetical list of all sites that are available on onXiam. Each of these site names is also a hyperlink. Clicking on a sitename takes you to a detail page about that particular site. Here you will see a headcount of how many of that sites' users are active on onXiam as well as both their onXiam username and their username on that given site. Whew! That was a mouthful!

People
I toyed around with the idea of making the people page a directory of sorts too, but for now I've decided against it. Instead I'm displaying the most recent people to join onXiam as well as a link to the search page where you can search for specific users.

All of this is just serving to "round out" some parts of the site that I wanted to have live when it launched, but due to time constraints I just wasn't able to have it all ready. But with this done, and with the "add a site" functionality launched, now I'm going to try to get to work on some more interesting and fun things for the site!

You Can Add Sites

Last night I put up some new code that will allow onXiam users to add sites to onXiam. Once you submit the necessary site information, the new site will be available for all onXiam users to add to their profile.

This was probably the feature most requested since I launched onXiam. I had always planned on making it available, but the problem was that the process of adding a site is somewhat complex, and I have been struggling with how to make it easy enough that anybody can do it without confusion or error.

Well, I tried and I tried. I coded it one way and then another. I asked my friend for his opinion and tried that way. Then I tried a few other approaches. All of them had shortcomings. You see, the problem is not so much adding a site -- that part is very simple. The problem is creating links to user profile pages on these user-submitted sites. Why is that difficult? Basically it is because URL schemas are different from one website to another. Some websites feature the username in the URL (such as http://www.onxiam.com/people/kevinkmp/), while others do not have usernames in the URL but instead have some other kind of identifier (such as http://upcoming.org/user/22400/). That makes creating these "site templates" quite difficult to put completely in the hands of any user.

You see, in order for onXiam to link directly to people's profile pages on various sites, I have to abstract these profile page URLs. For instance, I have to take the URL, figure out what is the username in it, then replace that with a placeholder of sorts. Now whenever an onXiam user says "On [this-website] I Am [username]", I then merge their username in place of the placeholder in the URL, thus creating a direct link to their profile page on that site.

Now try to imagine how I've been building the "Add a Site" page. It necessitated text such as:

• Do users on this site have their own profile page? If so, what is the URL of one of these?
• What username appears in that URL?
• If no username appears in that URL, then what other identifying code does appear in there (hint: look for something like http://www.website.com/1234 -or- http://www.website.com/page.html?u=1234)

As you can see, this has the potential to be quite confusing, and when I had a few people test it, that was made all the more obvious. So finally I took a step back and re-evaluated what I was trying to accomplish with the "Add a Site" feature. When it came right down to it, the main thing that I was trying to accomplish was to make new sites available to onXiam users by getting them to appear in the dropdown box on the "add an identity" page. The ability to link directly to profile pages is a fringe benefit, not a core requirement.

With this in mind, I thought about how long this had been taking me to build vs how long it would take me to review new sites as they come in and handle providing the direct profile links myself. I decided that since I had already spent two weeks trying to get this feature built, it probably wasn't worth it. Simplify! I would simply provide users with the ability to add a new site. By default, when users add an identity on one of these new sites, it will link to the homepage of the website. As new sites are added, I will be monitoring them and when possible I will tweak them to link directly to user profile pages. I don't think it will be too difficult for me to stay on top of this, and quite honestly, I think it will be easier in the long run.

So there you have it. If you are an active member on CommunitySomethingOrOther.com and you want to add it to onXiam, now you can do so by providing two little pieces of information: Site name and Site URL. So for example:

• Site name: Onxiam
• Site URL: http://www.onxiam.com

That's all there is to it. Upon submitting the site information, it will then be immediately available to all onXiam users. I hope this is the beginning of tapping into the knowledge of the users in order to make onXiam grow even more.

Chinese Coverage

About a week ago I noticed that quite a few of the people joining onXiam were stating that their location was somewhere in China. This happened frequently enough that I decided to do a little digging.

As far as I can tell, I think that this post was the beginning of it. Unfortunately for me, I can't read it. I tried running it through an online translator, but the resulting text was not all that understandable. Well, I'm thinking that this post made some interesting points or something like that because as I said, I've been seeing a steady stream of people in China joining onXiam.

So I just wanted to say welcome to all new members, especially those of you joining us from China. I hope you like the site.