Celebrity Pictures with News – the blog

The time has come for CelebrityPWN to move home once again.  We are moving from the shitty MediaTemple (gs) host to a smaller company called ServInt.  What this means for you is a more responsive site and faster load times.  At least this is what I hope.

If you encounter any weird errors or problems due to the move, then please let me know ASAP.

Also, its important to mention that I have been doing lots and lots of work on the website since the last update.  I will mention all the changes in the next blog post.

Here is a special holiday update to reveal a new type of stat category, Social Stats, and a few other goodies. This has been in the works for almost a month now. Basically, social stats refers to how users interact with other users. We started with popularity, and we have now expanded it into which site users like and dislike you.

• Comment Social Stats
  • Find out which user has voted the most for your comments
  • Find out which user has voted the most against your comments
• Story Social Stats
  • Find out which user has voted the most for your submitted stories
  • Find out which user has voted the most against your submitted stories
• User Awards
  • Voter of the Month
  • Most Popular User of the Month
  • Submitter of the Month
• Gossip Site of the Month - At the end of every month, the top gossip site with the most votes will get this award.
  

Want to see the new social stats in action? Take a look at cozgotti’s profile

It is important to note that social user stats are only available for users with D-List or better. Those of you who just signed up simply don’t have enough stats for accurate results. To move up from newbie status all you have to do is participate in the site with comments, voting, and submitting stories. Easy right?

The second thing to make note of is the fact that the stats for who voted the most for your submitted stories may not be 100% accurate. The reason for this is that at the beginning of this month I had to make a change for this to be tracked more efficiently. So even though you may have 150 stories submitted, we are only looking at stories from the 1st of the month on to select who is your biggest fan. (Biggest fan for comments does not have the same problem).

The social stats will be updated TWICE every month. On the 7th and 21st.

On another note entirely, we are quickly approaching Christmas. It was about a year ago to the day when I first started work on CelebrityPWN. I started this project as a learning experience and it has been an extremely challenging uphill climb. A year later and I am still actively developing the site, which is more popular today than I could ever imagine.

In a single year I have gone from receiving a measly 50 hits per day to 3,000 to 4500 unique hits per day. In fact, CelebrityPWN has been flirting with being a top 100,000 site at Alexa.com.

I look forward to seeing what the future brings in 2008 and want to thank all the users who have helped along the way.

Happy Holidays.
- Brant

The world’s leading celebrity gossip site (in my head at least) has been down due to MediaTemple.net being a bad host.  I won’t get into details, but it took them 36hrs to reply to my FIRST tech support request to which they gave me the wrong solution to fix it.

It was completely their fault and they are trying to make it better by giving me a few months of free hosting.  So this taught me a lesson, good support is hard to find.

If you know of a web host that is similar to MediaTemple’s GridHosting package in the 20 to 50 dollar price range then please let me know.

Unregistered users can now comment and vote on stories that are posted.  This has been somewhat tricky because I want to avoid breaking the website.   I encourage people to test it and report back any odd problems they might occur because this took quite a bit of re-writing of code (and head scratching) to make work.

If you want to be able to keep track of your voting history, message other users, vote for comments, receive comment notifications, or submit stories then you will have to register for the site.

Many of you might be thinking okay, so unregistered users can comment. . . So what?  Well, this gossip site that I have created has NEVER been done before on any website. Not Digg. Not Reddit. Not Netscape.  I have created the first hybrid user driven site that allows unregistered and registers users to co-exist.

As we all know, when you open up a system that doesn’t require registration, then things can go terribly wrong.  Spam and/or inappropriate comments are some of the problems that are bound to happen.  Surely, there must be a way to police all these comments without keeping the burden on just myself?

Of course there is, but I won’t spoil the surprise now.  If (and maybe when?) the flood of comments come, I intend to be prepared.  I will release another comment system update in September that will put the power in your hands.

Stay Tuned.
CelebrityPWN 

This update focuses on two things, the comment system and the rss feed. Each time I update the comment system I think to myself, “What else could i possibly need to add?”. Well, it turns out quite a few things. And I have more planned for the future.

1. Comment System Updates.
   • Each comment that is submitted now has their total of “up” and “down” votes shown publicly. (I believe user tizerri has asked for this a bunch of times.) Prior to this I didn’t even track each of these individually, so you will see some discrepancies between total points and the breakdown. But rest assured that the total is correct.
   • When a comment receives a certain amount of positive votes then that person will receive bonus points towards their level. I thought it was about time people get rewarded for being themselves. On the other hand, a user with a negative score for their comment won’t get penalized. The only thing that happens is that their comment gets automatically hidden.
   • After a user has voted for a comment, the “up” or “down” comment icon will show up “grayed out” to remind you which way you voted . Previously, you were not shown how you voted.
   • If you look at each users “Comment History” the breakdown has been. Plus, if you look at your own comment history you can now see who has voted for or against your comments. Happy now?
   • Unregistered users now see the vote icons for comments but will be prompted to sign up when they click on them. They will also be able to see the comment breakdown. Hopefully this will entice more users to sign up knowing how much fun it can be.
2. RSS Feeds. The RSS feeds have been tweaked a bit to adhere to proper formatting. Now your news reader will show how long ago a story was submitted properly (and in some cases who submitted it). Also, each story listed is broken down into categories by 1) Celebrity Name and 2)Domain Source . If you want to see what I am talking about then open up IE7 (if you have it) and go to www.celebritypwn.com/rss/

3. Celebrity Cloud. This is just a fun way to show which celebrities are the most popular. The bigger the name, the more popular.

If anyone encounters weird bugs or think something isn’t quite right then make sure to let me know. Hopefully to you guys the site looks well organized and straightforward because behind the scenes things are getting very complex (especially comments and voting!).

Also, I’d like to thank cozgotti and forbin001 for their hard work.

Enjoy Celebrity PWN

1. Private Messages. Finally you are now able to message another user on the website. It has been something that has been talked about for awhile, but finally added ths week. Private messages here show you if/when the user has read the message sent.
2. Profile DropDowns. This is only accessible to registered users so I will provide a screen shot below. Each user will have a [+] next to their name with more options such as “Send Message” or “View Comments”. As users get more and more features, this dropdown menu was needed to make quick navigation much easier.

The site has undergone a rather significant facelift in the past week. I have been playing around with photoshop for several months now and decided to redesign some of the interface and graphics. If you look at the picture above, I have enhanced the thumbs up / down icons to make them more visible. The header image, navigation bar, and background image have all been redone. Enjoy the much much prettier celebritypwn.

No, I don’t mean how popular you are at work or at school.  No one cares about that.  I am talking celebritypwn popularity.  Of course this matters most.   The idea for celebritypwn popularity is pretty simple, if people like what you say then your popularity will increase.  Now users can compare themselves for highest level or highest in popularity.  I am fairly certain that no other website has this (unless they steal it from me of course).  I have to thank terri for the idea to bring this to the site.

Now, its time for a list of changes and tweaks:

1)    Stats Page.   Due to the new category of popularity I had to make changes to the Site Stats page.  There is now a page for Site Users and Site Celebrities.  On the site users page you may sort by Level or Popularity.

2)  Comment Notifications Tweaked.   On the “Comment Notification” page, users will be directed towards the exact comment that was replied to or just posted.  Previously it would just direct you to the story and you’d have to find it yourself.  This began to get very confusing when a PWN would have several conversations you may have been involved with.

3) Vote Spy. Vote spy has been updated to properly display comment voting.  Previously it only displayed PWN voting.

4) Bug fixes. There were some bugs with comment voting that I still had to fix.  All is well now

The best celebrity gossip comment system just got better.  Members who have achieved level 15 (aka D-List) or better on the website are now able to add pictures and/or youtube movies in your comments.  Furthermore, images that are too big to fit inside the website are automatically resized to fit.  The images will load inside the same window with the gray background fade just like other thumbnail pictures.

A few tweaks have been made to the comment notification system.  I have increased the maximum amount of notifications to 50.  I have also made changes to ensure more accurate comment notifications.

I’d also like to say that this is the 6th month the site has been online and every single month site traffic has climbed.  Keep telling your friends!