Public Voting on Celebrity Gossip goes live
People that who are too lazy to register for the site can now rejoice. You may now vote on stories even though you have not registered for the site. Early on during site development I went back and forth deciding on whether or not people should register to cast votes. Today I decided that having public voting can only make things better.
Time will tell what kind of impact this has on the site. In case you’re wondering, public votes will influence the gossip stories just as much as newly registered members of the site. So it shouldn’t be too big of a problem. The most importnat part is that it can be done in perfect harmony with registered users. That’s why developing your own site can be fun! 
At this point I am very tempted to allow anonymous voting for comments or even submitting comments. Anonymous comments could lead to spam (among other things) but on the other hand, most gossip blogs allow it. So I will ponder this and ask others for their opinion on the matter.
Comment System August Update and more
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.
- 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.
- 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/
- 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
Two new site features and a redesigned interface
- 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.
- 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.
Threaded Comment System Critique
There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 websites for the past 2 to 3+ years. Most people seem to think that web 2.0 is just shiny graphics and JavaScript. Scratch that. . . A LOT of JavaScript. The idea of nested, or threaded, comments has been around since forums first hit the web.
Browse to just about any popular site and you will notice that 90% allow some form of user interaction via voting or comments. The websites that do allow comments, maybe 1% to 5% have threaded comments . Look at myspace.com, facebook.com, youtube.com, espn.com, and flickr.com. None of those sites even ATTEMPT threaded comments. So then what sites do use thread comments?
Most of the sites that use threaded comments happen to be social new sites. Lets take a look at some of the bigger named sites: Digg.com, Newsvine.com, Reddit.com, and Netscape.com. These sites are all about user input, so their comment systems should be cutting edge and very user friendly. I’m going to also include Slashdot.org, although its a bit different than those mentioned. I will grade their comment systems on a scale A – F.
- Digg.com – C+. Comment system is unorganized, needlessly complex, and frankly… abuses javascript. (Show/Hide anyone?) It is impossible to follow a conversation because of various bars of blue colors. The site has been credited as leading the social news website revolution, yet just recently made their first attempt at true threaded comments. They promise to make more changes, but I highly doubt the site will ever clean up their system enough to satisfy most users.
- Newswine – D-. Comment system is readable but is not truly threaded. It seems as though comments can only go 1 thread deep. There doesn’t seem to be a way to hide comments with a negative score either. It is ugly and too basic. Sorry, that won’t cut it.
- Reddit.com – B+. Conversations are fairly easy to read and they have a markup language that users are able to utilize. It looks as though threads can go as deep as they want. I would give this website an “A” if the comments didn’t have so much whitespace in between them. If they tweaked it visually, then it would be just about perfect. The best feature for me is the fact that users get notified when someone replies to their comment.
- Netscape – A. The model which other sites and developers should look towards to developing a proper threaded comment system. Threads can go as deep as they want on this site as well. Readability for a conversation is very good and with plenty of comment options. Perhaps the amount of text and icons on the right side can make a reader feel a bit overwhelmed at times? Despite that, I am very impressed with Netscape’s comment system.
- Slashdot.org – B-. This reminds me of an old school type threaded comment system. There is nothing wrong with that, but just not my cup of tea. A user has to click on reply-to threads that loads another screen to read the comment. Also, the header of the comments is a bit too big and doesn’t really help with the flow. Their unique take to critique comments as “Funny”,“Informative”, etc is a great addition.
Let’s not send me hate mail just yet because your favorite site got a bad rating. Or perhaps I omitted your favorite site? In case you are wondering… I use both Digg and Reddit. Keep in mind that I do not consider myself an expert. If anything, I am barely a competent amateur programmer/web designer. However, I have developed my own threaded comment system from scratch. That is essentially the reason why I wrote this article. I had plenty of time to study what I liked/disliked from other comment systems. I would rate my celebrity gossip’s comment system but it would be impossible for me to be objective. So why don’t you guys go ahead and do that
How Popular are You?
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
Comment System July Update
Major new feature to the comment system. Users can now vote for or against user comments. I have been wanting to add this feature for sometime but kept putting it off. There have also been a few visual tweaks so comments are easier to read.
Registered users will notice the changes right away. Each comment has green ‘+’ or red ‘-’ icons that handle the voting. If a comment has less than 1 point, then it is automatically hidden. The comments that are hidden will have a “show/hide” link so you can still read and reply to them.
In the future, I intend to award extra points to users with comments that have +5 points. However, right now that doesn’t seem feasible until the user base grows.
Also, I am aware of visual quirks for IE users. I am trying to remedy those minor problems.
Updates to Comment System
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!
Celebrity Gossip for your Cell Phone
Before I get to the really really good news, let me start with a minor new site feature. Registered users at Celebritypwn can now unvote for something. This only works when you vote FOR something and realize it wasn’t as cool as you thought. You still can’t take back your vote against something and you can’t unvote a story that you submitted.
So now the good news. www.cellgossip.com has officially been launched. A fellow site member, Jenise, was telling me how it would be nice to be able to see gossip on her cell phone. I thought about it and realized thats one hell of an idea. Cellgossip should work in just about any mobile phone or PDA. I personally have not tested it, but Jenise and a few others say it looks good and the load times are reasonable.
So why is this site so good?
1) Its Free. We all know that its impossible to beat free.
2) Pictures. Did you really think I’d make a celebrity gossip site for your cell phone and not include pictures?
3) Worlds First. No other website or service offers you celebrity gossip on your mobile phone like I do. Though some places offer txt message gossip and think that is somehow fun. . .WRONG.
4) You Control it. Cellgossip is controlled by the registered users of the main site (celebritypwn.com). Everything you see there has been submitted by you and voted by you.
5) Uncensored. You know how most places give you the dulled down boring version of pictures and gossip? Well, not me. Nipple slips and dirty language is what makes gossip fun. So please be sure you are of age.
Please do enjoy it and tell your friends. Site suggestions are always welcome.
Its time for the May News Update
Before I get to the site news, lets talk about site growth. As you may or may not know, I do not pay to advertise this site. The traffic I receive is from word of mouth, search engines, terri, or other gossip sites who might come across my comments. So be sure and help spread the word. The more people sign up for this site, the more fun it will be!
Some of the subtle changes in this update include:
1) The Welcome Message. If you are logged into the site, then keep an eye out for it because its where I put important messages. Everyone else gets a message about signing up.
2) Bio Links. You will notice that PWN listing has been slightly tweaked. Next to each celebrity name there is a Bio Link taking you directly to the celebrities biography page. I found myself wondering who the people were and wanted to make getting that information much easier for everyone.
3) Site Stats. This isn’t so much useful, as it is interesting. On the right side of the site stats page you will notice a whole bunch of site totals such as comments, votes, etc.
4) Bug Fixes. As usual, there are bug fixes. Just know that it runs better this month than last
5) Image Size Restrictions. When submitting a story an image needs to be a certain size. I have lowered the size restrictions to allow smaller images. I realize not everyone needs a big image and some just want to see what the story is about.
New Site Feature:
1) Email Notifications. You can now be notified via email of any replies to your PWN submissions or replies to your comments. This is of course optional, and can be found on the edit/settings page on your profile page.
I’m still hard at work adding new features!
It’s been awhile since I’ve done an update on the site. The bugs that I have fixed the past week or 2 weren’t very significant. The biggest fix addresses the fact that some users submitted blank images. That SHOULD be fixed, but we shall see. The second fix isn’t really a fix but cosmetic changes. I modified the profile screen and settings to be more obvious and easier to navigate. It now highlights new mail to make it much more obvious. And the last fix, I made the stats tables much prettier than before
Now my favorite part. What’s new !!
1) Comments are now editable. CPWN user tizerri has been hounding me for two weeks to add this feature. Personally, I didn’t think I could add it in an easy to use and efficient manner. Well, I thought wrong. Each comment is editable for 5 minutes. To do this, simply, press the “edit comment” link and the window slides down revealing the hidden form.
This last addition to the comment system clearly puts Celebritypwn above ALL others. I’d like to see someone show me better!
2) Similar PWNS. Each PWN shows similar stories of interest related to the one you are currently viewing. A subtle change like this can go a long way.
Thats it for now.
