It has been a while since I’ve provided an updated status on various things, and since I find myself with a bit of time here at work, I might as well do so. Things have been going along quite well. Our editor has just been doing an amazing job at keeping links flowing into the system, coming up with ideas in not just making the site better for end users, but also making it easier to run (which has a direct effect on end users).
First up, DiyShare. It is taking longer than I wanted it to, but utlimately I knew it would. The primary reason for the delay has been Diysearch and the host of new functionality, bug fixes and general enhancements that we’ve made. Those took an immediate priority over DiyShare simply because Diysearch is a live production site. So, where am I with DiyShare? Well, I have a design/look-and-feel pretty well finished. I’m sure it will need some remaining tweaking, but the over-all concept is pretty solid. It, like Diysearch, is a very simple, clean and elegant design. I’m not going for the typical “Web 2.0″ candy-land Windows XP rainbow-brite nonsense that seems to have nearly sufocated web design. Yeah, Digg is not bad, but still everything looks the same! DiyShare will be completely different, but share some of the basic concepts with Diysearch.
As for the development of DiyShare, that is coming along. If I had to put a percent-complete on it, I would probably say its 40-45% complete. Most of the queries are written, all of the data objects are done, the DiyShare Engine is about 80% complete. The UI code was just started. I stubbed out a framework last week, but for the most part the front-end code hasn’t been really started.
In the coming days I’m going to post the current list of features for DiyShare in that they continue to be refined. I really am excited about this, and if we can get the word out about it, I really believe it will be unique, useful and quite valuable.
Diysearch Status - most of the major chunks of functionality are now complete and after three months the site is churning along nicely. The number of new links and users has been a little disappointing. There is just so much competition now-a-days for users, and that Diysearch hasn’t really proven itself to be completely stable yet, things are a little disappointing… but that’s only because I was hoping for the heydays of the site when people flocked to it in droves. Well, we’ll get there, it just is frustrating sometimes.
Some new features are going to be added soon. One big one is the ability to “watch” categories. You can “watch” a category and when a new link is placed in that category (after being approved) you’ll get a little tickler email saying “hey, this category you are watching just got an update.” The other big feature which is coming are the system event notifications. The code is already in place, we just need to literally flip a switch to enable it. I hope that will come online this week, but ultimately that is the editor’s decision.
Currently we are averaging about 1,200 unique visitors a week to the site, not bad, not great. Here are some more numbers for you:
Total number of approved links: 478
Total number of click-thrus: 7,055
Total number of impressions: 182,450
Site-wide clickthru rate: 3.86%
These numbers represent an aggrogate of all approved links. When there is more data, then I’ll be able to provide a weekly or monthly breakdown of what is going on, but for now this is a pretty good indication of the type of activity. I do believe, however, that that clickthru rate is higher than the average Web click-thru rate (which last I checked was around 1%). So, yeah, I think that says we are really starting to provide relevant content (courtesy of our users and editor).
I think that should do it for now. When DiyShare is launched (looking at an October 1st launch date) I’m going to be taking a break from new development (aside from bug fixes). I really really want to start promoting this thing and its always a toss up of what gets the time, promotional efforts or coding/development. To date, for obvious reasons, the latter wins out.
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This entry was posted by blinder on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006, at 12:32 pm, and was filed in site news.
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