Get your blog reviewed and review other blogs using myScoop

One of the latest additions to the new features that I’m rolling out on a constant basis is the ability to get your blog reviewed, as well as review other blogs using myScoop. While trying to create a “blogging community”, I’m constantly looking for ways for bloggers to interact with each other and I believe that a reviewing process may help this along somewhat.

One of the latest additions to the new features that I’m rolling out on a constant basis is the ability to get your blog reviewed, as well as review other blogs using myScoop. While trying to create a “blogging community”, I’m constantly looking for ways for bloggers to interact with each other and I believe that a reviewing process may help this along somewhat.

You can review a blog and score it according to it’s content, originality and design. Once done, all these scores are totaled and then averaged out to give a total score out of 10. In order to review someone’s blog, their blog needs to be in the myScoop directory and Only registered myScoop users can review blogs.

In order to get your blog reviewed, direct your readers to your blog page on myScoop (ex: http://myscoop.co.za/blog/32/). You can get this address by logging into your account and clicking on your blog in the “My Blogs” section within the “My Page” page.

Once your blog has been reviewed, this information will be stored in the database and will be used for ranking in the near future.

Once again, your thoughts, ideas and opinions on this matter are welcome.

Open Flash Charts and other changes installed on myScoop

I’m sure you agree, the old Google charts that myScoop was using looked quite plain and tacky. I recently installed Open Flash Charts and what a difference it has made to the look and feel of the site.

I’m sure you agree, the old Google charts that myScoop was using looked quite plain and tacky. I recently installed Open Flash Charts and what a difference it has made to the look and feel of the site.
nickduncan-myscoop

The “Live Stats” section has been modified to remove the popup window. A graph that displays the hits to your blog for the past 30 minutes and your last 20 visitors now displays in a new page. More statistics will be displayed soon. Your thoughts and suggestions here would be great.

Another new addition to myScoop, is the “Total recorded blog traffic” graph on the home page and on the blogs page. This is a global representation of the hits to blogs myScoop has recorded for all registered blogs within myScoop that makes use of tracking badges. More on this will be added to the FAQ section soon.

Known bug fix: The search bar’s width has been fixed for IE7

As always, your comments and suggestions are important to me and the development of myScoop so please keep sending them in to nick@myscoop.co.za. You can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

New “Rank” Badge Available

I received some great ideas from Galen the other day. In one of his ideas, he suggested letting users have the ability to install a “Rank Badge” on their blogs in order to let their visitors know where the blog stands in terms of the myScoop ranking system.

I received some great ideas from Galen the other day. In one of his ideas, he suggested letting users have the ability to install a “Rank Badge” on their blogs in order to let their visitors know where the blog stands in terms of the myScoop ranking system.

This is what I came up with:

myScoop myRank
myScoop myRank

You will be able to find the code snippet once you click “Manage my Blog” in the control panel after logging in. However, please note that this badge does NOT act as a tracking badge.

More badges of this nature will be added soon.

Afrigator buys itself back

Justin Hartman recently announced via the 27dinner function that Afrigator is buying its shares back from MIH. It would seem as if the original shareholders will be in full control once again, which is good news considering there will be no more “corporate” policies governing what to do, when to do and how to do. This opens up a host of avenues for the well established blog aggregator and I’m sure there is plenty of excitement surrounding this topic.

Justin Hartman recently announced via the 27dinner function that the original shareholders of Afrigator are buying their shares back from MIH. It would seem as if the original team will be in full control once again, which is good news considering there will be no more “corporate” policies governing what to do, when to do and how to do. This opens up a host of avenues for the well established blog aggregator and I’m sure there is plenty of excitement surrounding this topic.

Well done to the guys at Afrigator and good luck.

myScoop – from concept to current and beyond

Every now and again I get this sudden urge to develop something that’s beyond my reach. Enter myScoop, my latest “lets-see-if-I-can-do-it” project. myScoop is essentially a combination of most of my PHP skills that I have learnt in the passed few months and when I started with the site it was originally supposed to be a social bookmarking tool, similar to that of Muti. I’m not 100% sure of when the focus shifted to blog aggregation. Either way, I’m pretty happy of the result.

myScoop Logo

Every now and again I get this sudden urge to develop something that’s beyond my reach. Enter myScoop, my latest “lets-see-if-I-can-do-it” project. myScoop is essentially a combination of most of my PHP skills that I have learnt in the passed few months and when I started with the site it was originally supposed to be a social bookmarking tool, similar to that of Muti. I’m not 100% sure of when the focus shifted to blog aggregation. Either way, I’m pretty happy of the result.

The first stage was nothing too advanced. I wanted users to be able to submit their favourite bookmarks and let my site crawl that page, retrieve the title tag and then retrieve the first paragraph of the blog/page. The user would then simply just select a category and throw in a couple of tags and press submit. The concept was easy enough and worked perfectly. myScoop would automatically assign you a shortened URL and go on to post that URL, Title, shortened description and the first tag to Twitter. Soon after that I got another bee in my bonnet and decided each submission needed its own stats page whereby a user can view how many hits it had received in the passed 30 minutes or hits per hour for the current day.

About a week later I launched the blog aggregation side of the site with the ability to add your own blog and follow other blogs. Again, the concept is simple enough; you would submit your blog address and the blog RSS feed location, and the site would crawl your RSS feed and fetch your article information. During this stage the site underwent a bit of a face lift with the help of Bonita who created the amazing myScoop logo and some great ideas from Bryan.

There are currently 2 articles discussing myScoop in fair detail:

There will be many more changes and upgrades to myScoop in the coming months. The only way myScoop is going to succeed is if it has functionality that is easy to use and understand. The only way I can get this accomplished is with the help of YOU. So im asking everyone that uses myScoop for all your ideas, comments and suggestions. Thanks for the support!