2 posts tagged “features”
A new release today brings a number of backend improvements that improve Vox's performance. You won't see them, but they're there to keep Vox performing like you've come to expect.
Two additions which you will be able to see, however:
We enabled cross-posting on public Vox posts to your LiveJournal. If you write a public post on Vox that you'd also let your LJ friends know you've written, all you need is to enable an option in your Vox account and click a check box when you want to post.
When your cross-post to your LiveJournal, you'll see an excerpt and a link back to your Vox blog.
We've added twelve new themes to Vox, many of which came from our Vox banner contest. Additionally, the two winners of the Foxkeh theme contest is represented. Thanks to Michael, Kenn, Teresa, Tomohito, Taylor, Katy, and Cindy for your contributions!
A little special treat for our beta testers -- if you joined Vox prior to the official launch on October 26th, you'll have a special theme to use if you'd like to signify that you were part of Vox's early days.
Additionally, those beta testers also have a little badge on their profile page to let everyone know that you helped make Vox come to be.
A light release, but fun nonetheless. We're already working on our next release and your feedback helps! Keep it coming and keep on posting to Vox.
And don't forget about our Vox World Trip promotion! Want to win a trip to travel to the cities that Vox was born: Paris, Tokyo and San Francisco? Either write a post about what you like most about Vox or invite people to join Vox. The more people you invite to Vox, the better chance you have to win.
- Mena
Last week, I was briefly interviewed by Jason Kottke about Vox's QotD feature. You can read the interview over here. We've written about the Question of the Day on Team Vox before, but I figured that since we've let so many new people in lately, it was worth talking about again.
As I said in the interview over at kottke.org, the Question of the Day came about sort of accidentally. There was a need to have some sort of call to action on the main dashboard page and a feature that helped people get over the writer's block that is so common in blogging. So, the QotD was born.
We've seen that the most popular posts -- or rather, the posts that get the most responses -- have some sort of nostalgia factor to them. The "what was your favorite childhood candy" was the first indicator of that. Nostalgia and the ability to quickly associate an image with a post are clearly the winners for most answered questions.
However, one surprisingly popular answer was the one from this past Monday. The question about family roots and genealogy had far more responses than we imagined. In fact, not only was it answered by a great numer of Vox users, but the answers were incredibly thought-out with a couple paragraphs written on average. I know, for me, this was the question that I read every single answer. I love learning about family histories. Some really interesting ones were Anil's, Andy's, Lane's and Yoz's.
We're incredibly happy by the uptake of QotD. In the planning stages, we realized that with neglect, this feature could be our albatross. However, the excitement shown by our users has made us want to take QotD and make it even better. Look for more enhancements in upcoming releases.
But, for now, I'm totally interested in knowing what sort of questions you all like answering most. More nostalgia? More daily lives stuff? More serious questions? More media-related? Let me know. And if you have a question, post it here. If we use it, we'll give you credit in the QotD box.
-Mena
