Move over Google Reader

So it’s been awhile. First and foremost, I just want to say to those that have followed our progress since day 1, we appreciate your perseverance. Looking back at the designs/functionality of the previous couple releases vs what’s on the screen now, I wonder why you’re even reading this. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Now as for what we’ve added in this release: the ability to add your personal RSS feeds. Can’t find a blog profile on Pollis? Simply add it to your RSS on your profile page. “But Google Reader” you say, well its Google and they love trying stuff, seeing what comes of it and then they abandon ship. Google Reader is closing this summer and there’s probably a dozen other RSS feed aggregators in the works. We offer the ability to share rss articles to your friends with a simple click. Do you have dozens of pages bookmarked that you check daily and often copy the link, post it to a friend’s FB wall? Skip the search, copy and paste; just insert those bookmarked pages’ rss feed into Pollis and it’s a one stop shop for sharing and discovering content all from your newsfeed. We’re hoping we can get some traction using that feature. We’ve also added the ability to add friends (making the sharing easy), and the ability to share an RSS post (defaulted so only you can see them) to your public newsfeed. We made RSS social

Even with this RSS addition, we’re still keeping the focus on of the blogging portion of the site. We’ve added a blog chat window on each blog profile page allowing for users to openly discuss topics the blog circles around. It’s a much neater open chat forum of sorts. The ability to delete posts and block commenters on you blog page has been added, much like standard internet interactions allow with other platforms.

Our previous editing capabilities were rather unsightly for ranking your top 10 blogs, we’ve added a jquery click, drag and drop ranking method making it simple, visually aesthetic while impossible to overlap ranking two blogs the same number. When it comes to uploading profile photos, our new script allows for a custom selection of your uploaded photo. Managing your blog’s writers and admins is simpler too, a click to add or remove writer or admin privileges. We’ve also cleaned up the notifications, making it so you won’t get a notification for the same unchecked story over and over (ie if I rank your blog #1 on my page and you haven’t seen that yet, you won’t get blasted with a second identical notification when I rank it #1 again).

As always, we’re open to suggestions. I know many of you have come out of the woodwork at times asking about Pollis and giving your two cents. I’ve done my best to address all these comments and suggestions. We hope this final release is something that will begin drawing in more daily users with your help of course so we can begin expanding and bringing on more developers/marketers/ etc. Thanks for making it this far into the post and if you’re looking for content to write about, we would love to answer some questions for you to fill in a small section of your newest blog post/newspaper/e-journal or any press. If you would like to join the team, by all means contact me via email Justin [dot] fox [at] pollis [dot] com and let’s see what we can build!

What the hell is Pollis?

So you've seen statuses, tweets and hopefully an ad or a suggestion from a friend. You're likely wondering 'what is Pollis and what good does it do me?' You have your favorite news source, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, wherever and typically you browse titles that sound interesting to you. Some of these articles are actually blog posts that are featured by the news outlet. Bloggers blog about anything and everything that goes on in this world, even topics that are up to the minute events. Some of these bloggers are even on the ground in hotspots like Egypt, Algeria, Washington DC to name a few. Combining these factors, the main idea is to turn Pollis into your personalized newspaper. You subscribe to the blogs that are of interest and then get updates from them. Sign into Pollis in the morning and read your news that you want to hear about.

We've been live and accepting traffic outside our social circles since January 21st and already have a couple dozen blogs on record. So we hope you'll sign up even if you don't have a blog (yet).

Pollis Blog Scores

I swear there was thought behind the math that comes up with your blog scores. In fact, it was probably the first thing I contributed to The Pollis. When the scoring system was created I was still essentially very clueless in PHP/HTML/CSS and all the jazz that now makes up what you see on the site. However, with an engineering degree I had become well practiced in math, formulas, predictions and the creation of mathematically related systems.

But enough jibberish nerd talk and into what goes into the number you see on the blog profile pages:

First off we have three(3) main contributing factors:
-5 Star Ratings
-Top 10 appearances
-How many 5 star ratings you give out (we're trying to encourage you venturing through the entirety of the catalog, I mean that's the point of the site, right?)

First we take the average of the 5 star ratings that have been given to your blog.
Following that we have the top 10 ranking average. But wait, #1 means you're awesome which means you should get more points, right? Exactly. This took a quick subtraction of the average ranking value from 11. (If you're ranked 1 on average you'd get 10 points, 5 on average: 6 points, 10 on average: 1 point) I made it so that if you were ranked at all you get some points even if you think 10th should be worth 0. Hey, you worked hard to make it onto somebody's top 10 and 10th is still better than no recognition, so we're rewarding you with points.
Both the 5 star and the top 10 values are taken as averages from only the people that have given you the feedback. We wanted this score to reflect the community that you're engaged in, not the population of the site.

Examples:
So say you get 15 people to give you a 5 star rating and 20 people to rank you in their top 10:
Add up all the 5 star ratings and divide by 15 gives you Average Star Rating
Add up all the top 10 rankings and divide by 20 gives you Average Ranking. Subtract Average Ranking from 11 and your result is the Adjusted Ranking.

The final portion of the algorithm (only worth ~5% of your score)comes from your writers going out and giving other blogs 5 star ratings. Say you give out 10 ratings and there are 50 blogs on the site, you would get 10 divided by 50 points. 0.2 would be the value of your Ratings Given score.

The final summation and adjustment to get onto a 100 point scale looks like:

Average Star Rating + Adjusted Ranking + Ratings Given = Blog Score out of 16 possible points.

Take the Blog score and divide by 16 gives us a decimal less than 1 so we multiply it by 100 to get us a value out of 100.

This is only the first go at the ranking algorithms and I image as the site continues to grow, we'll have to adjust the equations to lessen the value of the Ratings Given portion. Personally I'd love to see all the blog writers go and visit every other blog profile page but if the site grows to a few thousand blogs and gets any traction, it'd be time consuming to keep up giving each blog feedback while keeping yours up to speed.

Hope you've enjoyed, and I would love some thoughts/feedback

-Justin

Onward & Upward!

He quit! Jake just quit. Don't worry, he's just quitting his day job to work on Pollis and its networking full time. That's dedication. Unfortunately, my 6 year college program put me a bit farther behind in student loans so I'm stuck grinding 8-4:30 for a paycheck then working nights on Pollis, which for the record I love doing. It's not to say I don't sneak in some tweets, fb posts and emails throughout the day at work for Pollis.

What's next for Pollis? Well the plan is to get a decently sized pool of users and blog readers that will attract a wide array of bloggers. Right now it's going through twitter and engaging users using #blog tag that have a blog & 500 followers or less. I figure if we can get ~500 users on Pollis, these 500 follower blogs would be more than happy to join a site that could double their readership. Hopefully from there, they bring their followers and some of their followers find additional blogs through Pollis and it snowballs.

So if you know a blogger, or somebody who's an avid reader, have them sign up for The Pollis and for bonus like the facebook page to follow the action. Soon we'll be posting a feed of blog updates from our blogs as they give us an update on The Pollis.
Facebook Page

And just as important, if not more so since we'll be giving out #PollisPromo stuff shortly:

Follow Us On Twitter

For those that are signing up for the Pollis for blogs or just readers, thank you and feel free to leave comments, questions, bug finds and general thoughts that come to mind. No filter required, just type it!

@shirefoxx
Pollis Blog Page
Metrics: As of 10:34 pm we have: 9 blogs (2 are awaiting verification), 37 users

Now what?

It was sometime about 9 1/2 months ago when we were able to say "You're fired" for the first time in our young start up's life. The developers we hired weren't coming close to cutting it which left Jacob and I with just ourselves and a little bit of cash to create a rather intricate website from essentially nothing. Jacob tried teaching himself code when he first came up with the idea for The Pollis however, he figured it would take him 100 years to learn and execute.

Lucky for him, I had taken a very basic HTML class back in 2005 (yikes, I know) and a basic C++ class freshman year of college to program a lego robotic. The technical formatting and flow knowledge of the languages wasn't there, however the logical thought process was. Before March I dabbled in php/html/css and what not attempting to make my own cool website shirefox.com which has since been blank slated and was never very cool. In March when I started the programming Pollis it was a daunting task learning everything for php/mysql/css/html as well as setting up the server. Somehow stuck to my guns and crunched through ~20 hours a week of work after my 8-4 day job.

A big breakthrough came when we got a friend of mine to give us some css layouts which looked stunning however when translated into the basic beta structure of our website looked spaced out, uneven, chopped up and a bit discolored. This wasn't the designers fault, it was my fault for accepting code used on webpagemaker and it was all structured by individual div tags and styles within each div tag.

Initial concept designs:

Followed by:

The smart, efficient way (which is how it's set up now) is to use a .css file and put all the formats into one document and pull up that document per page. Another downfall of the initial layouts were that everything was set up to be static, frozen in place on the screen based on hard pixels left and top. When applied to variable comment sizes, number of posts, and general "we'll never know how big the division is going to be" results, these formats were mind boggling to try and control. These results were all completed during our very soft and rookie launch on October 25th 2012.

Here's what's live now after much detail refinement:

The following day I departed for a week long road trip where I flew to Vegas and drove back to MA with a friend of mine moving from LA to MA. That story will be the next blog post (hopefully done on Sunday pending NFL craziness).

With the time off and not looking at code or a computer or the website, it gave my brain a much needed reset. When I was ready to take on The Pollis programming again, I realized how JV and unprofessional it looked (Not saying the current designs are state of the art, but they are a lot more fluid and consistent). Combined with the realization, Jake was pleasant enough to come up with 20 something things that needed to be changed/added. Since we were hacking away at our product, I added in a bunch of things to help make it more user friendly/simple. Ended up with near 50 todo items a few of which were 8 hour jobs in themselves i.e.: notification system, separate pages for editing blogs and user profiles, etc. Thanks Jake. But, we'd love feedback. With that, I took to Dreamweaver and started making new layouts. It was only supposed to be for the front page but once I got fluid with software and the divs and how to make everything neatly organized, the rest of the pages went by like a breeze. Once all the layouts were completed it was like I was doing surgery on the code taking bits and pieces of php and plugging them into the layouts. This operation took just under 2 months and culminated on December 21st, 2012. Yes, I finished it around 2:00 AM EST on the day of the "Apocalypse". Maybe we're the new beginning to bring some light to portions of humanity, who's to tell yet.

As any of my followers should notice, I'm actually writing a blog post instead of hammering down lines of code which means the portion of work for me on the Pollis has slowed down a bit while we try and find bugs/ get new blogs to sign up and get the ever important readers to sign up and show their blogs that they care. Plus the more blogs and the more user feed back within the site we get, the more the nifty algorithms get to be executed.

Follow the action as we go from ground zero and take off with your help.
@shirefoxx
@The_Pollis
Pollis Facebook

One More Thing Before Launch

It's starting to become a problem when I'm passing through the pages of Pollis trying to find loose ends and can't think of any from what I see. Most would see this as a job coming to a close however I see it as a new frontier where all we need now is users. Yikes. There's one major thing to complete and then for all visual purposes the first draft is done. That major thing being the formatting of the blog updates on the user pages. The rest of the work is for SEO and addressing users comments as they come in which can all be done behind the scenes.

There's no official launch point yet, just a few messages and tweets being sent out by me to bring in a couple of closer friends that blog. I figure we should try and get a small base of material before we send out the mass email to the bloggers Jacob has compiled through Alexa. com. He's spent quite a few hours reading various blogs that scored within our reach on Alexa.com. For those that don't know alexa bases a rank on # of unique hits per given time frame as well as # of external sites linking in. Example being the top 3 sites are Google, Facebook & Youtube. The idea is to find bloggers that are similar to us right now that have a small reach into their social circles and a few random search engine surfers then invite them to join the site, bringing them into a new pool of readers. Hopefully this will work in two ways, most importantly getting the blogs more page hits and readers as well as giving Pollis some wings to broaden its horizons. Although it's not official, I'm hoping that the launch date is November 4th/5th when I return from vacation.

Welcome To The Pollis!

      Greetings! So there's a multitude of reasons why you've happened upon my blog, hopefully it's because you've found a Pollis business card under the keyboard of a W.E.B. DuBois commons computer (or found us on a search engine). If this is the case you likely passed through the site which has been under coding development for several months and originally thought of almost two years ago. As of right now The Pollis is still under development (and missing a few small features) so if you see any bugs, please feel free to write me a comment on the blog or shoot me an email.

     The basic premise of the site is to offer a free platform to search for blogs you may be interested in. Why not just use Google or Bing? Where's the feedback? When you search on Google or Bing there is limited feedback on how good the content is. To summarize, there are no report cards or consumer reports of various blogs. With the blogosphere's input directly to my business partner or myself (and hopefully an increasing product support team), we hope to offer a continually updated database of blogs. We're inviting all blogosphere users and putting the power in their hands to rate and rank various blogs. The idea behind it is while time passes, some blogs become outdated or abandoned leaving room for newer ones to become a better read. With the inputs from users (5 star rating system and a  personal "top 10 blogs") mixed with some other factors we hope to give the reader base a better heads up before spending a few minutes reading something they weren't all that interested in.


    Going forward The Pollis is looking for a range of blogs to sign up and add to the blogosphere's social network. With the blogs comes readers and hopefully other blogs since we are giving out free exposure (example being the slide show on the front page of Pollis). If you've come this far from the reaches of the internet, feel free to add a blog to the site or just sign up as a reader. To add a blog it only takes a quick copy and paste of a code into your existing blog site which you can remove once you've confirmed. This process takes a minute at most (during development my count is up near 100 sign ups just for my own blog)

    All are welcome! And if you have any questions, suggestions or issues by all means leave myself or Jacob a message. I look forward to reading randomly discovered new blogs that join The Pollis.

-Justin