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!