The most common email we receive is regarding the implementation of the voting widgets. Many of you have also expressed interest in a smaller version of the widget.
So, our Voting Widget now has company! A smaller version of the widget can now be added to your site We are now making it easier for everybody to add the widget and also enhancing the look and feel of the widgets.
And you don’t need to be a scientist to figure this out. Just follow the directions on the voting widget page and you will have a shiny new toy in no time - http://www.indianpad.com/about/widget…
In the coming weeks we will start filling in the empty grey boxes you see on top of every page. Currently these are only available (for free) to users who have won ‘Ipadder of the Month’ in the past.
We plan to keep a box for the user who wins ‘Ipadder of the Month’ while other boxes will feature paid advertisers. We are still testing these spots and will provide more updates as we go along.
The site now features advanced caching and code reuse that should enable us to be faster and lighter. There are numerous bug fixes and new features in this release. Some of the salient ones that you will come across are the following -
- Automated thumbnails and caching of posted images
We have a large number of posts with images where the original site is removed or down. This breaks all the image links that are on our site. We now plan to cache those images locally so that this does not occur.
We will only cache images that are enclosed within textile tags (i.e. you use !http://image_location! to post image). Read more on textile tags.
Copyright Concerns
- We only cache a medium quality image.
- We automatically add a tag on top left corner that refers to the original site.
- A link back to the original image is also added automatically (the user can over-ride this using textile tags -
!http://image_link!:http://link ).
- If you don’t want your image cached and served by us then you can use the standard ‘img’ html tags.
- Site Cloud
We have another new feature called Site Cloud that aims to recognize sites that are posted here. You can slice, dice and analyze this data in multiple ways to find the leaders in every category or date range.
- Expanded View
Most of our new features are based on user feedback and this one is no exception. aacool mentioned on this post that an expanded view of the site may be useful for casual readers who want more information at a glance before they vote.
You now have an option on your profile page to enable or disable this feature. Please note that we reduce the stories to 15 a page when you choose the expanded view and this is useful only if you are on a fast broadband connection.
As always, with so many new features you may find some unforeseen bugs and we encourage you to contact us regarding those. We are here to make your padding experience more enjoyable…
Over the last week we have made a lot of changes on the submission process. Most of them are behind the scenes whereas some have been created to help you in submitting stories.
- Page Title displayed while submitted links - Some of our users may remember that we used to create story headings using the title of the page you link. However, we stopped doing that as users were not editing the titles at all. Now, page titles are displayed under the link once you try to submit a story. This may help you in creating a title without going back and forth.
- Redirects not allowed - We have recently started compiling a list of sites that are automatically moved to the adult section. Along with that we have also restricted sites that are cloaked. for e.g. If you cloak the url of your site using tinyurl.com or any other such service then your link will not be accepted.
Its come to our notice that some stories posted in the general section link to sites that have ads or content which is not suitable for minors.
Therefore, we have added new filters that will move all stories from such sites into the adult section. This may also move some regular stories from these sites to the adult section. In such cases, please note that even though the story is not rated mature the site may be featuring adult themed ads or content.
Please let us know if you have any concerns or comments.
There has been a recent surge in voting by new users and this has led to a large number of stories moving to the front page.
Therefore, we are increasing the karma limit that is needed to appear on the front page. Stories will now need a karma of 75 or 9 votes by registered members to appear on the front page.
As always, your comments and views are welcome and appreciated.
There are many users on IndianPad that are only interested in items from a specific category. To make their browsing a bit easier we are adding some new features to our category pages.
- Category Pages now open in their own tab. This tab is temporary and is only displayed if you click on a category. e.g. Sports
- All category pages now have sub-tabs that categorize stories as Popular or Latest.
A quick small change has been made to all pages on the site. If a story has been voted down then the reason will be shown with the number of votes in front of it (this is visible at the end of the page along with the ‘Voters’ section).
This may help the story authors figure out a reason if a story is voted down without a comment explaining the reason.
Most major sites do not allow scripts or Video embedding as that can lead to big security holes. We, on the other hand, allow users to pretty much post anything they wish in their posts.
We have been updating and adding new code over the past few weeks to overcome any XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) hacks while maintaining the functionality of the site.
However, while we are working on methods to stop any malicious scripts from hijacking your User ID we ‘HIGHLY RECOMMEND’ that you start using ‘FireFox‘ and install the ‘NoScript‘ Plugin. This will help you stay safe and secure on this as well as other sites.
Please use the following settings once you install NoScript for the site to function properly.
Many users have confessed confusion over how they can format story text or comments to include links or pictures. We have now updated our textile help to provide extensive help that has been taken from our friends over at hobix.com.
Now, you can click on the ‘use textile to format text‘ link to see the help (see image below)
