chopstickles blog

It’s again been a while since my last update and it may still be another week before an in depth update is posted. At the moment within the next week or two i’ll be allowing people to test a partially public alpha version of Project-SN. This version of course is may have several bugs in it as well as in correct functioning in Internet Explorer (any version).

The new Account section of the site which was mentioned a few posts back has fully been implemented as with the updates to the User Control Panel section. Numerous bugs are still being fixed at the moment such as galleries and image uploads. They are of course protected from malicious scripts being uploaded and executed on the site.

Some notable fixes include:

• Fixed public and private profile access (top friends still being fixed)
• Fixed online status and added total time online of the user
• Improvements to the Applications section (only 1 publicly available application at the moment)
• Fixed edit success and failure messages
• Added Mutual Friends to friends profiles

Many more site sections have also been modified to use PHP as the template parser rather than a template engine which just adds extra unnecessary overhead to the application.

Some important things that need fixing:

• Delete Video Comments (no edit mode will be available yet)
• Gallery Uploads/Editing etc so it can become a public application
• Accept/Decline/Modify friend requests and friends respectively
• Member Search (needs some work still)
• Final updates to the User Control Panel (minor fixes)

A new feature which will help entice MySpace members to migrate or create accounts on Project-SN is also being researched at the moment too. This should allow for easier profile creation and save the user having to copy or retype all their profile information onto Project-SN. As this tool is early in development it may be a month of 2 before it appears on the site in a publicly accessible area.

Current Lines of Code: 17,250 (approx)
Current Version: 3.0.5a (Alpha)

Just an answer for anyone who would be curious about such a thing.

Will Project-SN spam ads everywhere and have pop ups and pop unders on every page of the site?

Most likely not.

The answer being that is because we will eventually have ads on some pages to help support the sites running costs. Please note that we will not at any time have pop ups and or pop unders. Advertisements like that are sure to deter the users from using our site over all the other social networks all over the internet. We want to keep the site as appealing and user friendly as we can to all users on the site, to keep them all returning.

Another sort of advertisement that Project-SN will never do is have the user redirected to an ad page prior to being redirected to their destination. If you are unsure what is being referred to here then think of where MySpace used to redirect users to another page prior to be redirected to the Profile Control Panel after logging in to the site.

So how will Project-SN support itself then? 

We aim to support ourselves through simple text ads on various pages on our site. We are aware that some users block these sort of ads so we have worked on alternate methods to show ads to visitors of our site. On other sections such as your Account and the User Control Panel there won’t be any ads for products or services rather only ads for artist and band promotions.

We will however also provide a premium user service to help cover the costs with this allowing the user to have access to extra tools on the site as well as being able to view high quality images and extra hidden bonuses. The price of being a premium user is still being looked into as we are unable to determine it due to the small bonus feature list attached to it.

More to come on this subject as we work it all out.

It appears that Bebo.com has just added it’s own Applications platform for third parties to develop applications for their site (alike to Facebook). There were also several applications which have been accompanied with it’s launch aswell. Apparently the same standards as Facebook were used for their developer platform allowing developers to add their applications onto either site.

After a little bit of testing and adding an application to my profile I have to say it works very well and is as easy to use as on Facebook. A good feature implemented with it all is the applications limit, only 8 per profile which should help alot with page loading times, unlike Facebook where there seems to be no limit and pages can take a while to load on broadband.

For something more in depth about it be sure to visit Mashable’s post about it.

Bebo Applications: http://bebo.com/c/apps/browse_apps