New release 2005-10-25

This release brings some more usability improvements.

• There's now an option to display all your bookmarks in a flat structure (without the categories), just like any other social bookmarking service. Personally, I think it's really difficult to find my bookmarks using this layout. But since the other social bookmarking services have it, and it was really easy to add, if anyone likes it here it is! :-) Note: This option is only available if you're logged in, and as usual you can select to show all your public only, all your private only or all regardless if they're public or private.
  
  
• Moved the links to show 10/20/50/100 bookmarks per page and the sort order to the bottom of the page, to make room for the Public/Private/Both and Show All Bookmarks links at the top.
  
  
• If you are searching, browsing by tags or displaying all your bookmarks there's now a link "Default view" which quickly takes you back to the default layout.
  
  
• Added an option to export bookmarks using the Firefox bookmarks file format, which honors "charset=UTF-8". There were also some problems exporting bookmarks using BIG5 encoding (such as Chinese). These are now fixed in the Firefox export option (still remains in the Internet Explorer option though).
  
  
• Added JavaScript feeds in addition to the RSS feeds. So now all you bloggers and homepage owners can very easily display your favorite bookmarks on your own pages. This is still a preview. It's currently being tested by a number of users and will be documented and released to the public in a week or so.
  
  
• Added an option to show new bookmarks only, which works like the all bookmarks view but always sorts the bookmarks in descending order of creation. This option is primarily intented to be used with the JavaScript feeds so you easily can publish your most recently added links on your blog.
  

//Henrik

New release 2005-10-17

This minor update improves usability even further.

• The ratings are now shown with icons instead of figures. A bookmark rated as poor is shown with a thumbs down icon, an average bookmark is shown without icon and bookmarks rated good, very good and excellent are shown with one, two and three yellow stars, respectively. This should make it more obvious, I hope, what the ratings are and how to use them. When adding/editing bookmarks the dialogs also show these icons and they are clickable.
  
• The admin tasks (Add bookmark, export/import, etc.) have been moved from the admin menu on the right hand side to the blue area at the top of the page. The most common tasks (Add bookmark, Tools and Settings) are shown by default and if you click the More Tasks>> link some less frequently used tasks are shown. The normal/edit mode switch is the first link among the default tasks. I hope this new design helps everyone to find the admin tasks (some users missed the old menu).
  
• Some users (especially those with huge bookmark files or slow internet connections) have had problems importing their bookmarks. This should work better now.

There will be even more usability improvements in the next release, soon to appear. Stay tuned... ;-)

//Henrik

New release 2005-10-11

I have now improved the performance of the tag type-ahead feature further. This time it's a significant performance improvement, so now it should handle also very large amounts of tags well.

//Henrik

New release 2005-10-10

Another minor update with a few fixes:

• The type-ahead feature for the tags field was slow if you had an extreme amount of tags. It has been somewhat improved but I will improve it further over the next couple of days.
  
  
• Also, if using Internet Explorer and its feature for remembering form data, Internet Explorers dropdown suggestion list would sometimes interfere with the tags type-ahead drop-down list.
  
  
• Some people had problems importing large bookmark files (usually over slow connections like modem dialup). This is now fixed, I believe.
  
  
• ...plus the usual couple of hidden fixes and improvemements.
  

//Henrik

New release 2005-10-04

This is a minor update with the following enhancements:

• There's now a non-popup version of the Add2Netvouz button (bookmarklet) available. This was a request from a user and because I had most of the code ready I just enabled it.
  
  To install it log in on your bookmarks page, switch to edit mode and then select the Tools menu option.
  
  
• Some versions of Internet Explorer had a problem with the new tag type-ahead feature. The tags drop-down list was hidden under the "Rating" drop-down list. This is a bug (or is it "broken by design"...) in Internet Explorer. To work around it I changed the Rating drop-down to a horizontal list instead.
  
  
• Netvouz now only registers a click to a bookmark if you are logged on. This way I can get rid of all the clicks made by search engines etc. crawling the site. So now the Popular links page should be more correct because it's really what the Netvouz users are using.
  
  Note: The Popular page nor the click statistics does not reveal who has clicked a bookmark, it could be any logged on user. And only public bookmarks are counted.
  
  

//Henrik

New release 2005-10-02

Usability! Usability! Usability!

In this release I've focused on two usability issues:

• First is the ability to display both your public and private bookmarks/categories/tags at the same time. This may seem like an innocent change but because Netvouz was originally designed to clearly separate public content from private content it has been quite a fundamental change. This is also the reason why this new release has taken some time. But now it's here, and it's great improvement for all you users who have both public and private bookmarks.
  
  So now you can easily switch between displaying your public bookmarks, private bookmarks or both at the same time (which is the default). The setting is stored in a cookie so it's remembered until the next time your visit Netvouz.
  
  And if you e.g. display all your private bookmarks tagged "sports" and you then click the Public link, the search criteria remains so Netvouz then displays all your public bookmarks tagged "sports".
  
  If you then decide you want to modify the bookmarks displayed you just click the Edit mode link at the top of the page and your bookmarks page is decorated with the edit options making it very easy to update your bookmarks.
  
  To distinguish between your public and private bookmarks/categories, your public ones are displayed in blue while your private ones are displayed in green.
  
  
• The next usability improvement is type-ahead support for the tags field. When you submit, add or edit a bookmark and you start typing in the tags field you will see a drop-down list of matching tags that you can select from.
  
  This makes it much much faster to enter your tags and also minimizes the risk of entering tags similar to the ones you already have (e.g. flight, flights).
  

Let me know if you spot any problems - or have any suggestions!

IMPORTANT!
Because the stylesheet (css) is updated you should refresh your browser's cache (hit F5) when visiting Netvouz. Some users browsers cache the old stylesheet and therefore do not get the correct layout.

//Henrik