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Netvouz - Online Social Bookmark Manager - Save, Tag and Share your bookmarks

This is the Netvouz blog. To visit the Netvouz social bookmarking service go to www.netvouz.com.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

New URL syntax at Netvouz

We have a new syntax for the URLs here at Netvouz. Most people will not notice the change, but search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. will appreciate that it is easier for them to crawl Netvouz and gather the information they want. And some users may even appreciate our new, pretty URLs!

What we have done is we have reduced the number of parameters and instead included them directly in the path of the address. Here are some examples to explain the changes:

Browse by folder:
Now: http://www.netvouz.com/demo/folder/5873138918755759749/Newspapers
Was: http://www.netvouz.com/demo?category=5873138918755759749

As you can see we no longer use the "category" parameter but the category number is included in the path of the address, and the name of the folder is also included.

Browse by tag:
Now: http://www.netvouz.com/demo/tag/computers
Was: http://www.netvouz.com/demo?tags=computers

Just like the category parameter, the "tags" parameter is replaced by the "tag" token in the path. To use multiple tags, just add them like tag1+tag2+tag3.

Show a user's new (most recent) bookmarks:
Now: http://www.netvouz.com/demo/new
Was: http://www.netvouz.com/demo?page=new


Users using our Linkrolls for blogs or other kinds of feeds will appreciate that we are backward compatible with the old address syntax, so you do not need to change your blog templates, feed readers etc. immediately. However, we will drop the old syntax at some point in the future.

RSS, JavaScript and HTML feeds are still generated using the "feed" parameter, such as http://www.netvouz.com/demo/new?feed=rss, so there is no change.

Apart from this major change there's a number of small internal updates as well. As usual :-)

//Henrik

Sunday, November 19, 2006

The Big Bang Upgrade - Finally!

One may think Netvouz development has come to a complete standstill because there hasn't been any announcements about new features for some time. But nothing could be more wrong.

The last couple of months I have spent all my time migrating to a brand new server platform. And finally, today, I have done the final switch. Phew!!! (To be honest the switch actually took place a week ago but because of some "interesting" network problems Netvouz has been running on the backup servers for a week, so today we did the final switch to the production servers.)

The new platform is a complete rip-and-replace upgrade of both hardware and software. Everything except the Netvouz code and the database content (your bookmarks!) has been upgraded to brand new versions. The new platform provides us with a solid foundation with advanced capabilities we can leverage when we continue develop new features again. The future looks bright!

//Henrik, the happy developer and sys admin