Q: So John, what are you working on?

A: Glad you asked that!

I’m taking an all new swipe at the user accounts so that people can have simple name and password accounts which are only for LOL.com. I’m going to make sure that you can login with multiple OpenIDs rather than just one. And, this is the big one, I’m going to add the first new functionality to let you do something fun without having to go find a picture or a joke to post. Hopefully you’ll like it.

In the next release after that Don and I are going to give up the reins on handling submitted jokes and let everybody play. You’ll be able to vote something in as a real joke or try to keep it stuffed in a dark closet where it belongs. If you’ve got any ideas for any of that or something of your own, write it down in a comment or mail it to us. It’ll beat the daily, “How much u take 4 ur domain,” emails we get.

Shoutout to Brian Ellin

His design for a new OpenID signin page for Pibb.com was what we ripped off (with his permission) for the new OpenID signin on LOL.com. I like it a lot more and it seems like we are getting more people than ever signing in with their Yahoo!, WordPress, etc. IDs as well as getting all new ones from MyOpenID. It’s always great when people sign in and vote or add new jokes and Brian’s design made it even easier for them to do it. Thanks again.

Here’s Brian’s original weblog post where he talked about his new design: http://brianellin.com/blog/2007/11/09/pibbs-openid-signin-page/

Surprise Update

Sorry for the surprise update but I noticed a significant slowdown in the user pages last week. As a result you got to see some new changes like search on the front page, more explanatory text around voting and the image, the list of most popular jokes, etc. that I wasn’t quite ready to release yet. However, so far, so good.

Hope you enjoy the improvements because there are tons more yet to come.

So far so good

Not surprisingly more people are coming than with the old version of LOL and more of them stick around than before. Also, they click on many more pages than they used to as well. So clearly the site is a big improvement over what we had before, but better is just not good enough. I want great and it’ll take a long time to get there. However, I’ve already started making some important improvements in the site that will be rolling out in the next couple of weeks:

• An archive page that lets you look at jokes in not just chronological order but also based on how they are doing in the voting.
• A greatly improved sign-in page that will encourage more people to get an OpenID and show them how they can use an OpenID they already have if they use AOL, LiveJournal, WordPress, or Vox.
• Searching directly from the home page.
• A makeover for voting to make it clearer to new visitors. Any ideas on how to explain “Possibly Offensive” to somebody with an icon or very few words is welcome…

Of course, that’s just a start for the new LOL. There’s lots more yet to come in 2008.

BTW, if you have suggestions for LOL, please add a comment. We would love to hear from you!

It’s ALIVE!

It’s been a long road to version 2.0, and we’re finally there. Please checkout the new LOL.com.

What’s New

• Add your own jokes, you no longer have to wait on us to add them!
• Search the jokes
• Voting, Do you like it or not like it?
• Picture Jokes
• Tags, a quick way to categorize the joke and find others like it.
• Permalinks, link to your favorites
• …and more

Drop on by and join the fun.

Progression

Features and cleanup are progressing nicely. The voting system is in place so I thought I’d give you a sneak peek. I apologize for the bad image. I had to use Paint to save it because Photoshop Elements won’t load at the moment.

The green and red icons allow you to give a like or don’t like response to the joke. The yellow icon is used to mark items as “This might be offensive” or TMBO. Looking closely, you’ll also see that each joke shows who entered it and how it was tagged.

Not Quite Ready for Beta, yet.

Just a quick note. We made good progress last weekend and got very close, but there are a few issues that we want to correct before we start the limited beta. We’re down to cleanup and automation, so it shouldn’t be much longer.

Stay tuned…

Beta Rollout Tentatively Scheduled For This Weekend

Those who have requested entry into the beta and friends and family who will help us out with testing the new version should get to try it as soon as this next weekend. I’m putting the last touches that we absolutely have in there so it will be ready.

Some things like the appearance of the votes may still be kinda clunky at that point (and the admin pages on our side are definitely clunky) but it should all hang together to make a version of LOL that is a huge improvement over the old version.

Improvements will be pretty continuous through the beta from a laundry list of to-dos I’ve already got and whatever the beta testers reveal, but I’m hoping that by the first week of April we can roll out the new version for general use.

We have a size

Some of you may care about design. John was researching an age old question, “what is the predominant browser area”. The answer? 776 x 424. Basically, if we design for 776 x 424, 95% of you will not have to scroll to see the content.

Some might be asking, “where did the magic numbers come from”? Thomas Baekda’s report “Actual Browser Sizes“. In his report, he documents how he captured browser window sizes from visitors, crunched the numbers, and came to his conclusions.

Digging a little deeper, I discovered that he seems to have used a “pepper” from Mint. What is Mint? “Mint is an extensible web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.”

March to Beta

I just wanted to drop in a little note saying development is progressing at a nice pace. John is busily working on features and I made a little progress on deployment, not nearly as much as I’d like though. I’ve got family coming in this weekend, so who knows what if any progress’ll be made on the deployment side.

We can’t tell you when, but sometime in the future we’ll be having a limited beta to test the new site. Here are the requirements.

• Create an OpenID at MyOpenId.com
• Then send an email to lol.submissions@gmail.com with Beta User in the subject and your OpenId in the body of the email.