As many of you likely know, I run a couple other sites, one of them being The Hao Hao Report.
HHR is a social bookmarking site for all us sinophiles that just love reading blog posts and news about China. Essentially it works the same as other social bookmarking sites (digg, netscape, del.ico.us, etc.), whereby community members submit links for everyone to vote on. If a story gets enough votes it gets promoted to the front page.
In so doing, visitors can get a quick glance at what the most popular stories circulating the English-language Sinosphere are. Simple enough eh?
Well, if you’ve not visited recently, or are just hearing about the HHR, you may have missed a major overhaul. We’ve upgraded a bunch of things and added some new features, including:
- New Look: We’re still working the kinks out of the slick new look. Let us know what you think.
- The Bury Feature: This has been a long time coming – but finally all users will have the ability to “bury” posts that are bu hao.
- An Unvote Feature: Get a little too friendly with your mouse? Vote for something you didn’t mean to? No problem! Just go to your profile, click on the Voted tab and you can take back any vote you mistakenly gave.
- Latest Comments: I love this feature on blogs, and I’m happy to have it now on here. Now when you post a comment it gets displayed for all to see on the sidebar of every page. A great way to see what people are talking about at a glance.
- Save Stories: Like a story a bit more than just a “hao” click? Worried you might not be able to find the link again? Well, now you can just click the “Save” link below each submission. Check out your “Saved” stories on your Profile page.
Tools
We’ve also updated and added some things in the Webmaster Tools section. New graphics to pepper your blog or Web site with, and a new feature that allows you to display the latest submissions right on your site! (see the Lost Laowai blog’s right-hand sidebar for an example)
As always, if you’ve any problems getting this stuff to work or are a little scared to start mucking around with code – just fire us an e-mail and we’re happy to help you out.
And still…
And just to remind you, we’ve also got:
- Revenue sharing with Google Ads (your submissions can earn you cold, hard cash).
- A bunch of handy Webmaster/Blogmaster tools to help your blog’s readers submit your stories to HHR.
- Private messaging between HHR friends.
- The ability to submit videos (from YouTube, Google Video and Xoinks).
- The nifty Tag Cloud to show you what topics are hottest.
And a whole lot more. As always, we hope you’ll let us know your thoughts about the Hao Hao Report. If you find some bugs, step on them (or let us know so we can step on them).
This is one of the handful of reasons I’ve not been posting much recently. Rather than bore everyone by blogging about how this snippet of code isn’t doing what it’s supposed to, or open source this, php that… I’ve got some finished projects coming out the pipe, and will be announcing them shortly (that’s more fun for everyone).
Thanks for bearing with me.
