We’ve had a DZone Google group for a while now but it has been an invitation only group. We are open up the group on a request basis. You can navigate to http://groups.google.com/group/dzonegoogle/subscribe to join. Please provide your DZone member ID as that will help us verify real members versus spammers, et. al.
We encourage this group to actively help improve DZone and its sister sites.
Stacy – AKA 3Monkeys
I am happy to announce the newest tool from DZone, DZoneLive. DZoneLive allows you to integrate DZone articles on your site. For those eager to try it out, here is the configuration page http://www.dzone.com/add-dzone.jsp. Simply select the options you wish to activate, and copy the script to your web site. If you are a DZone member, you should make sure to supply your username as we will likely provide some type of recognition for using of the widget. Below are a few sites where you can see the widget in action.
Most of the current users prefer the ul/li scheme for rendering, however, a div structure is also available. For those wishing to style the resulting html, the outer container has a class of “dzone-links” while the individual items have a style of “dzone-link”.
Please send comments and suggestions to stacy@dzone.com.
DZone is proud to announce our newest team members, Lowell Heddings, DZone Sheriff; Stacy Doss, DZone Ambassador; Tim Yates, Linkmaster General; and Daniel Spiewak. These individuals have provided countless hours of support, work and dedication to DZone, and we felt that it was time to bring them on board officially.
Lowell Heddings is a Senior Software Engineer during the day, but as DZone Sheriff he is responsible for maintaining the quality of the content on DZone. Although each team member has the ability to block or edit any of the submitted content, Lowell is ultimately responsible for removing spam posts, editing middle-man links, and general quality control for the site. Lowell estimates that a dozen or more spam links are blocked on a daily basis.
Stacy Doss, a Integration Engineer by day, focuses on promoting the site and specifying new features, while occasionally doing a little coding. Stacy envisions site improvement then discusses them with the staff to refine both the specification and feasibility of particular features. Stacy will be writing a weekly blog entry where he will review links of interest from the past week. Also known as “3Monkeys”, Stacy has been an active member in the social networking world for some time. Specifically he was a top contributor at digg, but became more interested in the DZone model.
Tim Yates writes bioinformatics tools and develops websites in addition to being DZones Linkmaster General. Also known as bloid, Tim is a link posting machine. Able to search out obscure articles from a wide variety of sources, Tim has long been the top contributor at DZone. Tim has posted in excess of 2500 links so far, and over 1000 of them have been promoted. Tim also writes code for the site from time to time, so you may notice his handiwork around the site.
Daniel Spiewak, although officially one of the Editors at our EclipseZone.com site, is also a very active member of the DZone team. Daniel is a student at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and is an independent programming contractor. He provides a variety of services for DZone including link moderation and feature development.
Again, we welcome these contributors and hope they are only the first of a growing DZone team.
DZone has recently acquired http://bigbold.com/snippets and has launched snippets.dzone.com. Snippets is a web repository of programming code snippets. It uses a similar tagging system as DZone and was developed in Ruby on Rails. The team is working on a site redesign to more closely match the traditional DZone look and feel. Feel free to take it for a test drive in the mean time.
Peter Cooper posted on the sell at Ruby Inside:
I wasn’t really in the market to sell Code Snippets, but while talking on the phone with a friend, he mentioned he might be interested. I gave it some thought and thought his offer was pretty good. Before saying ‘yes’, I decided to do some research with a few other contacts to see if I could get a better offer. Quick as a flash, Rick Ross at DZone got me on the phone and agreed a sale within minutes. It is easy to see how well it integrates with their stuff, so I think we’re both happy!
DZone users can view the latest snippets directly from the DZone main page, as we’ve integrated the snippet site feed on the sidebar. Comments and suggestions on integrating the new site are always welcome.
In trying to provide even better service to our users, DZone is in the process of revamping our blogs. Not only will the official blog blogs.dzone.com/dzone become more of a source of information regarding DZone news and happenings, but editors will have their own blogs to impart information from any of the various Zones. Look for more news and announcements over the next few weeks.
We’d like to make it as easy as possible to give you precisely what you’re looking for from dzone. Some of you might want to track “java OR ruby BUT NOT games” and we’d like you to be able to grab a feed that gives you precisely what you want.
Building an interface to such a “FeedMaker” may not be easy, but the result would be cool. In essence you could assemble feeds that target your personal interests very specifically.
We’d like to know whether this is something you wold use, something you would value? Your comments will help us set the priority we give to this feature. Thanks!
Until now, dzone.com has lived on one of our servers that also hosts some other DeveloperZone/Javalobby services, but growth at dzone.com makes clear that it needs a home of its own.
We built a new server yesterday, and hopefully sometime today or this weekend we’ll be migrating dzone.com over to it. The new machine will run dzone.com and nothing else, and preliminary speed tests are indicating that it may perform much better than the dual-Xeon presently hosting the service.
We have adjusted DNS for www.dzone.com to have a very short TTL value in preparation for changing the IP address it resolves to. Still, you may notice a short period of hiccups while the DNS change propagates to other servers around the internet. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two for everything to settle down to normal after the changeover. TIA for you patience while it occurs.
BTW, we’d love to get some ping times to this new machine from around the world. Please post a comment if you would. The new machine’s address is 64.69.35.237 (cp8.javalobby.org) We’re also considering whether to move dzone.com from our Los Angeles data center to a facility located outside Washington, DC. If you want to post your ping times to 66.117.49.117 as well, then it might help us decide what to do. Thanks!
Single-page web aggregators are all the rage, but one of the very most popular and attractive is Thomas Marban’s popurls.com. Thomas took a simple concept and executed it with refreshingly elegant and practical style. In the short months since he launched it popurls.com has gained a very large following and has been imitated by dozens of similar sites. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Thomas should feel very flattered indeed!
It is a great pleasure to see that Thomas has added a feed from dzone.com to popurls (down near the bottom right.) We’re very excited to be keeping company there with some of the biggest and best established names in the business. There’s no doubt that the 100% developer focus of dzone will appeal to the above average audience of popurls, too. The cutting edge audience of popurls.com has a much higher percentage of developers and designers than a typical portal page.
We’re thrilled to be included on another great site, and we hope you’ll visit popurls.com yourself to see why. Thanks, Thomas!
We want to thank 3monkeys for some great suggestions on how to reorganize the top of the dzone.com pages to make key commands easier to find and to use. He sent in a mockup image of the way he wished it would look, and we liked his ideas a lot. Now it looks pretty much the way 3monkeys envisioned.
The key change is the inclusion of a tabbed menu in the green bar below the dzone logo. 3monkeys and others pointed out that the right-hand sidebar links to add new stories or get to the queue were not sufficiently obvious. Now the links for these are (hopefully) in the first place most people would look.
We have also shifted the search box to the far right, and we modified the login block a little to make it easier to get to your account preferences when you are logged in.
Subscribe to RSS Feed