So, we did our big roll out last night, and I’ll get the bad news out of the way first. In this case though, the bad news is also good news, kinda.
We had one bug at roll out which is related to the ‘spinning icons’ on the blogger dashboard. I’ll explain why this was in a bit when I walk through the feature list, but suffice to say that issue is fixed. Our new process seems to have worked.
The only other ‘issue’ of sorts is actually a misunderstanding due I think to a failing on part with regard to communication to you guys. There have been a number of people complaining that their page ranks etc are not updating. They aren’t supposed to update real time. We update blog ranks of all kinds every 48 hours, based on login. So, if you login every day of the week, you’ll see changes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and so on. We limit the updates that we do simply to limit the load we place on our data providing friends. We are assessing what the impact would be of reducing the update time to 24 hours from 48, and we are also looking at forcing updates for today only to, in effect, give everyone a nice clean fresh start.
Onto the updates.
The biggest change we made was to the blogger dashboard and opportunities list, and this is where the spinning wait icon comes into play. Whenever people log in we need to check various things in the database, and on external sites (including your blog) in order to calculate which opps a postie qualifies for. We look at what we know with regard to ranks, update those ranks if they are stale (see above), and hit your blogs to determine if you are disclosing etc. Previously this all happened while the blogger dashboard was loading, causing it load very slowly indeed. Same thing on the blogger opportunity list, which is why it was next to impossible for us to sort that list to show qualified opps first.
We have a new system in place which spawns a background process on the servers to do all this work for you behind the scenes. When you log in now, this process does all the data gathering PPP.com needs and then builds your dashboard views, and your opportunity lists when it’s done. The net results are that you get a much snappier interface, and we can at last sort the opportunity lists properly; you’ll notice that you’ll see opportunities you qualify for at the top of the list, and unqualified ones near the bottom. In addition, this means the ‘qualified opps’ button now works properly and displays a nice well ordered list of opportunities you qualify for instead of rag tag pages with an opp here and there.
The next biggest change is in categories. A large number of you, posties and advertisers alike, expressed concern over the categories. They were too specific before to be able to make intelligent choices about just what a blog talks about. That’s changed. We now have a set of catch all general categories as well as more specific ones. This is actually why we took the site down last night to do the deployment. A small program was written to go through all the thousands of blogs and bloggers we have, and all the opportunities, and map existing category choices into the new category selections. Since we have added more general categories now we’ve also reduced the number of categories you can select for a blog to 4. In addition, to combat a growing number of posties just changing their categories in order to qualify for opportunities (rather than to reflect what they really write about), we’ve limited the number of times you can change them. Posties can now change the categories associated with a blog once every 30 days, and no more.
All of you logging on today will also have noticed the alert system in place. This is a mechanism that enables us to quickly notify you of important information about the system. It’s actually been in place for a little while now, but last night was, I think, the first time we used to alert everyone to some of the key changes in the system.
On the advertiser side of things we now have the ability for advertisers to choose to get email alerts about their opportunities. As an advertiser you can tell PayPerPost.com whether you’d like to receive an email when a post is made on your opportunity, whether you’d like an email when your opportunity approaches fulfillment, and whether or not you’d like an email when your opportunity fills or ends. This is response to a number of pleas for a more communicative system that doesn’t require people to log in to check their campaigns.
Also on the advertiser side we noticed a number of people having problems with segmentation raising the price on an opp and causing issues with the advertiser then having to cancel their new opp, add funds, then start over. You can now add funds to cover your opportunity in all of the opportunity creation, and edit screens. We’ve also stopped the system forcing a minimum price on an opportunity. Now, when you segment, we ‘suggest’ what the price should be based on our views of the marketplace. Ultimately though we are an open marketplace and it really is up to you guys to define and control the marketplace, hence we don’t force prices on you.
Finally, we have a new affiliate program for posties called “Signup forms”. You can find it under your affiliate tools. Basically this is a mechanism for placing a PayPerPost registration form on your site for both bloggers visiting you and advertisers. So what? Well, if you do this you are helping us market PayPerPost.com so we reward you. If a blogger signs up through your form we’ll pay you 15 dollars. If an advertiser signs up through an advertiser registration form we pay 25 dollars. As always though with blogger affiliate sign ups, your newly signed up blogger must make an approved post before you get paid. On the advertiser front, you get paid when the new advertiser makes their first deposit into the system.
And even more finally, we’ve added a bunch of new affiliate badges and Review My Post badges since you all asked so nicely.
So are we down then?”500 – Application Error”
Just wondering where the GENERAL *not general man/woman/life* category is and why we can only pick 4 when it was previously stated we would still be able to pick 5.
So as far as selecting categories as a Postie, you can select 4 max — 4 being a combination of both general and specific categories, right?(p.s. glad to see you took my suggestion about the levels A Segmentation Win-Win Proposition — is it the same on the advertiser side? meaning they have to expand a button to see the more specific categories?)
Actually, I was playing with a script for technorati and we can actually pull a string for our ranks and scores directly using our own technorati API Key. What I could suggest you guys is WRITE A PLUGIN and with a CRON, get our blogs to UPDATE the Technorati daily, and then PUSH it to PPP so it gets captured properly, thus reducing the reliance to URLTrends,Technorati 3rd Party and more…That’s abit too indepth, but if needed to, I might as well get the code plugin installed, just as how AKISMET is designed.A suggestion with this is to pull a list of TAGS from Technorati to suggest the BLOGGER what cats to insert into our site instead as some are not as specific.azrin
First, I’m happy to have my technorati numbers finally show up, it’s the first time since all of this started that mine have shown up. So Thank you!However, I have issues with the four categories, because if we take one general we can only take three specialized. It’s not clear then if you should take one general say “Business” then not pick that as a specialized or if you can even just pick general categories and not specialized. If we are limited to only changing these once every 30 days…That’s going to make it hard right now for those of us trying to figure out how this works. I understand the reason for the creation of the 30 day period but doing that right now as it shows on my one blog that I logged into last night to look at – I’m now stuck for “29 more days” which seems kind of harsh given we were advised to check our categories to make sure they were what we wanted last night without being told the little 30 day warning was going to start immediately.The lag time is still a problem and hopefully that will be resolved soon.
I haven’t changed my categories since segmentation began and I discovered that most of my blogs had no categories picked. For the most part the categories that I picked have been working for me, but now I see others that might work better. However I’m afraid to change anything in case it really doesn’t work. I’ll be stuck with my changes for the next 30 days. It would be nice if you’d give us a grace period of a few days to change our categories to some of the new ones. Perhaps until this Sunday and then after that begin the “can’t change for 30 days” rule.I also thought that there would be a more general “General” category. I suppose that’s supposed to be the “life” category, but I must confess that when I’ve chosen Life as a category on other sites it hasn’t really been very beneficial because advertisers don’t seem to chose Life blogs – even though many are just that. I’d also like to be able to have 5 categories. We’ve heard in the past that we’d only be able to pick three categories so I guess four is better than three, but since the categories are still so spread out I’d prefer to pick five.
Thank you for the other catagories they do help those of us that a bit more eccletic blogs. The “alert” pop-up was a bit of a shock at first.
I agree with the categories grace period. After the update, I got the alert and thought I had to re-select my category and their was no warning that after doing so I couldn’t change it for 30 days. Now, I only have one category selected, can’t change it and can’t post on hardly anything.
I really appreciate the level of communication that PPP has shown us, recently. I no longer feel that I’m in the dark about the happenings/changes at PPP, and this rollout announcement is a fine example of this.
As an advertiser, I am a big fan of changing the minimum prices to recommended prices. I just made my first deposit to fund my advertising account in months.
My Technorati ratings are still not showing up.
I signed in after midnight last night (PDT) and changed some of my categories too, not knowing it would be locked in for the next 30 days.
I also tried to put some of the new disclosure badges on my blog last night and they didn’t even show up! I tried several colors and sizes…nothing. Haven’t checked yet today though. At this point, I am just wondering about my last post being accepted or not. The advertiser’s site didn’t seem to want to make me a blog for my local area after I filled in all my info. :::big sigh:::
My Technorati ranking still sits at N/A
I just want to say a big THANK YOU to you, Pete and your great team. I lost a Vista opp after I posted but was unable to submit due to some 500 error but Dan and his chicken hat pacified me somewhat. Dan is too cute to be mad with. Great job, guys!
My Technorati is also still n/a. And I’m with everyone who suggested a little grace period to try out these new categories. I, too, was surprised that there wasn’t a true “General” category and rather disappointed to find out that we would only be allowed to choose four.And I’ve just gotta say that the “specific” categories seem to be rather strange combinations to me and not really any more helpful than the previous list. Just my two cents.
Y’all are killing us with all of these new “wonderful” rollouts…that don’t work properly. I know that y’all are working hard, but I’m really frustrated that you keep working on new rollouts when the old ones haven’t been fixed yet. My technorati rankings still show a big fat N/A. I don’t like segmentation, it is not good for the “little guys”. And from what I understand, the page rankings really don’t tell anyone anything about who reads your blog and how often it’s looked at.
anonymous,Your understanding is just barely off. A low PR doesn’t necessarily say whether that blog gets traffic or not. This is true. However, you can almost assuredly know that a high PR is a blog that gets plenty of traffic and solid link value.For the record, I hate PR too, but if I was an advertiser I’d absolutely use it. So I guess I can’t really blame the advertisers.I think it would be cool if PPP would expose the number of views per opp taken and an average views so we could see how well our paid posts are doing. That would be interesting. Too bad the performancing deal didn’t work out or the stats from that program might be determining rank.
Trust me a high PR does not necessarily increase the amount of opps you get, its a myth. The only thing that seems to guarantee lots of real choice in opps/high paying ones is a good Alexa. Things have gotten better with this roll-out, but not much. Right now I am looking at a choice of 5 low-paying & lame opps.However an improvement is better than nothing so thank you PPP.
Good shot dudes! Keep up the good work! Yeah, the site truly IS “snappier”
I’ll give credit where it’s due & this rollout worked pretty smoothly for me & I love the new badges & categories, so thanks for listening to us.
Haven’t had any opps for past two weeks….more disappointed as I am unable to take any as most opps don’t accept xanga?? hopefully there will be more opps for all domains…and the low ranked PRs..
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