Ma.gnolia Blog: Ma.gnolia Monthly 15: Return of the Newsletter!
The Ma.gnolia Monthly newsletter is re-posted on the blog for those who like their newsletters bloggable. If you’d like to subscribe, just change the notification options in your profile.
Just when you thought you’d never see it again, the Ma.gnolia Newsletter rises from the forgotten realms, chock full of good news you may have missed in the past few months. We took a break from publishing the Ma.gnolia Monthly while we organized our plans and priorities.
Now that we’re settling into a solid groove for the next few months, we’re ready to get the word out about some new additions you may have missed, and to let you know what we’re working on. Well, most of what we’re working on; we still like our surprises. Click through to see what we’ve been up to.
- The Ma.gnolia Team (support@ma.gnolia.com)
New Features
We’ve been adding some visible and not-so-visible features in the past few months that are worth sharing here.
New Bookmark ViewsThe most visible feature is one you’ll see on many pages – we’ve re-tooled our bookmark views for a more compact experience. While we still love our spacious approach to presenting lists of bookmarks, we’ve tightened up the presentation by trimming the bookmark metadata we show, and by bringing command menus in to collect all the things you can do with bookmarks into a smaller space. The change lets us grow the number of things you can do with a bookmark, like Giving Thanks, while ensuring that more of them can fit onto a page.
Find Untagged BookmarksFrom the highly visible change of bookmark views to an invisible change in our search feature. If you used to love our now-retired Snap Mark, or you just bookmark a lot of things quickly and dont’ always find time to tag them, then this one is for you.
Now, when you’re in the mood to organize, you can call up all your tag-less bookmarks with one easy click. Just go to the Find Bookmarks box, make sure you’re searching for tags in your bookmarks, and click Go with nothing in the search field. Ma.gnolia will show you the tagless bookmarks, crying out for categorization.
Daily Blog PostingWe heard you loud and clear: this is a feature we badly needed, and now we’re happy to say that it’s in the last stages of beta. Available to everyone through their Profile (check the new Blog Tools tab), the beta Daily Posting feature will walk you through the steps of setting up your blog to post new bookmarks from Ma.gnolia on schedules that go from daily to every 2 weeks.
We’ve had an amazing amount of help from our members in testing and refining the feature. After we’re out of beta, we’ll continue to work on this feature by adding support for more blogs, and a few fancy tricks we have up our sleeves. Like our link rolls, our daily blog posts can be delivered with some basic styling, or marked up properly so you can adapt them to the look of your blog.
Facebook IntegrationFirst the schools, then the homes, and now the workplace. Facebook is everywhere, and we’re proud to have been included in the launch of their application platform back in May. The Ma.gnolia App shows your most recent bookmark in your profile page, and you can move to see the latest bookmarks from friends on Facebook also using the app.
Adding a Facebook application that integrates with your Ma.gnolia account got us a nice extra feature for free: members can sign in with their Facebook IDs. So, in addition to regular sign-in, you now have the choice of getting into Ma.gnolia with OpenID, or with a Facebook ID. If this is news to you, you can get started by going to your Ma.gnolia profile and clicking the Seeds tab. Or just jump to install the application from the Facebook side at http://apps.facebook.com/magnolia/. It works in either direction.
We learned a lot in the first time around with a Facebook application, and are currently re-writing the application based on those lessons, mostly learned from the reviews we received from Facebook users.
Hello, Wiki
You just read about some of the bigger changes we’ve made in the last few months. There has been lots more than that going on, but how can you, a busy person, keep up with all that stuff? The Ma.gnolia Community Wiki comes to the rescue, with a section just for our Official Change Log. We update this with both big and small changes. We also announce updates through our Twitter channel
Ma.gnolia and Pibb, Sitting In a Tree…
You already know that we love your emails, but sometimes a conversation is best had in the open. We jumped onto the great service, Pibb.com to get a wider conversation going with Ma.gnolia members starting a few months ago, and the results have been great.
When the team is there, we’re talking with members about support issues, discussing features that could be added, improvements to be made, bugs to fix and more. When we’re not there, some members often are and have been stepping in to help out. That kind of giving is part of what makes the Ma.gnolia community a strong one, and we’re very appreciative of their help.
Not only is Pibb a superb group chat tool, it’s staffed by responsive and friendly folks, and it’s even embeddable, so you can jump into the chatter right inside Ma.gnolia. Just hit ‘Chat’ under the Help menu.
The Road Ahead
For this special return newsletter we’re happy to lift the curtain a little on what we’re working on here.
Firstly, we’re working very hard on replacing our search engine. The search that we launched with has long since been outgrown by the number of people using the service, and while we’re happy to have you all with us, it’s been tough to keep up! Replacing the search engine will not only improve overall performance of the site (most of the pages you go to on Ma.gnolia involve some kind of search in the background). Bookmark searches will also be quicker, and the new engine will allow us to open some neat features like OR searches and other nifty tricks.
Once we have that in place, we’ll get going on our long-promised Pro package, which has been sharply focussed for the first round to our Saved Copies feature. Under a Pro membership, Ma.gnolia will save complete copies of the pages for you, rather than just the text content like we do now. This expanded feature will provide complete protection from disappearing pages and unavailable websites, holding graphics and all in place just the way the page was seen when you bookmarked it. We have some extra treats in the Pro package, including password-protected feeds for private groups, and some sweet icons to show off your Pro status.
Taking us towards the new year, we’ll be introducing some new organizational features, including some surprises for the sidebar. I did mention that we still like surprises, right?
Amid all that of course we’ll be fixing bugs and making little changes here and there. Keep watching for those updates, and yes, for more editions of the Ma.gnolia Monthly to follow. It’s good to be back!
Posted by Todd on October 15, 2007 | Mark This Post
Member Comments
Todd on October 16, 2007
We currently do what you're suggesting in the bookmarklet, jwm. Adding that to the extension shouldn't be too hard for the developer, so I'd suggest leaving a request with them and mention that we'd be happy to help make it happen if necessary.
Daniel on October 19, 2007
Is it me or is Ma.gnolia significantly snappier than ever? Often the line is slower (traffic i suppose), but i find that lately, this bookmarking service has made significant speed increase in search as well as adding bookmarks.
Todd on October 19, 2007
Thanks Daniel - we've been able to make improvements as part of our ongoing work. Sometimes we can speed up performance by changing the application code, and other times by changing the confiruation of servers and assisting machines. Still other times we can be affected positively or negatively by caching, hosting and ISP changes.
The performance boost you're seeing is good news, and likely a combination of all of the above, as it's something we pay close attention to. Thanks for the feedback!
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John on October 16, 2007
If the new search engine has a search by URL feature that can be integrated with the bookmarklet and Firefox extension, such that pages you've already bookmarked come up for editing, then that alone would be enough for me to get a Pro account.