Pijoo Blog

The early launches of Pijoo way back in 2007 included a toolbar for firefox, which we had to drop when Firefox 3 was launched due to some compatibility issues (ok it just stopped working altogether) so we’ve been frantically trying to remake the toolbar ever since.

Well, we’re pleased to announce that the Pijoo Toolbar is now back.. and since we used 3rd-party tools to build it, it’s about 9000% better than our own poxy efforts.

The new toolbar is a lot sexier than before, and it works on both Firefox 3, and Internet Explorer - bringing your Pijoo community to your browser. You can even click the Pijoo logo on the left to stumble *ahem* discover random blogs from the Pijoo network.

You can grab it from the widgets page and start exploring the marvelous world of.. erm.. Pijoo, and because it rests in your browser, it’s great for lazy people who can’t be bothered to search for blogs the traditional way. Grab it!

Tags: Blogs, firefox, toolbar, Widgets

The Pijoo minions are currently working on the all new, Pijoo Blog Awards.

We will be trawling through our members to find the very best blogs, in a range of categories. Only Pijoo.Com members will be eligable for an award, so if you’re not a member yet, join now!

There will be eight main categories, as well as another 15 ‘mini awards’ to recognize those great Bloggers who didn’t quite make it to the top of one of our main categories. The competition will be launched at some point in August (keep checking back and we’ll keep you posted as it draws nearer), and the categories will include:

Best Sports Blog, Best News Blog, Best Technology Blog, Best Male Blogger, Best Female Blogger, Best Comedy Blog, Best Media Blog…. and, The Pijoo Ultimate Blog Award For Outstanding Blogging

Sign up for our newsletter when you join Pijoo.com for all of the latest news and updates on the Pijoo Blog Awards!

Tags: award, blog, blogger, blogging, Blogs, pijoo

A couple of eagle-eyed users have asked.. “oi! What’s these creepy codes in my widget/invite/etc.. links?” - for the rest of you, this refers to the “&ref=????” or.. “&AffID=????” at the end of links that appear in your widgets and invite messages.

It’s no conspiracy, these codes are part of a new tracking system that allows us to see who’s bringing new members in, because we hope to reward you for doing so. We’re keeping the details hush-hush for now, but sometime in the near future, all these referrals will bring huge rewards for users who actively spread the word about Pijoo.

It may be money, it may be other prizes.. but it’ll definitely work towards a free upgrade to sponsor accounts, among other benefits, so in the mean-time - just keep doing whatever you’re doing - referrals are already being tracked for when we launch the scheme.

The idea came about when some users said.. “Hey! We should get credit towards sponsor accounts for our referrals!!” .. so we did what any self-respecting web service should do - we said..”yeah, ok”, and started looking at ways to reward our top referrers.

The reward scheme will be launched in the coming weeks, but we will invite a handful of users into the private beta, where they can cash-out, upgrade for free, or whatever goodies we decide to put in.

You can start earning credit for referrals straight away, by inviting friends, using one of our widgets, or if you prefer to mention Pijoo in a blog post, copy & paste the link from the ‘Invite Friends’ page and use that - as it has your unique code already in it.

Tags: links, referals, Widgets

What exactly is a ‘Pijoo’? It’s a question that has people the world over scratching their heads.

Picture this, You’re walking down the street and suddenly from behind you you hear ‘Hey, my Pijoo’s bigger than yours!’, or maybe ‘Did you hear about that bloke, with the Pijoo? Haha, man he was Pijooed…..’ It could happen. And would you know what they were talking about?….. nope, of course you wouldn’t!

But it did get us at Pijoo.Com thinking…. what do YOU lot out there think Pijoo means? Scribble your ideas down and send them in, the best ones will be featured here on our Blog.

A few suggestions:

Pijoo - A small furry fruit with large seeds, native only to Cambodia

Pijoo - A large itchy growth usually found behind the knee

Pijoo - An almost extinct breed of Sloth that feeds on bark and matchsticks

Pijoo - A unit of measurement used by scientists to judge the weight of fog

Can you think of anything better? Let us know……..

Tags: blog, blogging, Blogs, community, pijoo, pijoo.com

Pijoo now has handy RSS Feeds for blog posts in the voting system. You’ll find feeds for popular and latest posts on their respective pages in the Quick Links menu.

Firefox users can just drag the link to your toolbar and get a snazzy list of favourite blog posts in your browser, or just click the link the good old-fashioned way to subscribe using your favourite reader.

We’ll also be adding feeds for blogs, users, comments and anything else we can think of to make staying up-to-date with your community as easy as possible, so watch this space for more updates on that.

Twitter fans, we haven’t forgotten you - you can now get a bunch of updates by following http://www.twitter.com/pijoo. This is an automated bot, so if you prefer to follow a real human being (loosely speaking) you can follow my Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Pijoo_Brett for regular insane ramblings.

Tags: blog posts, RSS Feeds, Twitter

We’re all about feedback here at Pijoo, you helped us build the site with your great ideas, bug reports and emails, and because we want to continue improving the service we provide to our bloggers, we want more! We always listen to what individual members have to say, so we’ve made it even easier for you to get in on the act, and help shape the community into something really useful.

Just nip over to our Feedback Survey and let rip with your worldly wisdom. For those who prefer to email us, you can do that too, from the contact page.

Tags: feedback

Cartoonist (and Pijoo co-founder) Calvin Innes has completed the first of several new posters for Pijoo.Com.

If you’d like to download the poster to use on your website or blog, please feel free. Just drop us a line to let us know.

Tags: advert, blogging, cartoon, pijoo, poster

Being a new site, we still have a modest user-base here on Pijoo.com, but ranking highly on search results, or hitting the front page can make a big difference to your blog readership, and we have some tips for you.. straight from the horses mouth as it were, on how you can boost traffic to your site without much effort, it’s really no big secret - you get out what you put in.

1. Explore - Don’t just add your blog and hope for the best, every time you visit a profile, or a blog page, your avatar will appear in the sidebar, linking back to your profile, and your blogs.
2. Add friends/blogs to your network -  Not only does this allow you to keep track of your favourite blogs, you also get a link to your profile from all your mutual friends, and blogs you’re reading.
3. Get chatty - if you visit a blog page you like, leave a message in the sidebar. You can do this for blogs and profiles, and it’s a great way to make connections and build your network. You will also be seen as an active blogger, and appear on the front page.
4. Add your RSS feed to your blog page - we will crawl for all your latest posts, and let you (or others) submit your best posts into the voting system.
5. Submit blog posts - you can do this by clicking the blue ’submit post’ links from your blog page (if you added your RSS feed) or from the quick-links in the side-bar. If your posts get voted highly by other users, it could appear on the front page.
6. Comment on blog posts - Just below the voting buttons on the posts page, is the number of comments for that post. Click it and leave a comment for an instant link to your profile. This is also a great way to make friends on pijoo.
7. Get featured - Although we favour blogs from sponsor accounts in the ‘featured blogs’ section, you can also get featured by making sure your blog has a nice image, and great content. Blogs without a display image will not be featured. You can also email us from the contact page and ask us to feature you - who knows, we might just say yes.
8. Upgrade to a sponsor account - This is always optional, and we don’t want to push sponsor accounts in your face, but this list would be incomplete without a quick mention. Pijoo sees sponsor accounts as a vote of confidence for the blogger, and blogs linked to sponsor accounts usually rank higher on the site (although the above tips are more important for ranking, upgrading could give you an extra boost).

Tags: blog network, blog ranking, blog search, community

Just a quick post to mention some back-end changes to the site, which will probably go un-noticed, but should improve the overall experience, especially when it comes to sharing and submitting posts.

Firstly, some of you may have noticed a lot more comments on blog posts submitted to the voting system; this is because we now attempt to crawl the article itself for comments, and where possible add them to the comments page on pijoo. Just a couple of restrictions for this new feature - it only crawls for posts when you submit the post, or if the post has no comments already, and because some blogs regularly have 100’s of comments on every post, it only grabs a maximum of 50 from each post.

Second change this week, is a tweek to the ranking algorithm for blog posts, which now takes into account the relative age of the submission compared to other posts in the pool. This means new posts will get on the front page quicker, so it’s all good. Pijoo also sets a limit on the number of posts in the voting system at any one time (which will be increased as the site grows), to make sure older posts with high ranking don’t dominate the pool.

If you have any questions about how ranking works, or how to build a high profile for your blog, you can ask via our contact page, or by leaving a comment here.

Tags: blog posts, ranking, voting

We like to dabble with new technology and gizmos here at Pijoo, especially when something pops up that could help us display user data in visually appealing ways, and Google Earth gave us the perfect opportunity to experiment.

Pijoogle Earth (relax, it’s a working title) uses Google’s APIs to embed Google Earth into the browser, allowing us to cross-reference the location of bloggers, blogs, and connections from Pijoo with Google Maps data, and display it on Google’s much loved 3D globe - without having to download an executable file.

Yes, the people at Google are very clever indeed, but not so good at documentation, which means the (also clever) people at Pijoo still have some bugs to fix before we can let you play with this feature, but as you can see from the screenshots, it’s working quite nicely.

Is it practical? No, it’ll probably melt the database, but there’s something quite satisfying about reading blogs from space, or seeing where your pijoo friends live.

No launch date as yet, but keep watching the blog for updates on this and other features on the way.

Not a member yet? See what all the fuss is about… here

Tags: google earth, google earth api, google maps