The Babblz Blog

Ok folks, if you haven’t noticed, Babblz.com is no more. At least, the old version. Too much spam and database issues led to it’s demise. It was fun, and we are looking forward to the future of Babblz.

We are looking for ideas on what Babblz 2.0 should be. Should it be a parenting blog? An informational site? Bring back the old voting system? Any other ideas?

We are experimenting with color changes, and we are making them on our live system! I know it’s crazy! We are trying to get away from the pink and purple, and make some usability tweaks. Bear with with us!

We have been having some sporadic database connection problems, and we are working as fast as we can to correct them. We appreciate your patience!

Did you know that you can submit articles to Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Simpy, and Yahoo from Babblz? After clicking on the “Read More” link for an article on the home page, simply click on the “Add this link to…” link below the summary. You will see icons for the most popular social bookmarking sites (most popular after Babblz, that is ;P ). This will take you to the submit screen for the bookmarking site using the URL for the submitted article.

Ugh. You know that feeling in your stomach when you put hard work into something, and then realize you may have made a mistake? That’s how I am feeling right now…

When we were thinking of a name for our new social bookmarking site, tons of names popped into our heads. We settled on Babblz, and it was the clear winner. We checked for the domain availability, and did a few searches to be sure no one else was using it. But I now realize we didn’t search far enough. And it was sooooo obvious…

I have even been to Babble.com many times before, although I never realized it. It was always thought of by me as StrollerDerby. I never looked at the URL and saw that it was part of Babble. It’s also an awesome site that is well designed and developed.

Sure, Babblz is a bit different that Babble. I really don’t think there is an issue of confusing the two because Babblz is a social bookmarking site, while Babble is more of a portal and community site for new parents. But if we stick with the name Babblz, we need to be real careful not to infringe on their model as we add new features.

I could really use some opinions on this, and all will be appreciated.

Thanks! Steve

Here are a couple of quick badges you can put on your own blog. Just right click and save the image to your computer. After uploading to your site, please link the images to Babblz.com. Thanks!

One area of Babblz that is sorely lacking is the User Profile section. We really want Babblz to feel like a community, so we will be addressing this area over the next week or so.

Did you know…

• You can add other users as “friends”?
• You can see what other users have submitted and voted for?
• You can subscribe to a individual user’s RSS feed?

What other features would you like to see? Would you like to have a “user profile of the day/week/month” featured on the home page? How about the ability to show rss feeds from your own blog in your profile? Anything else? We’ll look into any suggestions you may have. Bring em’ on!

We Love Twitter! It is a major distraction when we are trying to actually work, but we can’t keep away from it. We even manually refresh since we can’t wait for it to refresh automatically!

Now you can receive Babblz stories through Twitter. Add us as a friend from our Twitter Profile.

This is an experiment at this point, and we promise that if it gets out of control, we will turn the Babblz Twitter-er-thingy off. Or you could just dump us as a friend. But as they say, beaking up is so hard to do.

We just made it easier to subscribe to your favorite category’s feed! On the sidebar, you will see a section called “RSS feeds”. Here you will find the feed for each individual category, as well as a feed for all categories.

You’ve seen it on other sites, sitting in the corner or at the bottom of the post, showing off how many people voted for the blogger. Now it’s your turn to show off how many votes you have on Babblz!

Copy the code from this file: babblzbutton.txt

edit: If you are using Internet Explorer, the link above does not work. Right click and Save the file, then open in Notebook or a text editor. Sorry!

Right now, this only works on the Single Post page of your blog. We can also only guarantee it works with Wordpress, but see no reason it shouldn’t work on other systems. We may turn it into a plugin in the future.

If you have any trouble or need help, feel free to email us or leave a comment below!