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It’s All About Events: How jQuery Uses Ning

There are more than a dozen features available on your Ning Network. And while adding them all is an option, some Ning Networks choose to focus on just one or two, like jQuery Meetups. With only two features Events (re-named Meetups with the Language Editor) and Groups the focus of this Ning Network is clear; giving jQuery developers the resources they need to plan local meetups with other area developers.

For non-techies, jQuery is a JavaScript Library that makes working with HTML and CSS super simple. When the jQuery team was looking for a centralized place where all users could plan meetups and find local meetups, they turned to Ning.

We looked at a number of potential solutions and eventually went with Ning. Ning provides an easy way to get social communities up and running all while putting very little burden on the jQuery team as maintainers. The Ning team was very gracious and provided us with all the resources that we needed to get it up and running. There exist capabilities for creating meetup groups, having centralized group discussions, and planning out future meetups.

Almost 1,500 members have joined since jQuery Meetups went live at the end of January. Local groups range from the Philippines to Cedar Rapids, and meetups are being organized around the globe.

All Systems Go!

All Ning Networks are online and speedy!

And we’re back!

Our engineers have fixed the issue. All Ning Networks are back online. Please report any issues to http://help.ning.com/. Thanks!

And we’re back!

We’ve finished our planned maintenance. All Ning Networks are back online. Please report any issues to http://help.ning.com/. Thanks!

Scheduled maintenance on all Ning Networks continues

Our engineers continue to work hard during this planned maintenance. Next update at midnight Pacific.

Coming out of maint

We’re bringing Ning Networks out of maintenance. Next update at 12:45am Pacific.

Most Ning Networks are back in action

Almost all Ning Networks are back online and running smoothly. We’re working on the last group now. Stay tuned.

Back in to maintenance

We’re taking all Ning Networks back into maintenance. We will update here as soon as we have more info.

Still in maintenance

Our engineers are working hard to bring all Ning Networks back up as quickly as possible. Next update by 3 am Pacific.

Scheduled maintenance on all Ning Networks

We’ve just started our planned maintenance. All Ning Networks will be down for the next 2 hours. Stay tuned for updates!

Improved Blog and Forum Text Editor is Live!

Yesterday, we announced significant improvements were coming to the forum feature’s text editor, and that we’d be rolling out the same editor to the blogs feature. We’re happy to announce that the new text editor is now live on your Ning Network’s forum and blogs features!

As an added bonus, we’re also including a new theme, “Linen,” for Network Creators and members to use. It will also become the new default theme applied when you create a new Ning Network:

Let us know on Creators if you have any questions!

Guest Post: Your Friends Can Be the Key to Success

Ed note: Today’s guest post comes from Bruno Leal, the Network Creator of Cafe Historia. A resident of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Leal works as a historian and journalist, and teaches social communication at a university. If you’d like to contribute a guest post, let is know in the comments below!

Two years ago I created Cafe Historia on Ning to provide a place for high quality exchange of knowledge, information and experiences for those who work with, study or just love history. Cafe Historia recently crossed the mark of 17,000 members and has become a reference on the web for historians, teachers and students. Many people ask me, “How did you get so many members without resorting to any kind of advertising?”

There is no magic formula to build a success social network.The only way to do it is hard work. You must produce quality content, be a good moderator, create an attractive design and update the content frequently.Those are the basic rules, but before all this work starts, you need to follow these very important steps:

First Content

Create content before inviting anyone to your Ning Network.Its very simple post a message on your blog, open forums, add videos or photos and inaugurate the first groups.Use the text boxes that Ning offers to publish articles or news about your Ning Network’s subject. Prospective members are looking for good content. So the more you give, more time they will stay on your Ning Network. If your guests cant find any content at all, they will probably never return!

Invite your best friends

After publishing (valuable and pertinent) content, it’s time to invite people to join your Ning Network.And this is a very important step for your success.At the beginning, you should never invite strangers.The reason? Your content may be the best, but people attract people and no one will want to become a member if there’s is nobody there. Your visitors wont become members. They will be just readers or worse: theyll quickly forget your network.
At first, you must invite your best friends.Make a list of e-mail addresses.This list should have between 50 to 100 names, at least.Explain to your friends what is a social network, how to use it and how their presence can help you in your project.Even though the subject of your social network may not be what they are interested in, someone will probably help you. After all, friends are friends!
With a few dozen members, the unknown visitors might feel more invited to enter your network because they wont feel alone anymore.A few weeks later, ask your friends to invite their friends too.

The “After Best Friends” Period

Many creators of Ning Networks wants to know: should I leave only the first page of my social network open or should I open it all? If you’re at the beginning, even with many friends, I suggest you leave only the first page public and the others, private.It will make Internet users curious and help increase the number of members on your Ning Network.But if you’ve been established for at least six months with enough good content posted, my suggestion is to open up your Ning Network. The number of who sign up will decrease a little, but the number of readers will increase significantly.When you open all the pages, Google is allowed to index all the content, to your Ning Network will show up more on Google searches.
That’s it. I invite you to take a visit on Cafe Historia (you can read it in English!) and see how is everything working out. And now, create your own Ning Network! Try all these tips, involve your friends on your project and and good luck!

Stopping Spam Before It Starts

Everyday here at Ning, our Spam and Abuse Prevention team wakes up and thinks about one thing with singular focus: fighting spam. While spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, so are the ways that we’re fighting back. Our goal is to balance fighting spam with ensuring that legitimate members are able to seamlessly join and contribute with as few roadblocks and work as possible.

And that’s what we’ve got to talk about today.

This week we deployed a back-end service for detecting and blocking spammers. This new system first came online as a beta at the start of the year and is now disabling more than 200 accounts per day. We are actively developing the capabilities of the system and the rules that we use to identify spammers. And we are planning to be increase this number significantly over the days and weeks to come.

Additionally, we’re launching a new CAPTCHA system for posting content early next week. Members who join your Ning Network after this release with unverified email addresses who are not part of a moderated Ning Network will now have to enter a CAPTCHA when they post content to a Ning Network. For legitimate members, this will take an additional few seconds while preventing “bots” – or automated scripts from spammers from adding spam.

As we work to combat spam behind the scenes, there’s something you can do at home to help us. When you use the “Suspend for Spam” feature when disabling member accounts, it feeds into a system that we will use soon across Ning Networks to automatically disable spammers before they start.

Martin is Ning’s Manager of the Spam and Abuse Prevention Team.

Creating community for local artists

The image of an artist working in a studio, apart from distractions (and other people) is a persistent image in the media. And yet, many artists seek community, for support, critique of their work, opportunities for exhibition and more. From Fresno, CA to Rhode Island, artists are connecting with each other, and using Ning as their connection tool.

FresnoArts.net

It can be difficult for people to know where to look to find great art in their communities. The Fresno Arts Council (with support from a corporate partner) helped create FresnoArts.net a resource for both artists and art-lovers in the California city of Fresno. Events are a focus on this Ning Network. Each tab points to a different type of art event, everything from visual arts to poetry to film. In addition to being a resource for patrons of art, FresnoArts.net also offers import info for working artists. For example, right now there’s information about a city commission for a work of art that will engage people as they enter and approach the downtown and Chinatown areas in Fresno.

Arts in RI

Across the country in Rhode Island, there’s Arts in RI, a Ning Network for artists and Etsians who are “committed to offering high quality handmade alternatives to mass produced products.” Those who purchase items from the members of Arts in RI know they’re purchasing locally made goods (if the buyers happen to be in Rhode Island, too!). The photos section features some of the best worked produced by these talented artists

Looking for more? The Brooklyn Art Project has a focus on NY-based artists, but the art featured draws in fans from around the world. Or, there’s the San Francisco-based Sidewalk Stalker, which celebrates the art under our feet.

A better text editor, on Forum and Blog posts

For Ning Creators and members alike, adding content is an essential part of any Ning Network. When it comes to adding text, the text editor members rely on should be as easy to use as possible. Starting tomorrow, adding and editing text on Ning will become even easier.

Previously, all text editors on a Ning Network allowed members to add photos, add links and format text. But using those tools produced HTML code that many non-technical Internet users didn’t understand. So a few weeks ago, we rolled out a new, WYSIWYG editor to the forum, while still keeping an “HTML” tab so that advanced users could still edit HTML as they always had.

WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get”, and it means that when you’re doing something like making text bold, you’ll actually see bold text, instead of code for <b>bolded text</b>. In the last few weeks, we heard feedback that the WYSIWYG editor wasn’t as easy to use as it could be. And so we’re rolling out a number of improvements to make it an even better experience editing forum discussions on Ning, while also rolling out this editor to the blog feature:

The major improvements include:

More space: 400 pixels of vertical space to edit the text, instead of the previous, 160 pixels
Smaller font: A smaller font, so more text can fit in the text editor
Resized images: Even though images in the forum and blog can’t be any wider than 721 pixels (the full width of the forum and blog), they weren’t being resized while editing. Now, any image added wider than 721 pixels will be resized to 721 pixels.
Edit image: Previously, once you’d added an image to a text editor, you couldn’t change the size, alignment or link unless you knew HTML. Now, in “Rich Text” mode, you’ll be able re-open the Image dialog.

When working on these updates, we also realized we made an oversight when adding the WYSIWYG editor to the forum. We accidentally omitted the “Options” drop down, which allows you to customize images that you add to text. We’ve brought back the Options drop down, with rewritten, clearer text and the ability to customize images even if you add them via URL, not your computer.

Here’s what it will look like:

All of these improvements should make editing forum discussions or writing blog posts a breeze. And we’ll continue to take your feedback and improve text editors in the future.

Copying pasted text

One note about copying text from other programs or Web sites. One of the nice parts of a WYSIWYG editor is that you can copy and paste not just text, but also links, images, tables and more into your forum or blog post. However, when a WYSIWYG editor tries to maintain all those items, the outcome isn’t always perfect. If you’re looking to paste text and nothing more, try using the “HTML” tab, and no special formatting will be pasted. You can usually copy and paste content into the WYSIWYG editor with good results, but the “HTML” tab is a good bet if you’re just looking to copy only text.

Using Ning to bring Boo Radley to life

Last night, PBS’s fantastic Frontline program aired a program all about digital media and the World Wide Web, called Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier. In their own words, the program “presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world.” One area where technology has had a tremendous impact is in the classroom. Above, you can watch a clip of English teacher Jenny Johns explaining how she uses Ning to teach classic literature like To Kill a Mockingbird to her students.

If you’d like to learn more about using Ning and Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, make sure to check out Ning in Education, Classroom 2.0 and the Education Ning Network discovery tool. You can get more info on the Frontline Digital Life program here and find out when it’s airing in your area here.

Maintenance Friday night, Feb. 5, at 10 p.m.

This upcoming Friday, Feb. 5, well be doing some maintenance on the Ning Platform beginning at 10 p.m. This maintenance window will require us to take a 2 hour downtime. We don’t like to take downtime very often, so when we do choose to do downtime maintenance, we want to make sure to get a lot of key things accomplished. In this maintenance period, we’ll be doing upgrades on hardware, key systems and databases, which are all vital to keeping your Ning Network up and running in the future.

The maintenance will start at 10 p.m. PST and will last for 2 hours. During this time all Ning Networks will be offline and will display branded maintenance pages. Ongoing updates regarding this maintenance will be available on the Ning Status Blog.

Brad, a Community Advocate at Ning, is working on a trick car charger for his Palm Pre.

And the Sun Will Set For You… with Linkin Park

LinkinPark.com is your one stop place to satiate your thirst for information on this popular band. Fans from all around the world come together to interact with the band and other fans just like the diverse sounds of their songs, LP fans are from all walks of life, all over the world. After signing in, it’s simple to connect with other members based on favorite band member like Mike Shinoda or Chester or find other fans in your country. There’s even a group for Russian fans, with most of the content posted in Russian.

If you are a member of the Music For Relief Ning Network, you might already know about Download To Donate for Haiti and the great work the band is doing. On their Ning Network you can see a behind the scenes video as the band prepares their contribution. If watching that video leaves wanting for more, check out the band’s music videos or even videos uploaded by other fans. You can even sing along once you know all the lyrics.

To keep their fans up to date with every single off-the-press news, Linkin Park uses their blog which includes recent TV appearances, new iGoogle themes, and latest song and album releases. Thanks to the RSS feed, you can even add it to your Google Reader or other RSS aggregator so you never miss a post.

Meeting other fans, staying current on Linkin Park news, and finally understand what they are singing in that one song about crawling in your skin all great reasons for spending some time on LinkinPark.com.

Christina is the Manager of Partner Support, and is a recovering vegetarian.

Protect & empower girls with The Council of Daughters

Actress Demi Moore is fired up about protecting girls from child sex trafficking and exploitation. The organization she’s working with is called Girls Education & Mentoring Services (GEMS); it’s organization “is committed to ending commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking of children by changing individual lives, transforming public perception, and revolutionizing the systems and policies that impact sexually exploited youth.”

The place for supporters people like Demi Moore, Halle Berry, moms, daughters, cousins and sisters to connect with others around GEMS’ mission is their Ning Network, Council of Daughters. When daughters join, they make a pledge to help out in whatever way they can. One of the ways to help is to host a film screening with friends; another is to make a donation. To learn more about the GEMS and The Council of Daughters, make sure to read Halle Berry’s letter to members. She writes:

Imagine what we can accomplish if millions of women band together to fight for the needs of girls at the national and local level. Imagine the power we can wield if we all agree that every girl in America deserves the right to grow up and live her dreams. Imagine the enormous change that is possible if we each commit to a simple pledge: Every girl is my daughter and I will do whatever I can, whenever I can, to protect the girls I know and the girls I may never meet.

Learn more in the discussion forums about the work these women are doing to end child exploitation for today and the future.

All Systems Go!

All Ning Networks are online and speedy!