OK, I know this is supposed to be the LineBuzz blog and we're supposed to blog about new features and things Buzzin'. You know - pretend like we're blogging but really just use this as a PR tool. ;-)
Well if you're a geek like me, you'll understand. Check this out!
I think that soldiers in the desert scene with the transformer behind them with the spinning thingy is my favorite.
Want to find out how to get a gun for your 10 month old baby? Check out Stuff Jen Says - one of our newest bloggers. Jen has LineBuzz installed, so go ahead and interrupt her by highlighting some text while you're on her blog.
We've been working flat-out for the last two days on Internationalization fixes mostly for our Japanese users. This morning at 5am we rolled out another big fix. We now support our Japanese bloggers using UTF8, EUC-JP and the SHIFT-JIS character sets. You should also see improvements using other character sets like Cyrillic. We've also fixed the blank blog titles, selected text and comments for Japanese users.
We still have a few minor issues we're working on and we'll be fixing those over the coming days. Please let us know if you have any more bug reports or feature requests. We're here to help.
Mark.
Widgets are all the rage. LineBuzz is a widget and we like to think it rages too. We've built it to be very fast and very polite.
It's fast because we hook into the web page onload event and only do stuff that might be slow after your page has loaded and your users have something to read and look at.
Many widgets don't do that, and that's bad because if their servers go down or slow down then your page slows down too. Your page will stop loading at the point where you've inserted their Javascript and the browser will wait for their servers to respond. Your user waits about 3 seconds and then goes to someone else's blog.
LineBuzz is also very polite. We've written it to respect the needs of other widgets. We hook into the page onload event, but we make sure that anyone else who is using 'onload' will still run just fine. Here's the code we use - it's called a closure and is a well known javascript technique:
function LBSetup(){
var oldonload = window.onload;
if (typeof window.onload != 'function') {
window.onload = LBOnLoad;
} else {
window.onload = function() {
oldonload();
LBOnLoad();
}
}
}
We even run everyone else's code before ours because we're super polite. :)
One of our users is using a widget from a company who shall remain nameless and they simply do this:
window.onload = myVeryRudeFunction;
Everything that uses onload on the page breaks. Very naughty. So I think our user is probably going to remove the other company's script because it may break more than just LineBuzz on the page.
So when you choose which widgets to run on your blog, make sure they're fast and polite.
We have been working through the night to add Japanese support to Linebuzz. This is a very high priority for us. Yesterday 20% of our traffic to LineBuzz came from Tokyo alone!
Some of our fixes are now live. We now have basic Japanese support and you shouldn't have a problem if your blog is the UTF8 character set.
But there are a few more things we need to fix. Specifically, we need to support the CP932 character set, which is why you are seeing some blank comments, comment titles and blog titles.
We're going to get some sleep (it's 6am here and we've been working for 22 hours now) and then keep working until we get this fixed for you guys.
Thanks for being patient with us. :)
Regards,
Mark & Kerry
The LineBuzz founders.
This is a message for our many Japanese users who have signed up thanks to 100shiki.com and other Japanese websites that have covered LineBuzz.
It's translated for us by our good friend Joe Heitzeberg, Snapvine's CEO. (at 1:30am in the morning I should add)
日本「LineBuzz�ユーザー�皆様�：
今夜日本語å—ã?Œã?¡ã‚ƒã‚“ã?¨å‡¦ç?†ã?§ã??るよã?†ã?«ã‚³ãƒ¼ãƒ‰ã?«æ§˜ã€…ã?ªæ”¹å–„ã‚’ã?—
100shiki.com has us as dot-com of the day. A few other sites in China have picked us up and we have a lot of Chinese users who are trying to use us. We're aware that we have some international character problems right now and we're working through the night to fix this for you. Please give us 24 hours and we'll have things working for you.
Thanks!
Mark Maunder
LineBuzz Founder & CEO
PS: Also if someone who reads this can write chinese, send me this message in chinese so I can publish it on the blog. Thanks!
We have a bunch of new bloggers who have joined us. I'll try to mention as many as possible during the coming weeks. For a real-time list of the newest, visit our home page and look at the right sidepanel.
Andy Sack, Judy's Book CEO - and someone who's become a good mate via the Seattle Open Coffee which he started in Seattle and generously takes time to mc each week.
Jason Goldberg, Jobster.com CEO - an avid blogger and a legend for being extremely open and sometimes controversial on his blog, Jason's been in Wired, CNN, the list goes on.
Snipperoo - an awesome widget blog who covered us and now uses Linebuzz
Joe Heitzeberg, Snapvine's CEO and all round super nice guy.
Sueblimely - I just dig Sue's blog and her writing style.
Mani Karthik's Daily dose of the Internet - Get a dose from Mani today.
Since yesterday we've been covered by AdGlobe's Blog, ProBlogger.net (with a very long and interesting comment thread), Snipperoo, Junction Blog, DemoGirl, MFora, GoGoing (chinese), Plooptionary, KatiLoghia (Italian) and TechAddress - and the others I've mentioned below. Our Google Analytics graph looks like a skate park quarter pipe since Saturday.
We have a bunch of new bloggers - check out the LineBuzz home page, we've added a list of newest bloggers on the right side that's generated in real-time. It's a list of all blogs that have LineBuzz installed and have received at least one hit in the last 60 minutes, sorted by newest blog.
Tony Wright tells me 37% of his referrers yesterday were from us. And we thought we were just providing a useful tool. :)
Mashable just covered us. The article is quite complimentary (Thanks Kristen) but mentions that traditional comments and inline comments are in two different locations. I think that inline comments complement traditional comments rather than replace them. You can write a long traditional post and use inline comments to create references to what you refer to in the traditional post. The real value of inline comments is that they add context - and that's often very necessary in long or complex blog posts that cover a variety of subjects and have a range of talking points.
We're eagerly gathering user feedback and input from sites like Mashable and putting it all back into the product as fast as possible. So we're thinking about the connection between traditional comments and inline comments. Watch this space.
blog.linebuzz.com.sharedcopy.com 
