Wednesday, 21 Jul 2004

Fixed some minor bugs with article searches. You can now actually download articles from the "Download this article" link on article search results.

Saturday, 23 Aug 2003

We finally got around to testing and deploying the "mail me this article" autoresponder. While we were at it, we also added a "download this article" link to the articles display.

Warning: IE, in its infinite wisdom, ignores the Content-type header that's passed back when you try to download an article, and displays it as it would HTML. This means if you want to download an article, you need to right-click the download link, and select "Save Target As". Then you'll need to give the article a name, since IE will assume you want to save it as "dlart".

Tuesday, 29 Jul 2003

Okay, this time for sure...

The article database is back online, and it actually appears to work. Feel free to suggest an article or several. We're still working on the "mail me this article" feature. Let us know what you think.

Sunday, 27 Jul 2003 (evening)

Well, we goofed. The article features wasn't quite ready for prime time, so it's been pulled. We appologize to those users who couldn't use the site while we tried to install the upgrade. The article repository should be actually available Monday or Tuesday.

Sunday, 27 Jul 2003

We have the article archive online. We will be adding content to the archive just as soon as we finish the "mail me this article" feature. Feel free to enter articles for consideration in the meantime.

Monday, 21 Jul 2003

Our senior developer starts his long-overdue vacation today. After he promised to finish the article repository as soon as he gets back, we untied him and let him go. Expect to see it on the 28th or 29th of July.

Monday, 9 Jun 2003

We fixed a bug in the reviews process. For those of you who tried to review an ezine but failed, we appologize for the inconvenience - it should work just fine now.

Sunday, 8 Jun 2003

For those of you who want to link to us, and want to use some kind of graphic, we have three buttons. If you want an animated button, you can use http://www.TheEzineMachine.com/images/button-anim.gif. For a static button, you can use http://www.TheEzineMachine.com/images/button-static.gif, or http://www.TheEzineMachine.com/images/button2.gif (which is slightly smaller).

Sunday, 1 Jun 2003

We've hit 500 ezines! Going from 400 to 500 took longer than expected, but we're finally there. Our senior developer is still on the road a lot, so functional enhancements and updates have slowed down a bit.

Tuesday, 6 May 2003

The Ezine Machine was picked as The Golden House-Sparrow Site of the Day for 6 May 2003.

Sunday, 4 May 2003

Our senior developer has been on the road, with only intermittent access to the Internet, so updates have slowed down a bit. Things have been happening, though.

First, if you've looked at a listing in the past, and then again now, you'll notice that redirects to websites and other URLs are different. Where once a listing may have referred you to http://www.TheEzineMachine.com/redirs/website?e=344, the new redirector will send you to http://www.TheEzineMachine.com/redirs/website/2761028259 (going to this page will take you to the website for Toddlerhood, btw). This means spider-based search engines like Google will follow the link, since as far as they're able to determine, there's a directory called /redirs/website on The Ezine Machine, that just happens to refer to a bunch of different websites.

The second change is that instead of using a direct redirector (where the user is sent on to your website by our server), we're using an indirect redirector. What this means is that the user gets a webpage with a link to the desired site, instead of a command from the webserver to go to that page. A good bit of "magic" happens under the hood to make this transparent to the user, but obvious to search engines. In particular, for browsers with JavaScript enabled, it just looks like the surfer went directly to the page in question - the redirect page doesn't even show up in their history. Even in the case where JavaScript is disabled, the redirect page is designed to automatically load the website page in 15 seconds.

Taken together, these two changes let ezine editors and owners gain not just from a free listing on the site, but also from links back to their own sites that are counted by search engines in link popularity rankings. This means listing your ezine on The Ezine Machine can also help increase your rankings in some search engines.

Another new feature: you can now review ezines. In addition to a numerical ranking, you can also tell everyone WHY you think a particular ezine shines (or stinks, as the case may be....). Your review may take a few days to show up, since it will be read by a real live human being to make sure the review policy hasn't been violated (mostly making sure to keep this site PG rated).

Friday, 4 April 2003

We now have complete coverage for all popular search terms. Every single popular search should now create a list with at least one ezine. Drop us a line if you find one that doesn't.

Wednesday, 2 April 2003

Well, things are happening so fast and furious around here, we decided to add a weblog, both so we can keep track of things, and to let our users know what's going on.

Today, we added our 400th ezine to the directory!!!! Only another 2300 or so to go from the original batch of ezines we're researching, and then we have another half dozen lists to work through. If you know of an ezine, and you want to get it listed, don't be shy - go to http://www.TheEzineMachine.com/addezine.cgi and let us know. Yes, we still have a lot of ezines to research, but we make new submissions a priority - chances are, your ezine will be listed the same day you submit it.

Coming soon

Well, by golly, we've added all of the features we planned on adding for this phase! Let us know if there's something you'd like to see that we don't have on the site.

In the future, we plan on adding content (both articles and ezines). We do have additional development planned, but no firm deployment dates (and no more budget, either). We'll let you know what the new features are going to be once we get closer to actually deploying them.