Back in the heyday of Web 1.0 portals were the rage; these days it’s social bookmarking or link-sharing sites. It seems that every time I visit Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com, someone has released a new one. These days though, it takes more than rounded corners to make a site successful. Rick Ross knows that and even though there’s no shortage of rounded corners on dzone.com, there’s also a well thought out user experience there.
For those that don’t know dzone or Rick, dzone is a social bookmarking site targeted at developers of all languages. Rick Ross is the founder of dzone. Like most social bookmarking sites, on dzone you can post links to articles you like, vote on articles others have posted and leave comments. Unlike bigger sites of this nature, you don’t get the latest Apple rumor or < personal political agenda /> story. Everything is 100% developer centric.
I’ve been reading Rick’s Javalobby.org newsletter since he started it and I have great respect for him. After many years of seeing his picture appear monthly in my Inbox, I finally got to meet him “The Ajax Experience” last fall. We started up a conversation about how to get the PHP community involved in posting links on dzone that still continues today. Rick really, really wants the PHP community to get involved at dzone.com.
So help Rick and PHP out. Click through and visit dzone.
You can login using your OpenID (you do have an OpenID don’t you? All the cool kids have one. If not, head over to myopenid and get yours today) to vote. If you want to post, you’ll have to upgrade (for free) to a full account.
Comments
It's really important to us that DZone should fully and fairly represent the entire spectrum of programming languages, tools and platforms that developers are using. While we already have something for everyone right now, it is also true that the present mix at DZone is somewhat lopsided in favor of too many Java and Ruby links. I guess it's no surprise, given that we were already successful and well-recognized in the Java space when we started DZone, but this doesn't make the imbalance any more acceptable. The truth is that there should be just as many PHP links in the mix, or perhaps even more, since there are a vast number of PHP developers engaged in active dialog at blogs and websites.
DZone routinely sends hundreds of visitors to any blog or website that makes it to the front page, and it generally takes less than 60 seconds to post a link. If you think about it, that's a lot of good, free traffic for nearly no effort. This can benefit PHP bloggers just as much as any others. We just need to connect better with the community of PHP bloggers and authors so the know we'll do whatever we reasonably can to help them get noticed. In time we should be able to overcome the imbalance that resulted from initially promoting DZone mostly to the Java audience where we had the strongest reach. Our intention is for the site to serve all developers on every platform. More is better, and we'll roll out the red carpet to welcome the world of PHP developers at DZone.
Thanks again for your excellent coverage and supprt. We're very grateful.
Best regards,
Rick
The comments seems to be on a higher level rather than the usual "OMFG tHat'Z sO cOoL" as seen on some other sites. The new infinite scrolling feature is a nice as well.
Jim Plush
I *do* like the integration of openid though!
If you decide to use it or have any questions feel free to contact me.
http://blogs.dzone.com/dzone/2007/05/22/the-new-dzone-feed-widget-dzonelive/
Stacy AKA 3Monkeys