mixxt

maintenance work at the 19. October

2011-10-18T13:45:11Z

Our service will be unavailable or only partial available at the 19. October between 4 and 8 o’clock am, due to maintenance operations. We know, that this is on short notice and apologise for any resulting inconveniences. The maintenance operation aims to prepare new functions and to further develop our infrastructure. We thank you for your understanding! Share this [...]Our service will be unavailable or only partial available at the 19. October between 4 and 8 o’clock am, due to maintenance operations. We know, that this is on short notice and apologise for any resulting inconveniences. The maintenance operation aims to prepare new functions and to further develop our infrastructure. We thank you for your understanding! Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

Welcome to a new social networking experience and a reliable Ning-Importer

2010-05-03T15:35:35Z

Big news has rocked the world of micro social networks. Ning has cut large parts of its staff as well as giving many networks a difficult choice: pay or move away. We believe Ning has its reasons for making this step and nobody should take it personally. Of course this doesn’t help the networks that [...]Big news has rocked the world of micro social networks. Ning has cut large parts of its staff as well as giving many networks a difficult choice: pay or move away. We believe Ning has its reasons for making this step and nobody should take it personally. Of course this doesn’t help the networks that will become homeless. Many social network creators and bloggers have started looking for (sometimes strange) alternatives. That is where mixxt comes in. Providing you with more options: mixxtFREE mixxt offers you a free alternative to Ning. A mixxt community website will provide you with most of the Ning functionality, including customizable layout, discussion forums, event management (incl. RSVP, waiting lists), sub-groups, wikis as well as file and media sharing. In addition to all features you know already, mixxt also offers several key benefits you will most probably not have seen elsewhere: Unbeaten Community Management features Custom welcome emails, powerful newsletter system Highly customizable activity feeds Control the read and write access for every module individually. Imagine letting all members blog, but only the creator can upload files Decide who can access your network, how the members can join and how search engines can access your site Powerful sub-groups Create sub-groups with their own forums and images Control who can join groups and how Create closed or open segments for your users by creating controlled groups Allow your members to mail all other members of the group, this way you can have handy mailing lists Full Collaboration features, not only for educational and work-related use-cases Wikis, collaborative image albums, powerful document-sharing Add images to any text (incl. forum posts, content pages, wiki pages, news or blog posts etc.) Attach files to any content (incl. forum posts, content pages, wiki pages, news or blog posts etc.) Very powerful event-management (RSVP, automatic waiting lists, attendee exports), ideal for networks focussing on an event (e.g. BarCamps and others) or a series of events CMS, news system, blogs (for users or only for admins) … Advanced customization Customize your main menu and start page Create your own design with the layout manager Change any element of your community with CSS Why can mixxt provide free social networking when Ning can not? mixxt has a completely different business model which provides us with a more versatile and stable revenue situation. Although the mixxt business model shares the Freemium Model with Ning (or at least used to), we also provide fully White Labeled networks for enterprises or large institutions. These Enterprise Communities provide high customisation, external integrations into CMS/CRM/ERP systems and custom SLAs. Our customers include ministries, pharmaceuticals, publishers, radio stations as well as universities and non-profits throughout Europe. So apart from you being able to add Premium Features to your network for a small fee (starting at € 9 per month), large corporations can tap into our technology and expertise to deploy powerful and flexible social networking solutions. Many of our customers came into contact with us via our free and premium networks, learned to trust us and opted for one of our large Enterprise Communities. We also offer a partnership programme in some European countries that rewards Enterprise Community referrals with free Premium Services and a substantial referral fee. In addition to all this we have revenue sharing deals with many other services and we even provide complete social networking universes, that let a company run a complete social networking kit for their employees or customers or students (similar to mixxt.com itself). The ed[...]

A real Ning-Import and the migration survey

2010-05-03T15:35:33Z

The wild search for alternatives to Ning is keeping many social network creators more than busy, especially in the educational sector. Migrating your social network from Ning is a daunting task. Several services have rushed to offer you a “Ning-Importer”, which in many cases just sends out invitation messages. If it does some kind of [...]The wild search for alternatives to Ning is keeping many social network creators more than busy, especially in the educational sector. Migrating your social network from Ning is a daunting task. Several services have rushed to offer you a “Ning-Importer”, which in many cases just sends out invitation messages. If it does some kind of import, it will probably scramble non-English characters. You also have to check if profile questions are imported properly, in most cases they are not. Multiple choice profile questions? Not so easy, either. At least until now. Ning to mixxt member import We have just released a Ning member import that does all that and more. You even get to choose which profile questions are imported and what type of profile question it should be. The Ning-Import to mixxt lets you do some nifty stuff: Upload the memberdata.csv file Review the memberlist that is going to be imported (user data view of all records) Review the profile questions, set question types Automatically detect multiple choice answer options (you must select “multiple choice” for the detection to work) Add further questions and multiple choice answers on-the-fly Sort, rearrange and rename the profile questions Automatically join the imported members into your network Imported members automatically receive an activation email with a direct link to the activation system Soon: custom messages for the activation emails Member data review Profile answers import Your members will be able to login with their email address and choose a new password. Please keep in mind that you might run into legal issues if you import the member data to another service and don’t ask them for confirmation of the Terms of Service as well as the Privacy Policies. This is why the importer will not automatically activate the member accounts, they will have to activate their account themselves with one click. This keeps you on the safe side and respects the privacy of your members without impeding your networking goals. Give it a try and create your own social network with mixxt! You can learn more about mixxt here: Welcome to a new social networking experience and a reliable Ning-Importer Importing Ning content Now this is a different topic altogether. Ning does not offer any content export at the moment. Grabbing content via the RSS feeds is not possible, as most feeds neither contain the full content nor the older posts. This leaves creators in a bit of a pickle. We have tried various options, but Ning will have to follow up on its promise to help creators export their content so we can provide a reliable content import. This leaves us with one major question most social networking alternatives will be asking themselves: What content do Ning network creators want to migrate? Are Ning creators interested in migrating blog posts, events, images or something else? Ning content importing survey Many services and developers are wondering what kind of content Ning network creators want to migrate to other solutions. We have come up with a small survey to help developers and services all over the world in providing content import features. Most of all the survey should help the Ning network creators themselves, as they will have a better chance of getting more options to migrate to. The results of the survey will be published (anonymized), so please invest two minutes of your time to tell us about your requirements: The Ning content importing survey Premium migration service for selected networks mixxt will help 20 selected networks to migrate to mixxt. The only thing you have to do to apply for this migration is to enter the survey abou[...]

Tagging, images & files anywhere, new buttons & WYSIWYG

2010-05-02T22:06:29Z

mixxt has been busy lately and we have added several new features in Version 0.21.1 (nikuba): Video module: new navigation (next video, previous video) Design: New buttons and form elements, inkl. colour selection in the admin panel Blog & forum modules: Tagging for blog posts and forum threads Forum module: HTML-Upgrade (Formatting, images & files in posts!) Forum module: View [...]mixxt has been busy lately and we have added several new features in Version 0.21.1 (nikuba): Video module: new navigation (next video, previous video) Design: New buttons and form elements, inkl. colour selection in the admin panel Blog & forum modules: Tagging for blog posts and forum threads Forum module: HTML-Upgrade (Formatting, images & files in posts!) Forum module: View recent posts while writing your answer News module: Add article teasers to your news posts The most exciting new feature is the all new WYSIWYG-Editor. It is available in nearly every part of your mixxt network: blog posts news posts forum posts event & poll descriptions HTML/Code boxes on the Main Page content pages (CMS module) The WYSIWYG-Editor not only lets you format your texts, it also lets you add images as well as files to any content. Now you can collaborate even more effectively by adding resources and documents on-the-fly. Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

mixxt server availability almost 100% for 2009

2010-01-22T16:08:21Z

Last spring, we started using Nagios to analyse the availability and performance of our Community kit mixxt. Nagios is Free Software (GPL) and monitors critical IT infrastructure components, including system metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and network infrastructure. To ensure that system, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly, we monitor all systems—24 hours [...]Last spring, we started using Nagios to analyse the availability and performance of our Community kit mixxt. Nagios is Free Software (GPL) and monitors critical IT infrastructure components, including system metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and network infrastructure. To ensure that system, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly, we monitor all systems—24 hours a day, 7 days a week—and are very pleased with the decent result: During the last 300 days of 2009, the uptime of the mixxt servers (which means all mixxt hosted communities) was 99.938 %. Only 4.5 hours of downtime, plus scheduled maintenance, this is great news! These issues are taken very seriously and we’re still working on improvements. Our servers are equipped for our strong growth and running reliable and stable, even through temporary rushes. Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

Numbers! New Statistics in your mixxt-Communities

2009-12-17T08:51:47Z

Today’s update will certainly delight our mixxt community creators: mixxt has launched detailed statistics to give administrators a deeper insight into the activity and the utilisation of their networks. Member Stats We have added a new menu to the network settings of the administration panel called – guess what – “Statistics”. In addition to some general network [...]Today’s update will certainly delight our mixxt community creators: mixxt has launched detailed statistics to give administrators a deeper insight into the activity and the utilisation of their networks. Member Stats We have added a new menu to the network settings of the administration panel called – guess what – “Statistics”. In addition to some general network information (name, domain, launch date, creator), this page provides a detailed membership analysis. The number of members – split into their their different roles (members, admins, mods) – is supplemented by it’s increase over the last week and the last month. As a further indication for activity in the community, it also shows the number of pin board entries on member profiles. Features – Utilisation & Activity The main screen shows different values for each active feature in the community (as a reminder: you may choose from Blogs, Videos, Forums, Images, Groups, Wiki, Events, Files, Polls, Content Management and News): Number of posts/content plus the number of collections/albums/main categories Number of new posts/content by x different members over the last 7 days Number of new posts/content of x different members over the last 30 days Number of comments Recent edits Disk space & traffic On top of that, the network statistics provide information on available and used space and traffic: And now: Go ahead and have a look at your community’s numbers! As always, your feedback is highly appreciated! Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

@mixxt looks great on Twitter

2009-11-25T13:16:39Z

In addition to our help pages* and direct support via email, the mixxt team is using (and loving) the microblogging service Twitter to answer questions and requests from the mixxt universe. Twitter allows us to communicate with our audience and react very quickly, almost in real time. In April 2007, Oliver sent our very first tweet [...]In addition to our help pages* and direct support via email, the mixxt team is using (and loving) the microblogging service Twitter to answer questions and requests from the mixxt universe. Twitter allows us to communicate with our audience and react very quickly, almost in real time. In April 2007, Oliver sent our very first tweet (the short messages send via twitter) from @mixxt to the twittersphere: Since that day, @mixxt has tweeted more than 300 times, won 500 followers and appears in 16 lists. mixxt uses Twitter for rapid response to support requests, announcements of events and updates as well as news from the mixxt office. Besides that, we pass on interesting links and information from various mixxt communities. We can hardly imagine our Community Management without using Twitter and we really cherish this direct connection to our customers, users and partners. In addition to our English @mixxt, we’re running the very active account @mixxt_de for our German friends & followers. Our Polish support uses the Polish equivalent of Twitter named “blip”, while @mixxt_pl is not that active. As the Twitter bio only allows you to provide a very limited amount of information, our media designer Sebastian created a fancy new background image. The image provides more detailed information about mixxt and also shows who’s twittering here. Including Photos! Oliver (ou) and I (ne) mark our Tweets with our initials to avoid any misunderstandings and to inform our readers who they are talking to right now. What do you think of the new background on our Twitter profile? Are you satisfied with our support via Twitter? Is there anything we can improve? Just drop us a line or a tweet! *BTW: In the not too distant future, we will launch a new FAQ section on mixxt.com and improve our help pages to improve our user support. Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

Update: Global Search, Wiki Editor, Shoutbox

2009-08-21T15:17:21Z

In all the excitement about our new global friends, let’s not forget the other great new features that we recently added: Global Search Previously, mixxt users were able to search terms and keywords in some single modules, like the forum, members or content management. The new global search allows users to expand their search from one [...]In all the excitement about our new global friends, let’s not forget the other great new features that we recently added: Global Search Previously, mixxt users were able to search terms and keywords in some single modules, like the forum, members or content management. The new global search allows users to expand their search from one module to the entire community. In the search results, choosing “search the whole network” next to the search box leads the user to community-wide results. Users can show or hide the results from the modules ( members, forums, images, wiki, events, blogs, files, videos, content management, polls, groups) by clicking the respective icons: Search operators: Some operators are available to improve the results: mixxt & Community – finds any content containg the term mixxt AND the term Community mixxt | Community – finds any content which either contains the term mixxt OR the term community or both mixxt -Community – finds any content containing the term mixxt but NOT the term Community Wiki Editor The wiki editor now offers a toolbar with formatting options. This makes the handling of wiki pages much easier for non-techie users and helps them with font sizes, bullet points, headlines, links or anchors. Shoutbox In one of our last updates, we have already added an administrators’ shoutbox to post directly into the lifestream. From now on, every administrator may add a shoutbox to the main page which – depending on the privacy settings – allows every member to post and shout some words (400 characters!) right into their community. The shoutbox is ideal for status updates, announcements and tips, to post links or even for short dialogues. Not only every network may now have it’s own shoutbox, but also every group can place it on it’s start page! Your feedback is highly appreciated, have you already spotted some nice shouts in the wild? Stay tuned via our twitter updates! Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

Global friendships for mixxt-Fans

2009-08-21T11:22:28Z

According to the announcement in last week’s blogpost, mixxt has added global friendships to it’s communities! All mixxt users may now automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with joining a new network will be [...]According to the announcement in last week’s blogpost, mixxt has added global friendships to it’s communities! All mixxt users may now automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with joining a new network will be reduced to a minimum. Activating global friendships We have added a new menu to the mixxt-settings to activate or deactivate “global friendships”. If both users have activated this feature, they will automatically become friends in the networks (only for realname and public nickname networks) they join in the future. Of course, members will always be able to end friendships manually. Bonus: User A has enabled global friendships and joins a network. User B, an “old” friend of A, already is a member but has not activated global friendships yet. User B then automatically receives a friend request from A, which contains a hint to activate global friendships. This helps us to communicate this new feature more quickly and minimises the amount of friend requests and confirmations for each user very fast. BarCamp Power-User As we have already pointed out the pros and cons of global friendships in the latest blogpost: Most of our users and admins hold a membership in only one network which means that this feature appears to be needless or might even irritate them. The desire for global friendships mainly arose from barcampers and webworkers, who actively participate in many of our networks. This feature has been a hot topic in many internal discussions and we finally decided to pay tribute and respect to the whole BarCamp and web2.0 scene by making their wishes come true ;) Become a mixxt fan mixxt would like to take this opportunity to ask our users, customers, readers, friends and supporters to become a fan of mixxt. We have set up a Facebook page to collect and organise various information about mixxt and the mixxt team. Do you like mixxt? Then click here and become a fan: mixxt page at Facebook. Thank you very much! Your Feedback is highly appreciated. Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

Global friendships in mixxt Communities

2009-08-14T16:42:30Z

Some of our users have been waiting for this announcement for months: We will be adding “global friendships” to your communities! When joining a network, users will automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with [...]Some of our users have been waiting for this announcement for months: We will be adding “global friendships” to your communities! When joining a network, users will automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with joining a new network will be reduced to a minimum. The desire for these global friendships mainly arose from barcampers and webworkers, who actively participate in many of our networks. But since the majority of our users hold a membership in only one network, we have postponed this topic several times. BarCamp Power Users One of our goals is to keep mixxt with it’s multiple features as simple as possible to use, even for non-techie users. On the one hand, both the administrator and the members of a single (non-barcamp) community would most probably not catch the importance of “global friendships”. For them, they appear to be just needless. On the other hand, feedback and wishes from the BarCamp scene are very important to us, we see ourselves and our software as part of this scene and have grown with it. That’s why we were looking for a solution which satisfies our power users, but is not too complex to build or to use. Our “Global Friendship” Solution After discussing different scenarios, we have decided to go for a system which we can implement with reasonable effort and that will surely make our barcampers happy: In the mixxt settings, each user will be able to activate global friendships. If both users have activated this feature, they will automatically become friends in the networks (only for realname and public nickname networks) they join in the future. Of course, members will always be able to end friendships manually. In addition to that: User A has enabled global friendships and joins a network. User B, an “old” friend of A, already is a member but has not activated global friendships yet. User B then automatically receives a friend request from A, which contains a hint to activate global friendships. This helps us to communicate this new feature more quickly and minimises the amount of friend requests and confirmations for each user very fast. Fine-tuning and implementation Our developers are already working on the concept and the implementation and we might even be able to release the feature by the end of next week. We are excited about the reactions from the mixxt community and keep you posted on any news and the release date here and via twitter. Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Facebook Tweet This! Add this to Mister Wong Share this on Wikio Post this to Posterous Tweet This Post[...]

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