1. Support for local CSS/JS  (for WP). With this option SezWho CSS and JS files are now served from you local server…So no more waiting for JS to load.

2. JS is not a lot more compact (effects both BG and WP performance)

This means your load times will improve at least 25% and potentially a lot more.

3. Support for Blogger templates for both classic and new templates. This will improve the performance for Blogger by preloading the SezWho UI. See the details at http://blog.sezwho.com/blog/2008/08/01/template-changes-for-blogger/.

There are a number of additional exciting new configuration options. See the article below for many more new features.

As usual we treat support issues as our highest priority so if you have feedback for us or run into issues, please post to our support forums or send us an email at support@sezwho.com and we will be happy to help.

Performance upgrade giveaway : Tell us the load times your are getting with the new changes by leaving a comments below and we will randomly  choose 3 participants and send them our cool new Polo t-shirt with our Logo.

Check out the WP 2.2 Beta release (Blog catalog version will be available shortly)…Lots of goodies here:

1. Support for templates for comments (See this blog for an example of how they look). With the comment templates users can have good looking threaded comments while keeping the comments in their own DB. We are supporting 4 different look and feel for the comment templates. All of them support threading and have robust SezWho integration. Although we would love to have you use these templates with SezWho :-), but if for some reason, you want to use them independently of SezWho that should be possible as well. (The templates as is the case with plug-in are available under GPL and we will provide the documentation on how to use them independently shortly.)

2. Support for Thumbs up/down as ratings. Going forward thumbs up/down are going to the default settings.

3. Support for local CSS/JS

4. Support for configurable popups (popup on hover or not)

5.  Support for WP-MU and multiple installs in same WP DB

6. Easy upgrade. Just update you SezSho folder with the latest code and configure the new options from the plugins -> SezWho configuration page.

7. Improved support for filtering.

Try it out and let us know?

News of this acquisition confirms what we at SezWho have known for some time: distributed conversations and their participants are growing in number and significance. We started SezWho with a simple idea taken from the real world: Adding context and reputation to conversations deepens their meaning and enriches relationships.  In the social media world, SezWho’s universal profile and reputation capabilities improve user engagement within communities and across distributed conversations. SezWho helps communities engage participants as it helps participants build and leverage their reputations, expertise, and relationships.

From the beginning our focus has been on participants rather than content. Instead of building a content management and spam filtering tool, we built the best ratings and reputation service available — one that facilitates conversations across all forms of social media and across all social media platforms, including Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress, and Drupal blogs; phpBB bulletin boards; and the array of wikis.

So, how does the acquisition of Intense Debate affect SezWho? The simple answer is “don’t know”. The details on Automattic’s ID integration plans are as yet unknown and a lot will depend on those details. Regardless of what happens next with ID, we at SezWho will continue our commitment to innovation and to serving users across all social media platforms in order to improve online conversations within and across communities.

1. Pleasant surprise: IE now supports a firebug like debug tool out of the box. This is great and it greatly improves the efficiency of building web apps. Great job MS!!!

This tool has all similar features to firebug. Usability is not quite there yet (e.g. hover does not display value in scripts, inspect element thing is clunky) but all in all this is great.

2. Layout works great: All the layout we had issues with in IE7 seem to work great in IE8.

3. Issues with dynamic layout: While the basic layout worked great, there seems to be an issue with some dynamic elements in the page layout. The behavior is a lot improved compared to Beta 1 but there still are a few issues.

To reproduce the issue:

- Go to http://blog.sezwho.com

- Hover over the badge top left. This will cause the profile popup to show as below:

- Click outside the profile popup to make it disappear.

The issue is that while the profile popup disappears, some elements of the popup still remain (See the while table still visible in the pic above).

(you might need to do this a few times to reproduce the issues)

This needs to be fixed.

All in all a great leap forward compared to Beta 1 but as expected, there still are a few issues here. Great job MS.

We’re working on this and targetting to clear the backlog by tomorrow.

Update (08/14/08): Barring a few emails to aol.com domain and a few bounces due to incorrect email addresses, the email backlog is cleared now. Drop us a note at support@sezwho.com if you don’t recv. keys/confirmation emails within an hour.

Update: So just to be clear, your site will not get effected…it will load as it does now. The things that will not work will be ratings, and the profile popup etc. while we are down. So again, your site will not go down because we are going to be down. Let us know if you have questions.

Update (10:13 pm): Woof, Woof

We are announcing the support for precise layout of SezWho elements for bloggers blogs.

With the latest changes the blogger users will be able to:

1. customize the layout of SezWho elements on their comment pages.

2. Pick and choose the elements they want.

3. See SezWho elements load instantly on your blogger blogs

For instructions see http://sezwho.com/install_bg_temp.php

Now these instructions deal with template changes for blogger. If you are having difficulty with the template layout that you have, please drop us a line at http://sezwho.com/support and we will be happy to help.

Let us know, if you notice anything abnormal. The remaining part of the migration is happening this weekend (details to be posted).