The guys have been tooting; if you surf over to toot you will notice a couple of newly introduced features. First there’s a link to the Arabic Edition of toot on the homepage; and I have to ask what took you guys so long?

The Arabic version is a disappointing replica of the English version with posts in both languages mixed up together; if the target of such edition is non-english readers, why mix up both languages? The font for in Arabic version is much better as you see below, I wonder why it’s not used in the English version. Navigation remains to be a problem ith both versions, at least in my opinion; for instance if you go to the top 10 page, you will have to go back to the homepage before going to all blogs on toot.

The voting process has been improved. If you’ve been surfing toot for a while you’d notice the discrepancies in votes where a single member has over 600 votes and the rest are well below 100! Votes were easily rigged! The voting process now requires an email, all presented in a poorly aligned form (seen below).

It’s still not fully fortified. A single email address can vote once per day (it still verifies your IP address so you can’t vote for a person with multiple email addresses in the same 2 hours), better but it won’t forbid someone from revoting for herself again the next day or after disconnecting and gaining a new IP. To ensure a fair vote, I think an email should be done in a manner similar to Podcast Alley, where an email is allowed to vote once a month; combined with an arsenal of ip logging, cookies, client computer name, etc.

Toot is a work in progress as you can tell from the “not even alpha” in the logo and should not be judged in it’s current format.I would love to see some new features in next month’s build; RSS and JSS for toot reads and what’s tooting could be great. There should ability to interact with the tooticator about the items she choses to feature; some of those are not worth reading let alone featuring, but toot remains to be Arab biased, with arabic articles hitting the feature list no matter what the content is.

Another thing that should be added is a trackback when an item is featured, this works both ways. It lets people on a member’s site know the article has been featured on toot, and creates a link back to the site.

Till next build, keep on tooting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Random, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.