That’s right folks, Thumbd is now alive and kicking. We’re the internet’s newest social website. Currently we don’t have a lot of features (in fact, we have none), but we have plenty of enthusiasm and the know-how to get the job done.

We look forward to talking with you every step of the way. We’d like to build this project from the ground up with the help of contributors, so you better believe we’ll take every
bit of advice we receive seriously.

You can now register, login, and thumb articles. You can also submit.

Of course this is an “alpha”, so you may run into bugs, but at least the system currently works at some level.

I’ve had a few people offer to contribute, so we’ll start gettings some group efforts going soon. Beta testers are welcome to participate, as well.

The first 9 pages of thumbd are already indexed in Google, so it looks like the search-engine friendliness of the website is set up right. We’ve already had several members join, and submit stories.

Work will continue today (probably every day) on increasing the functionality. I’m not sure how to categorize the stories, but I’m thinking about using “tags”.

The design is a lost cause, and I wish I knew some JavaScript, but still, the site basically is already functioning. It’s easy to submit sites, and I’m working on additional features.

Today has been a productive day.

You can now trackback the blogs that you’ve thumbd.

I have to make the submit form better, but the basics are there.

Enter the URL of the post you want to enter. Click “Get Title” if all is well, you’ll see the title. Click the Copy button to insert the Title into thumbd.

Now you have two fields to fill out

1) The TrackBack URL - copy and paste it from the blog post.
2) The Description - your description of the story

That should do it -the Trackback URL is optional - if you don’t want to fill it out, you don’t have to.

Google is showing a lot of love for thumbd. There are 41 pages indexed, here on page 3 of the project. I’d say that’s a trend I could get used to.

The search engine friendliness is in-play. All the pages are attached to an auto-generated sitemap. Add to this the fact that I turned the pages into XML and attached an RSS feed, and you realize this baby is off and running.

The site is still pretty ugly, but it’s starting to grow on me fast. I’m looking for someone to make a JavaScript thumb counter, but other than that, the emphasis is on development and usability.

Yesterday was a good day for thumbd. I managed to solve a number of bugs, and I managed to increase the basic functionality of the website. thumbd is a website that communicates with others.

Traffic sources that are already delivering people to thumbd:

1) The blogosphere - some articles by bloggers (thanks guys), and the fact that thumbd sends TrackBack pings is making people aware quickly
2) Technorati
3) Even Google has sent in a handful of visitors

I’m noticing that new people seem to be able to join quickly and submit, so I’ll work more on the navigation and usability.

thumbd now has a basic ranking language installed.

Here’s some highlights:

1) Stories can only stay on the main page for 48 hours - after their initial 48 hour run, the stories become ineligible for main page status - they might still be displayed as a “random story”
2) Stories with the most thumbs will stay at the top

The basic system will require people both submitting stories, and then taking the time to review and thumb other stories. As the community builds, the pace of submissions, and the quality of submissions should change drastically.

I’m working on more of the programming today, but the basic system seems very functional to me, with only a few annoying bugs that need squashing.

The website continues to fare well in Google, with over 71 pages indexed as of today.

That’s what thumbd does. thumbd reaches out to the people by linking to the highest quality resources on the web. This should help any website grow, and I guess we’ll find out how well the philosophy does here.

If the highest quality data sources are submitted to a group of people. At least that’s the thought behind the website so far, and I’m sure it will work.

The word is getting out there, slowly and surely, and some news stories are being submitted daily. Now we just need to get people voting and all should be well.

Progress has been great for the first week. thumbd is up and running and even being used by a select crowd of Web 2.0 elite. The interface has been undergoing design upgrades, and the basic functionality is being improved constantly.

This upcoming week promises to hold even more progress in store. As the community gets a bit larger, more people will naturally take notice. Greg Kiernan was the first person to contribute to the project, in the form of a “thumbd this” add-on for FeedBurner.

That was a nice surprise as the day started.

Not much to report today. I’m messing around with AJAX. The learning curve is relatively steep, but not completely daunting. I’m also increasing basic error-checking, so the backend should improve dramatically.

I’m making the rudimentary moderation tools, as well as increasing the stats-tracking. The site is well-regarded in the search engines right now. As it get’s update, the pages appear very rapidly. No idea if this will continue, but it’s been off to a great start.

I’ll continue to work quietly throughout the weekend.