An improved grid view for Members pages (and sitemap!)

[Ning]

We’re excited to announce some improvements in our upcoming release, slated for next week. Here’s what’s in it:

* A new-and-improved display for Members & Friends pages
* The ability to display a featured profile question on the Members & Friends pages
* A Sitemap Generator for Network Creators

A new display for Members & Friends pages

Over at Ning Creators, we’ve had a great conversation with you all to find the best view for Members and Friends pages. Specifically, we’ve heard from you about the pros and cons of a grid layout and a list layout.

A grid display shows more members on the page. In contrast, the list view (which is what you see today) let you add a comment to a member’s My Page or give a gift, but it displays fewer members on the page. With this release, we’ve tried to capture the best of both worlds with a grid view that includes action links:

While we want Network Creators to have control over as many features as possible on their Ning Network, this is a case where we are not going to offer the option. This was a key part of the conversation over on Creators and the decision was to rollout the grid display came from these conversations.

Choose the profile information that appears on Members pages

As we looked closer at these Members and Friends pages, we also identified another opportunity for customizing your Ning Network. Today, the information that appears next to a member photo is pretty basic — you see the member’s gender, and their location. In some cases that might be fine, but we wanted to give Network Creators a way to showcase that one piece of profile information that’s most valuable to your Ning Network. For example, on a Ning Network for artists, that could be the medium in which they work, or on a Ning Network for firefighters, it could display their years on the job. To reflect that, you can now choose the profile question that will appear on Members and Friends pages by heading to “Profile Questions” on the Manage page and featuring a question.

A bonus feature: Sitemap Generator

With this release, we’re also generating a sitemap for your Ning Network that updates automatically. If you like, you can also customize your sitemap. To edit or customize your sitemap, click the Advanced Options link from your Manage page. For more info on this feature, check out our article here in the Ning Help Center.

[Vander NG]

Anyone found that the profile data of the new member cannot be searched? I know there is a latency that it could be searchable after the new member joining the network. However, I found it is now unreasonably long, some members has joined the network for more than 3 days but not yet being searched.

This seems happened to me after the Member Page was being modified (i.e., in Grid and Profile Question can be featured). Anything related? If it is not related then my post is off of the topic here, sorry.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Vander,

Search is a separate system and wouldn't have been effected by this change. If you're still not seeing search results for members who have joined several days earlier, please let us know.

Thanks,
Phil

[LANWANMAN]

I saw the new members grid, and it was a welcome surprise. Until reading this post, I had not noticed that we can generate sitemaps. I do need to explore how networks we create on ning show up on search engines. Hopefully, implementation of sitemaps will improve search results and ultimately result in more member sign-ups. Thanks Team Ning! Keep up the good work.

Ron aka LANWANMAN, Ocala, Florida USA

[Clark P]

Thanks for the sitemap generator! That's a great start. But it is possible to have it index more than 10 URL's and have it automatically update?

Thx!

[Evan]

Hey Clark,

The sitemap tool will generate a sitemap to all of your Ning Network's features. It's not possible to go farther in depth than that, because generating that information (and constantly keeping it up to date) for all Ning Networks would have required significant infrastructure and engineering resources.

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Clark P]

I understand quite clearly that it requires more infrastructure. And that is why folks like me have been asking for a Ning server side site solution for years. Ning sites have tens of thousands of URL's that can be included in a sitemap. Sites that big can hobble wimpy online tools and NEED a server side solution to create a complete sitemap. A 10 URL sitemap is really just a start, and not really useful since all the URL's in the sitemap you provide are linked off of the index page already.

So my questions are:
1. Will you allow us to upload our own XML sitemap files again? We could in the past.
2. If not, how many characters of our own hand-written sitemap can we paste into your sitemap space in Advanced Features?

Another suggestion is for Ning to automatically include "Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml" in the robots.txt file for all sites that have a sitemap. This provides for auto-discovery of the sitemap through robots.txt (which all spiders crawl anyway). What this does is assure that the sitemap will be found whether the site owner submits it to SE's or not.

So my request is to have a Ning sitemap feature that actually crawls our sites to generate the sitemap. This would generate large and useful sitemaps.

Thx

[Evan]

Hey Clark!

We're not planning on expanding our current sitemap offerings. You're right in that the current sitemap is basic, but that shouldn't hobble your SEO. Search Engines should be able to get to just about every publicly available page on your Ning Network via those main feature links. It would be nice to feed each and every link to the search engine, but they are able to use those starting points to crawl all the pages on your Ning Network.

However, we understand there are some people that really want total control over their sitemap, and we've given you that as well. You're now able to edit your Ning Network's sitemap.

Because of the very large infrastructure cost and small potential gain of constantly indexing every single page of every single Ning Network and keeping them up to date in your Ning Network's sitemap, this is the two-pronged solution we've settled on. To improve SEO, we've provided for an up-to-date sitemap of your Ning Network's features, and we've also enabled you to edit your sitemap yourself if you so choose.


/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[christi pemberton]

Hello. I took your suggestion of checking the box to automatically updating my sitemap, and I am still getting from Google Webmaster tools that it is an unsupported file (HTML). I checked the sitemap box under the "Manage" page, and when I uncheck the automatic update box for my sitemap, I see the HTML code for it, which has "xml" in it...so I am not sure why Google is still saying that the file is unsupported due to HTML...but in Google Webmaster tools, there are red x's for each url page that I listed for the sitemap.

Christi

[Evan]

Hey Cristi!

It's hard to say. If you contact the Help Center, we can look into it!

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Paste]

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