We’re really excited to tell everyone about the changes to Murmur.com that went live today.  After launching Murmur into private beta last December, we’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of users checking out the site, writing articles, commenting and giving the site a thorough test drive.  A lot of you even wrote to us with comments and feedback, which has been awesome.  We’ve taken your feedback, as well as our own in watching how everyone used the site and what was going on behind the scenes and have been working on this latest update for the past few months.   While we still have a lot of work ahead of us with the site, I think this update is a big improvement, and we hope you agree.

The biggest change to the site, and the one I’m most excited about is that we have opened the doors to the general public! Now anyone can register and use the site!  We’re still considering ourselves in “beta” as we’re still working on the site, but the more the merrier - so if you haven’t registered yet, go register!

Here’s a rundown of the other changes:

• Content Editor - We’ve upgraded the content editor that you use to write articles.  The new one is slick, fast and easy to use.
• Editing Articles - One of the biggest requests we got from users was the ability to edit articles after you’ve published them, so you can fix typos or links or what not.  Well now you can.  Just go to your Dashboard and under “My Articles” click “Manage” and then “unpublish” the published article you want edit.  That moves the article to draft and allows you to edit it and republish when ready.
• RSS Support - RSS has been enabled across the site, so by grabbing the feed url from the bottom of the page, you can add Murmur to your favorite RSS Reader - you can grab the main feed from the homepage, the feed from any section homepage (like TV/Film or Music), or you can grab the feed of a specific user!
• Watching Creators - Now it’s easy to add a creator to your watchlist, just go to their profile page and click “Watch This Creator” - it’s just that easy!
• Staff Articles - Murmur has a great team of dedicated staff writers adding content to the side, in addition to all the users - you can now identify someone from the Murmur staff by a little “staff” flag on their articles and profile.
• Sharing - Now it’s easy to share articles you like to Digg, Delicious or to your friends via e-mail, just click the little Bookmark button at the top of the article.
• Number of Votes for an Article - as you know, any article can be rated and it’s your votes that determine the popularity of an article.  Well now you can see how many people have voted on an specific article to see just how that rating came to be.
• Other Behind The Scenes Fixes - We’ve fixed a ton of other things that I won’t go into detail on.  All you need to know is that Murmur.com should now run faster and make for a more pleasant experience for you.

Now, unfortunately there was one cost to these fixes - we had to do some database upgrades that caused the previous articles loaded to Murmur had to have their votes reset back to zero, so be sure to browse through the site and read and vote on any and all articles to get them noticed!

We hope you enjoy these changes and it improves your experience with Murmur.com.  If you have any feedback, please let us know by emailing bugs@murmur.com with any bugs, suggestions or questions.

A big thanks to the Murmur development team who have been working hard on making the site better for all of us.

This is just the beginning, we’ve got a lot more planned for the site as well as some other cool things, so definitely stay tuned.  But right now, get over to Murmur, read some articles, write some articles and go tell your friends they can register!

thanks.
Ron Richards