Wha’gallang @ #Claja

Posted by Claja on November 10, 2010 under blog, New Features & Upgrades | Read the First Comment

… So I’ve been neglecting this blog for some time now; honestly, I’m not the best blogger.

Surprisingly, I have taken a more personal approach towards building a twitter base for @Claja_Jamaica as opposed to the business-as-usual approach used with Quoqu(#dead) and @iniQiti (#1 stocks & business twitter account and #24 in Jamaica by twitterholic). It is paying off well; I’m reluctant to do the same with our blog. With that said, I’m putting out an OPEN CALL FOR ANY JAMAICAN BLOGGERS who would like an article posted here- contact me at blog[@]claja.com. Afterall, this is a Classifieds site.(for now

I feel inspired by the #ictja movement on Twitter and am trying, desperately to make a solid contribution to our development. The feedback on Claja has been great; negative or positive, I have taken everything into consideration resulting in a change of direction for the Claja brand. It’s priceless to converse with those I look up to like @top5jamaica, @utenjm, @moniquepowell, @ingridriley, @waynejonesjnr, @rohanrob, @davidmullings, @playjamaica, @gordonswaby, and @dalekurt to name a few. I know Claja is the premier social classifieds in Jamaica; powered by our users, fans, and followers… but they have shown me it can be much, much more.

There have been some major changes to the Claja network, starting with the boring stuff like moving the site over to a new sub-domain; namely classifieds.claja.com for SEO and to seperate our landing page from our Classifieds page in searches (expansion & branding time soon come . There were 500k broken Claja links on Google for about 30min before I could set the mass 301 redirect in .htaccess. Boring, a mi fi tell yuh. Didn’t think it would make a difference but apparently Google put me on page 2 of ‘Jamaica classifieds’ for 2 weeks, ouch… but as of this morning we are up from the 10th the 8th position; two more bite d dus. The Google.jm take-over continues.

The new fixed header came from obvious inspiration; I have used them before, but when twitter unveiled theirs… I kicked myself for not thinking thats how I will put the search on each and every page, like duh (dude, wheres my car- duh -_-). Plus it simplifies the coming AJAX upgrade, killing 2… hundred thousand birds with one stone.

We are currently working on our API. One obstacle was to upgrade our rss feeds; all major feeds are now running through Google’s feedburner. That will allow for use of their simple widgets for now. The idea(gem) is that sites will be able to use our data, much like twitter. Geared towards location specific, or any JAMAICAN site or blog witch would like to show Claja events and ads, or post directly to a category from your site. ‘Simple as dat’. We already have multiple #ictja sites lined up to use this service.

The debate about using a custom comment system, fb social plugin, or no comments at all has been settled. You can now add comments to each listing… powered by guess who? Facebook,, should have been a no-brainer months ago, plus our fb fan-base is now 3,500+ strong. There is also a live-help system running in the background and should be activated any day now. We will be able to assist in ad posting, minor editing and advertising sales- live, one on one.

The listings themselves received another face-lift.  Users will be allowed to upload a background for their ad, so ads will look and feel more unique. It can be done now by special request, but will be free and up for testing in the coming weeks. Also, you can now add up to 8 images, and 4 videos to each ad… have fun, don’t forget to share .

“Claja is powered by our users, fans and followers in Jamaica.”

Thanks again for your feedback and inspiration,

Donald

Team Claja