Chris Dodson's Page

Celebrating the festival of lights

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the miracle of light. To celebrate the eight-night holiday, Jewish people generally play dreidel, eat fried food like latkes, give presents, and of course, light the menorah. It isn’t just around the holiday table that Jewish people are coming together. From socializing to [...]

Create and customize a classifieds section with Listings

Listings is the latest Ning App built by the folks at Apps.IO. With Listings, members can create, customize, and comment on listings of various types. It’s a great option for introducing a “Classifieds” or “Jobs” tab to your Ning Network. Because anyone can add a listing, it’s easy to see how Listings gets quickly populated with [...]

An Interview with Apps.IO’s Benjamin Cavanaugh

From making it simple to post a classified ad, to providing a way to visually map members, the Ning Apps created by Apps.IO are adding new and interesting functionality to the Ning Networks they are installed on. Their newest Ning App, Listings, was a finalist in the Best Original Ning App category in the recently [...]

Send yourself a preview of your broadcast message

We’re pleased to announce a key improvement to the broadcast message, which we’ve heard will make things easier for many of you. This is a perfect example of agile development, which allows us to make small, frequent improvements to existing features. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to click a “Send Me a Preview” link at the [...]

Five tips for running awesome promotions

Contests are a core way to drive participation on your Ning Network and keep members coming back. For example, the folks at My Kicks on Fire ran a contest to win a free pair of Nike Air Yeezy sneakers. To enter, members were asked to help get the word out via Twitter. Friends or Enemies launched [...]

Pour Le Web, en français s’il vous plaît

LeWeb is one of the largest technology conferences in the world, and pulls in participants from all types of tech-related industries, including mobile, social networking and application development. Today, Ning’s Director of Business Development Cristian Cussen, participated in a round-table about platforms along with representatives from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which was moderated by TechCrunch’s [...]

Digging deeper, building sustainably

In September of this year, the SF Chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA) and the Interaction Designers Association (IxDA) held a conference, Digging Deeper. The program offered up presentations from Gil Friend, a systems ecologist and CEO of Natural Logic, and Astrid Haryati, the Greening [...]

Living in Cigar Box Nation

Spam has an unusually long shelf life, is the world’s favorite meat in a can and serves as a delectable ingredient for sushi in Hawaii. Its cans, however, can serve their own purpose. On Cigar Box Nation, a Ning Network for people who create guitars out of cigar boxes, there’s a contest underway to create [...]

Simple and stylish: The Leslieviller

There are myriads of ways you can customize your Ning Network, but sometimes it’s the simplest ones that are the most striking. We’ve written before about the case for simplicity in thinking about and designing a Ning Network. The Leslieviller is for residents of Leslieville in Ontario Canada, and uses a simple design and consistent, [...]

An improved grid view for Members pages

Update 12/08, 2 p.m., Pacific: This release is now live, and Network Creators are discussing it on the Creators Ning Network. 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 [...]