Announcements and General Support Info Thread

   Implemented Search Engine Friendly Click Tracking
   Implemented Custom Left and Top navigation menus
   Implemented HTTP Referral tracking and custom CSS
   Implemented Bookmark & Share Widget

HASHJOIN can now handle custom domain/subdomain resolution.  Before, when you 
created a portal on HASHJOIN you would have to access it via link on 
hashjoin.com server.  This is no longer the case.  When you create a portal you 
can now specify a custom www.domain.com Or subdomain.domain.com so that it can 
be accessed via your own domain name such as:

   "http://domain.com" OR
   "http://www.domain.com" OR
   "http://subdomain.domain.com"

   FAO - How to enable custom subdomain or domain name

One of the ways that you can make money using HASHJOIN is to enable Google 
AdSense code on your portal.  HASHJOIN will then display your AdSense 
advertising on all of the content pages so if a user clicks on this advertising 
you get paid by Google.  All you have to focus on is content -- write and post 
it on HASHJOIN and we will take care of the rest.  If you want to learn more 
about Google AdSense here's a link:

   https://www.google.com/adsense/

If you choose to create a portal with custom domain name you will probably want 
to submit this address to search engines for indexing.  Additionally, Google 
now offers a new way for webmasters to manage their website in Google Index -- 
they call it Google Webmaster Tools.  These tools are free so if you choose to 
open an account with them the first thing they will ask you to do is to verify 
that you are the owner of the site.  HASHJOIN makes it very easy to claim 
ownership of a site by providing you with "Google Site Verification Id" for 
each portal that you create.  You get this Verification Id from Google and then 
update your HASHJOIN portal with that Id instantly proving to Google that you 
are the owner of the site.

If you are interested in Google Webmaster Tools and SEO (Search Engine 
Optimization) you can check the following links:

   Google Webmaster Central
   What is a Google webmaster tools account?
   Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Previously all content on HASHJOIN was being accessed via a dynamic query over 
an HTTP call.  This was perfectly fine for user interaction but it was not the 
best approach when it came to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) since search 
engines give preference to pages that do not have query parameters such as 
this:

   "http://yoursite.com/topics/abc.html"

vs pages with query parameters such as this one:

   "http://yoursite.com/proc?topic=abc"

We have solved this problem and now every topic on HASHJOIN can be accessed via 
a "Permalink" (Permanent Link).  You can get Permalink at the bottom of every 
page that has content (view Topic pages).

We also created a special interface to feed all topics from your portal to the 
search engine crawlers via Sitemaps.  Now all Public portals with custom 
domain/subdomain have these sitemaps enabled via the following link:

   "http://www.domain.com/tp"

We also placed a link to the Sitemap on the standard footer.

We switched to cookie based authentication from Basic HTTP authentication to 
enable Google Adsense crawlers getting to our pages and to enable custom 
domain/subdomain functionality.  This means that your old password will no 
longer work.  The new login page ( accessible from http://www.hashjoin.com ) 
has a link to reset your password -- it will ask you for your username/email 
which were specified when you originally created HASHJOIN account.

Previously all communication with the end-users was done via a hashjoin.com 
email address.  We now use your own email address / name when sending email 
notifications to your users.  You can change this on the [Edit] Portal page 
under My Account screen.