You can now invite any of your friends from your address book on Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Lycos and many other major email providers here: http://www.sturvs.com/invite

We have added a new For Sale category to content on Sturvs. User’s dont need to add items for sale to the Business category any more. What better way would there be to launch this category than with one of our own products?

Sturvs has added IMEEM to the list of media that can be embedded with quick-tags (e.g. <imeemsong>VIDEOCODE</imeemsong>) to display media in a Sturvs submission. This means users with audio files/mixes/mixtapes which exceed the Sturvs size limit of 20MB and users with IMEEM videos can still put their content on Sturvs, via IMEEM.

On IMEEM there are currently four (4) types of media users can post, and also copy embed code for, which are song, music playlist, video & photo. We didn’t see the need to enable Sturvs embeds for photos so we decided to focus on only songs & music playlists.

Instructions on how to embed each media type are below:

1. On the page of any IMEEM song, playlist or video copy the embed code from under the player as shown below:
   
2. Now in the embed code you just copied look for a random-looking code (let’s call it MEDIACODE) after the http://media.imeem.com/ part of the src attribute.
In any IMEEM embed code (either song, playlist or video) the media code is located in the same place with the following differences:

   For IMEEM songs, the media code is located at
   ...http://media.imeem.com/m/MEDIACODE…

   For IMEEM playlists, the media code is located at
   ...http://media.imeem.com/pl/MEDIACODE…

   For IMEEM videos, the media code is located at
...http://media.imeem.com/v/MEDIACODE…

   e.g.

   <object width="300" height="80"><param name="movie" value="http://media.imeem.com/m/MEDIACODE/aus=false/“></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://media.imeem.com/m/MEDIACODE/aus=false/” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”300″ height=”110″ wmode=”transparent”></embed><a href=”http://www.imeem.com/someusername/music/somecodeyouignore/song_title/”>Song Title</a></object>

3. Take this string (MEDIACODE) and when you reach step 2 of the Sturvs submit process, you can now place the following quicktag anywhere in the description field on the form to display your media:
   For a Song: <imeemsong>MEDIACODE</imeemsong>
For a Playlist: <imeemplaylist>MEDIACODE</imeemplaylist>
For a Video: <imeemvideo>MEDIACODE</imeemvideo>

View demo of the above instructions

All of the currently allowed quicktags for video/media on Sturvs are: <youtube><googlevideo><myspace><dailymotion><ifilm><metacafe><brightcove><imeemsong><imeemplaylist><imeemvideo> where a code is pasted from the original embed code from the external website and placed in-between the quicktags to embed the media on a Sturvs submission.

We hope say Nigerian IMEEM users go gbadun our new feature.

We would like to introduce to you the beta (test) version of our new Sturvs Web Search Engine.

Sturvs Search searches the entire web for whatever word or phrase you give, and also displays results from Sturvs.com to the right. It can serve as an efficient search engine for Nigerian content, because you know whatever you search for, you are showed what Sturvs.com has to offer for that search.

The Sturvs.com box to the right shows the top 10 search results for that keyword/phrase (by number of votes).

Please feel free to search for whatever you like on there.

Due to popular demand and requests from our users, we now have a user playlist feature on Sturvs Music. Each user now has a link to a playlist of music items that the user has saved to his/her profile. So basically the only way to add an mp3 to your playlist is to save that item. Each entry has a Save button under it when logged in.

Please note that the “Save” feature is not only for mp3s. You can save any Sturvs item to your saved items, which is visible under your profile menu, but only those items with mp3s attached will show up in the user playlist. All saved mp3 items can be visible under Profile > Playlist.

1. Click on Profile
   
2. Click on Playlist

Also to remove an item just go to your saved items by clicking on Saved in your profile and then click on the Remove button.

The user playlist will also always be available at:
http://www.sturvs.com/naijamusic/USERNAME

We hope this gives users a better listening experience on Sturvs.com.

After launching the mp3 upload capability, there was the question of continuity when users listened to music and also the inconvenience of having to go back to the Sturvs.com window to click play again whenever an mp3 finishes playing. Definitely the only way to solve this problem would be to create a player that will pull all mp3 files uploaded to Sturvs.com and place them all in a flash player with playback controls. But to put some sort of control on what shows up on the player, we decided the player would only pull mp3 files who’s submissions had been published to the home page (that had become Hot Sturvs). Even though it currently takes only 3 votes to make it to the front page, this method will be effective on the long run since the number of votes required will definitely increase in the future.

And why is Leona Lewis trying to use us for publicity?

We didn’t leave our facebook application out of the equation, it has a Sturvs Music player too.

Sturvs.com added the functionality to be able to upload mp3 files with a new Sturvs submission.

For mp3 submissions, articles or events, users don’t need to enter any URL in step 2 of the submit process. Then in step 3, there’s a file upload box. We are currently working on making this upload more user friendly and we’ll also fix some bugs that have to do with editing an existing mp3 submission.

Please see item #4 in the Sturvs Terms & Conditions for any issues regarding copyrights.

The Sturvs Facebook Application was launched on October 12, 2007 and started displaying Hot Sturvs, Latest Sturvs & Sturvs TV. At the time it was the first ever Nigerian facebook application. There are many more now though. Oladele had his new album Razz Is The New Cool out so we had him featured on the home page of Sturvs.com and used an animated image of his “Spray Me Money” phrase to attract people to the Share Button and Invite your Friends Link.

Sturvs TV was the main attraction at the time as it showed up on user profiles along with the 5 Latest Sturvs. It pulled and played random Nigerian videos from Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion and many other major video websites.

The application is also movable and can be put in the left facebook sidebar, showing only Latest Sturvs as Sturvs TV wont fit into the sidebar.

This blog is meant to log every new feature added to our websites so we will spend the rest of April doing a recap of features already added over the last year. Our new feature posts will contain both actually ‘new’ features and already launched features that haven’t been mentioned on this blog yet. It’s been exciting so far but will get even more exciting this year. We stays busy.