We had disabled our search engine earlier in the year, not too long after launch, because we had to make a sharp change in technology. We are working on it right now and will soon be launching it soon. It will be packed with features and will raise the bar of online search in Nigeria.

You can follow Sturvs on Twitter. If you don’t have a Twitter account, we suggest you get one.

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

Any one who went to a public university in Nigeria will understand the concept in the phrase “let my people go”. It has to do with the need to take extra course credits that make a student stay longer than the planned number of years in university, and then getting a very close grade (e.g. a C or D) to allow the student to graduate. Anyway, Sturvs is letting it’s people go…lol.

We have been loading external links within a frame on our website, in the effort to keep people on our site, but we have recently removed that feature, which is why we say we are letting our people go. Basically we have done some research and decided to allow users to freely leave the website for external links as they wish.

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?

The number of votes required before a submission is sent to the front page of Sturvs has been increased to 4 (from 3). This is to guarantee a good quality of content making it to the home page. With the surge in traffic and submissions, we have to gradually raise the bar. The original plan was to increase the minimum to 5 votes, but we welt it would be better to make the increase gradual. We will increase it to 5 within the next few months. Hopefully we will one day have enough traffic to increase the minimum to 10 votes.

Please note that we Sturvs admins can push any submission they feel worthy to the home page even if it has 0 (zero) votes. Submissions can also be removed from the home page if we feel they aren’t going to be of interest to visitors (as satisfying visitors is our ultimate goal) or if the same user intentionally votes up more than 1 self-related item to the home page at a time. We want to encourage other people voting on user submissions and determining whether or not they make it to the home page. Once again we will just say that satisfying visitors is our #1 goal and the #1 purpose of this website, so we will definitely always do what we can to make sure our home page contains interesting content for our visitors.

So far, the number of votes a submission gets really is a measure of how much the submission is liked by our visitors. A look at the top submissions so far this year can be found on our Top Sturvs page and there is no doubt that Gongo Aso deserves to be the most voted-on item (ahead by a large margin).

One issue of concern is our frequent addition of content from major Nigerian sources (e.g. newspaper websites and Youtube) and how these push user submissions off the Latest Sturvs page. We will be conducting an experiment to see how much user content will be on the Latest Sturvs page and how often content will be submitted if we slow down our import rate or pause it altogether. Hopefully this will encourage users to submit articles if they know that their submissions will spend enough time on the Latest Sturvs page to be seen by others before falling off.

Right now the average amount of time a submission spends on the Latest Sturvs page is 8 hours and for the home page (Hot Sturvs) 4 days. In other words any submission that makes it to our home page gets 4 days of free advertising.

Sturvs has broken through the 100,000 mark on Alexa with a current traffic ranking of 97,669. This is only a month and a half after we broke through the 200,000 mark. This means Sturvs is now in the top 100,000 websites in the world. This might seem like an achievement but we still aren’t stopping here. 50,000 is our next target!

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.

Sturvs loves the UK! That’s because we’ve been getting most of our traffic from there. The UK tops our list of traffic sources and it seems the lead the UK has over the US & Nigeria keeps increasing. Alexa thinks different though, as it claims Nigeria leads in traffic followed by the United States, then South Africa, then the UK. Hmm.

Sturvs has just broken through the 200,000 mark on Alexa. Sturvs’ traffic rank is currently 175,050 in the whole world and 191 in Nigeria. This means Sturvs is now in the top 200,000 most visited websites in the world and in the 200 most visited websites in Nigeria. It’s good progress but isn’t good enough. We plan to do better than this, so please watch us from now till the end of the year and see what progress we make.

We know Alexa acts like it’s on crack sometimes but this is still a good estimate of how much traffic we get. The graphs don’t correspond to our site statistics at all.

You might be asking, “what’s my business?” or “how does this affect me?” Well, if you have anything you want to market or promote, this means Sturvs can help you expose it to 1000+ daily Nigerian visitors. Any link that makes it to the Sturvs home page gets guaranteed traffic for approximately 1 week before it falls to page 2.

Update

Sturvs breaks through the 100,000 mark on Alexa in July 2008.