November 2nd, 2008

Monkey Technicians

In order to keep our server costs down, we have actual (non-unionized) monkeys running the whole backend of the site. The positive, a great PR story that fits with our motif. The negative, they're monkeys and not techies. Long story short, we hope our week-long server issues are behind us.

October 11th, 2008

Pulp Fiction

Okay monkeys the time has come. Poorly rated buds will now wither and die as promised. YES this will be reflected in your overall seed percentage. YES you will have a chance to see what is on the chopping block 3 days prior to it being pruned.

Check out our sawmill to see if there's any timber there worth saving. See something you wrote that you don't want to see disappear? This your opportunity to plead your case to other monkeys before it gets the axe!

August 5th, 2008

Lost in the Woods?

Trees are now sortable. There's a new pulldown menu at the top of the home page. It will sort trees by Date (newest-oldest); Word Count (least to most); Title (alphabetical); Popularity (amount of offshoots/branches); and Author (alphabetical by first name). Find the forest through the trees!

July 21st, 2008

Hide-and-Seek

Monkeys are now searchable. See that search field at the top of the monkeys page? It will search monkey names, numbers, bios, locations to return relevant results.

June 17th, 2008

Paste Press

PASTE magazine strives to bring readers thoughtful analysis on the best in film, books and popular (and alternative) culture. Check out the article An Online Treehouse for Literary Monkeys on page 14 of their July 2008 issue.

(Not for nothing, but we also had a small blurb in UTNE reader on Jan 29, 2008. Neat, huh?)

April 14th, 2008

Great Grove!

Frequent monkeys may have noticed that we combined the public and private groves so that all trees now appear on the home page. Don't fret, the private grove trees are still thriving and will continue to be distinguished as private in the attribute area of the tree description.

Why, you ask? 'Cause we felt the private grove stories weren't getting their share of traffic.

April 11th, 2008

for Young Adults by Young Adults

We've introduced a new "young adult" attribute that can be assigned to trees at the time they are planted. A young adult tree can be planted by anyone with a seed, and can be read by all of our monkeys but it can only be edited by monkeys UNDER AGE 18.

Young Monkeys this is your chance to shine! Write about your interests — and get feedback from your peers and your elders. We would like to request that ALL monkeys in these trees keep their snippets and comments clean. You have the rest of the site to spit, cuss and talk dirty. Thanks!

April 5th, 2008

Pecking Order

At long last we've implemented most of the code for the caste system. Monkeys are divided into alpha, beta, and omega depending on snippets written, ranking of those snippets, and (the somewhat vague statement) "activity on the site".

You do score points for logging on. Those who have not logged on in awhile will become dormant monkeys...and eventually they will have an extinct status.

Congratulations to Chris Sadler, Monkey #27, who is our first (and only at the time of this writing) Ambassador monkey.

March 15th, 2008

Keep Your Place

Here's a new feature we've always wanted to have on the site: Bookmarks.

Monkeys will have the opportunity to bookmark a snippet and add a personal note for themselves about that snippet. You can return to your bookmarked snippets via your personal monkey page. They are stored in the snippet list section.

March 8th, 2008

New Seed Percentages

We are terrible terrible people as we have recalculated how quickly new seeds are awarded for Monkeys that have already planted trees. Our reasoning: we want to cultivate lush trees with many branches and not many trees with no branches.

March 7th, 2008

Self-Love Denied

We have removed the ability for a Monkey Author to rank their own snippets. Sorry monkeys, but we are forcing you to appeal to your fellow authors for honest critique and criticism.

October 25th, 2007

Live Chat

We have added a new live chat feature to our site. We'd love to get your feedback as we are always looking for ways to improve. Please excuse the page's design. Monkey #2 has already fallen asleep and was unable to properly design it :)

October 1st, 2007

Snippet Ratings

Due to popular demand (or at least concerned authors) we've added a rating system to the snippets. Please help us in appropriately marking those snippets already created, if you remember anything racy you've written in the past that you think might spill over into "R" versus our default "PG" setting, please write us to let us know. Thanks.

October 1st, 2007

Monkey Mail!

We've added the ability for Monkey Authors to leave mail for each other on their profile pages. Be sure to write some words of encouragement for your fellow Monkey Authors.