Frequently Asked Questions

A circle is a group of blogs or websites that all have something in common and have linked themselves together to create a common reader community.

They often share similar topics, but sometimes they collect into a circle based on real world associations like co-workers, online gaming buddies, church groups, or simply friends.

Nearcircle is about building communities of bloggers so that anyone can get the benefits of scale and recirculation. We don't just connect the readers of your blog together, but also all of the readers of all of the blogs in your circle.

Our widget lets your readers chat with people on any website that's part of your circle, shows you who's on any of the circle's pages, and provides real time updated feeds from all sites in the circle.

Nearcircle takes the central idea behind web rings and updates it for the new web, with real time tools and features that understand the structure of today's syndicated websites.

And all of these features are integrated together, making it easy for your readers to participate in your community.

At the heart of nearcircle.com is a powerful document clustering engine that watches the contents of feeds over time and builds a "fingerprint" for what the site talks about.

We use that information to suggest to you, based on the contents of your own feeds, other circles that may be interesting to you.

The matching data is constantly updated based on what what our members blog about so if we have no suggestions now, check back later and we may have found several.

The owner is the person who creates the circle. They are the only ones who can kick others out of the circle and delete the circle. In all but "open groups", the owner also is the only one who can approve others to become members. Essentially, they manage the members and the circle.

A member is a full participant of the circle, they can control the list of feeds in the circle, and can add their own blogs to it. They are the managers of the content.

A subscriber is simply a person who has expressed interest in the circle. Subscribing to a circle adds it to your main nearcircle.com page so that you can have easy one click access to it, puts you on the circle's roster as a subscriber and tells the owners that you have subscribed. No one needs to approve subscribing and you can't be unsubscribed by the owner or anyone else.

Yes. A circle can be one of three types: open, normal, and private. An open circle is one where anyone can join as a member without needing approval from the owner. This is best used for very loosely collected groups, such as link exchanges, since anyone can edit the content of the circle.

A normal circle is one where the owner has to approve membership. Anyone can still view the circle content and participate in chats. This kind of circle is what most people, especially bloggers, will use.

A private circle is truly private, and only members can see the content of the circle. This is best for closed communities where you still want to be able to meet up with your friends on each other's blogs, but don't want to let just anyone see what's going on.

We work with common versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari on Windows and Mac OS X. Our widget does not currently work with Opera, since their Flash and JavaScript integration is broken.

The widget and parts of the nearcircle web-pages require a reasonably recent version of the Flash Player to have real time capabilities, such as chat, presence, and live updates. Our pages also require that JavaScript is enabled.

Based on the ubiquity of these technologies, odds are you and your reader's browser setup will work just fine.

Our goal is to work with as many browsers as we can so if you find an incompatible browser or configuration let us know!

Like many embedable web widgets we need you to be able to edit your page's HTML to embed us. Your blog host must also allow you to add script tags. This means that we work with many but not all blog hosts and all of your own custom web pages, such as those hosted on an ISP, or hosting service. Some hosted blog sites only allow you edit your HTML after you've paid them for a "premium account". In these cases the widget will work once you pay them. As a general rule if you are free to embed your own ads (such as from Google's AdSense) in the page, you should be able to embed our widget since they use the same technologies.

Our recommendations:

• We are big fans of Google's Blogger.com for free hosting of blogs, since they allow you the most flexibility out of the gate, and work very well with our widget.
• For paid hosting, TypePad is an excellent choice. Their site works very well with our widget, and we even have a one click install to your blog.

Other notable providers:

• The WordPress.com hosted site currently does not allow embedding of our widget, but hosting your own blog using the system from WordPress.org works very well.
• LiveJournal does not currently allow our widget to be embedded.
• Xanga should probably work once you pay to upgrade your account.
• We do not currently support hosts that restrict embedding of widgets to Flash only, such as myspace. Support for other forms of widget embedding, such as Flash only and iframes, is coming soon.

The widget and some parts of nearcircle.com connect to back our server to provide chat, real time listings of who's on the circle's pages, live updates to circle content, stats and more. Sometimes the widget cannot connect back to our server for some reason such as a drop in connectivity, a corporate firewall blocking us or a server crash. If the reason is temporary the widget will automatically re-connect to keep the real time features working.

The most common reason this happens is due to a firewall of some type between you and our servers that is preventing us from connecting to our servers. In geek speak: we use tcp port 8002 for upstream communications, and that may be blocked.

We are working on ways of functioning better behind web proxies and corporate firewalls for our next major release so stay tuned!

We collect realtime stats for your web-pages that show you what registered members are visited your pages and how often, as well as how many total hits your getting. These stats work only for pages where a circle widget is embedded. Members can get the embedding code on the "edit circle" page.

We will credit a hit to your site only if the domain name matches exactly with what you registered to avoid misfires on mass hosting sites. Any sub pages off the domain should work correctly. For example if you have a widget on: www.myisp.com/davesblog/page/2 and www.myisp.com/davesblog/, both will credit the hit to the blog you registered as www.myisp.com/davesblog/, but if your users go to members.myisp.com/davesblog/, it will not give you credit for a hit.

We don't believe in persistently tracking anonymous users across the internet, so the way we determine "hits" is by the number of times our widget is loaded from your pages.

If you embed more than one widget on your page, from different circles or the even same circle, then we will count each widget load as a hit giving you duplicates.

Since we have a real time connection to the page our stats of who's online are very accurate, but in the case of server maintenance or other unexpected issues, we may miss a few.

It should show up in ten minutes or less.

All changes are pushed out to the widget in real time, including any changes made to which feeds are part of the circle.

No page refresh is necessary.

We try to be very friendly to your servers while still providing accurate feed data. Our servers use the following rules:

• We check each feed only once every ten minutes no matter how many people are viewing the circle.
• We only update feeds when someone is actively viewing the circle.
• We only check on feeds the owner tells us to. We don't "crawl".
• We perform If-Modified-Since HTTP requests and cache results.
• We support gzip content-encoding.

If you used competing widgets that work only using javascript or flash, your feed would be hit much more often. At least twice for every visitor, and much more if they attempt to do real time updates via polling. Our server handles all the load for the real time updates so your server can simply serve your pages.

For those knee deep in logfiles, our user-agent is circlebot.

In the future we plan to have per site customizable poll times, as well as alternate methods of notifying us of new posts such as ping servers.