You may have noticed us taking a little nap this afternoon. It was the time change, it really tired us out. Just kidding!  We actually had some bug fixes and performance fixes to roll out. You’ll now be able to Mixx quicker

Two cool things to talk about this morning!

First, our partner, Reuters, has recently updated their site to add “Submit to Mixx” buttons on their photos and photo slideshows. Reuters has an army of photographers that take amazing pictures. Be sure to regularly check out their Editor’s Choices!

Just click on the “Share” button and choose to mixx either the one picture you are looking at, or the entire slideshow. We continue to be very excited have Reuters as a partner!

Second, the good folks over at Socialize Me! have taken it upon themselves to add Mixx as one of their options for their WordPress plugin. First off we want to give them a huge shout out for including us, and second, we encourage you to hop on over to their website and install their plugin. It rocks!

Imagine one of your articles has been submitted to Mixx. You’re getting a steady stream of visitors to your blog. You could really connect with some of these visitors—if you knew who they were. Well here’s the thing, with Socialize Me!, those visitors to your blog will see a simple message when they arrive: “Hi, thanks for the visit! Joe’s on Mixx, too!” with a link to your profile.

This gives you the biggest bang for your buck. Not only are your blog posts being submitted to Mixx, but when a Mixx user comes to your blog to read the post, you kindly greet them with a welcome message and a link to your Mixx profile. What a sweet deal.

According to the Socialize Me! instructions, if you’re a seasoned blogger, then the installation is very easy — just download the Socialize Me! Plugin, uncompress the file (if your system doesn’t do that for you) and upload the file into the Plugins folder on your server.

For those who’re new or less familiar with WordPress, a Plugin installation guide for WordPress might be what you’re looking for.

Configuration:

• Pay a visit to your WordPress account and sign-in to your Dashboard.
• Click on the Options tab.
• Click on the “Socialize Me!” tab on the sub-menu.
• Enter your usernames, IDs and profiles into the relevant fields.
• Add the code into your “single.php” page (see figure 1, or click here for the code) — you’re free to place the code where you like!

Today Mixx has reached a milestone! This is our 100th day of being open to the public, and we never could have done it without you. We love our jobs, but you definitely make it a lot more fun to come in every day. We’ve always tried to keep you up-to-date with everything that’s going on, and we absolutely want to know what you think of us. So in that same spirit of openness, we give you:

The State of Mixx at 100 Days:

• We’re now averaging hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month
• There are tens of thousands of registered Mixxers – 78% of whom have personalized their Mixx pages with more than 10 category tags
• Mixxers have created more than 700 groups, and counting
• So far, more than 5 million votes have been cast
• We now have a library of more than 50,000 tags submitted by Mixxers
• Mixx buttons have been found on the websites of some of the biggest media companies, including USA Today , Reuters, The L.A. Times, Slate, Forecast Earth from The Weather Channel, and Kaboose, with more on the way
• And it’s not just the big dogs! Many very cool and interesting blogs have added a Mixx button, allowing Mixxers to get great information from diverse sources

One of the coolest things that we’ve seen at Mixx is the level of participation of all Mixxers. We can’t say it enough—as you may have noticed—but we’re incredibly humbled by the time and energy that you put in to making Mixx such a vibrant community. And it’s not just people registering and voting—though we definitely encourage that! It’s the people who create groups that bring so many of you together—from Digg Crossovers (one of the first) to Green News; Mixxing the Web (who knew that rats laugh when you tickle them?) to Tech News, and at least 697 others. It’s also efforts like the Mixxing Bowl, where users get together to come up with ideas to help us improve and to chat about other cool stuff. They’ve even making podcasts and videos about Mixx. (They’re doing a casting call for a female podcaster, if you’re interested!)

So what can you expect from our next 100 days? Well we can’t promise all of these within the next 100, but this is a bit of what we’re working on:

• A Mixx Facebook Application
• Open APIs so the geeks among you can get access to some mashable Mixx info. Show us what we haven’t thought of yet!
• Better Groups Functionality
• New Ways to Earn—and Award!—Karma
• Improved Awards Display
• Audio Section for Podcasts
• Improved Commenting
• Improved People Search
• SCHWAG! That’s right—we’re going retail! Soon you’ll be able to buy Mixx hats, t-shirts, and more!

So from all of us, a huge THANK YOU for hanging in there while we worked out the first-100-days kinks, and for sending us great suggestions and Feedback.

Here’s to another amazing leg of the journey, and we’ll see you back in the Mixx!

Chris McGill
Founder, Mixx

Some (ok, most) of our Mixxers are way ahead of the curve when it comes to gadgets, widgets and cool little doodads. So it should come as no surprise that, not so long ago, one of you asked whether or not Mixx integrates with FeedBurner’s FeedFlare. Seems he wanted to add a little more, well, flare, to his feed. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist.) At that time the answer was No. But because we thought it was a great idea—and because we have the most amazing engineers who will do anything to be let out into the daylight every three weeks—we’re happy to say that, as of today, the answer is a resounding Yes!

So now all of you Mixxer bloggers out there can add a little Mixx pizzazz to your RSS Feed. FeedBurner has done an incredible job simplifying the process, but we’ll just run through it quickly so you can get that Mixx flare going as soon as possible.

• Step 1: Log into your FeedBurner account. If you have multiple blogs that you burn through FeedBurner, choose the one that you want to spice up with a little Mixx.
• Step 2: Once you’ve selected the feed (don’t worry, you can add more later), click on the “Optimize” tab at the top of the page (between the Analyze and Publicize tabs).
• Step 3: On the left nav bar, you should see a link for FeedFlare under the Services header. Click this.
• Step 4: In the middle of the page you’ll see a list of the official FeedFlare options. Scroll down until you see Mixx. There will be two check boxes next to Mixx: one for you to add the flare to your feed, the other for you to add the flare to your site.
• Step 5: Since you want to add Mixx flare to your feed, check the box in the feed column. (Of course you can also add any other flare items here, too.) Next you’ll see a preview of what the flare will look like in your feed. You can grab each flare item and rearrange to your hearts content. Of course, if you’ll allow us to play art director for just a moment: Mixx should go first. It just looks better. Ahem.

Once you have it just right, scroll down and click “Save.” And that’s it!

Want to see it in action? Hop over to your feed page, which will look something like: http://feeds.feedburner.com/(your blog name), and at the bottom of each feed item you should see a link to “Add to Mixx.” Click on this to get to the Mixx content submission page—the URL of the blog post should be filled in for you—and then it’s just like a regular Mixx submission: Click “Continue” to go to the last step where you can modify the title, the description, add tags and categories, send it to YourGroups or add it to your public location. Then click “Submit” and you’re done. And this time we mean it.

Have fun and, as always, let us know what you think!

The Mixx Team