Skribit Blog

I know it’s not the most amazing announcement but I just wanted to make it known that we have rewritten the about page to correctly display the current team working on Skribit. That would be myself, Calvin Yu and the indispensable Lance Weatherby. In addition, we went through some Skribit press and pulled out some interesting quotes. If you have written anything about Skribit in the past or know of a good piece for us to consider putting on the about page, please let us know.

Visit the the about page.

We here are at Skribit are big fans of Get Satisfaction.  They do a great job of giving our users a way to easily bring up issues to our attention and for us to interact with our users.

Here are couple topics that are currently going on at Skribit’s Get Satisfaction site:

We’ve been discussing internally about about implementing a reputation model for Skribit and what it would look like.  To get some external feedback, Paul twittered for some feedback, which eventually led to this discussion on Get Satisfaction.

We’re beginning to lay the ground work for creating PRO accounts, and want to hear your thoughts what you would like to see.

Finally, I started a discussion for people to share tips on how to encourage their readers to make suggestions.  If you did something that worked for you, please consider helping out your fellow Skribit users and comment there.

Yup, this is another look-we’ve-added-some-more-features post. These types of posts will become the norm as we churn away here, aiming to make a great product. This time the update was mostly aesthetic and aimed at helping new Skribit visitors understand exactly what we do. It’s a little slideshow showcasing some of our key features. Do you think it gets the point across? Let us know how we can help people understand what we do.

Oh and if you received a few emails yesterday morning stating that some users had blogged a suggestion and the email provided no blog post link, that was our mistake. We had a bug on our end when we pushed the code live Friday night. It was fixed as of 11am on Saturday.

Continuing with our series of posts highlighting new enhancements from our latest release, today I want to show some of the most obvious changes. First off, the homepage no longer just displays a simple list of suggestions. We have changed it to provide more information about recent suggestions, popular suggestions and recently blogged suggestions.

The management page also received some tweaks, notably iconifying the main action links. One of our next releases will move those icons up to a toolbar in favor of clearing up the interface.

Lastly, you might have noticed a few new options on the install page. Skribit now embraces multiple methods of interaction in addition to the widget. Since suggestions can also be given on blog profile pages, such as mine, you don’t need to use the widget if that’s not your thing. You can simply link to your profile page. However, as we have recommended with the widget, placement matters. The higher the badge, link or widget on your website, the easier it is for your readers to check out Skribit.

As Calvin talked about in the last post, you can also interact with Skribit using your account’s RSS feeds - a sort of “roll your own” approach.

Being bloggers and/or readers of blogs, we all love RSS feeds.  Not only do they give us a great way to keep track of what’s going on a website, but it also makes it easy for people to share content across them as well.  That is why in the latest release of Skribit we rolled out a set of RSS feeds for everyone to use.  So if you don’t want to receive an email every time you get a suggestion, you can disable those notifications and instead subscribe to your suggestions feed with your favorite feed reader.

So where can you find the links for these RSS feeds?  They’re available on a User’s public profile page:

And also, on a Blog’s profile page:
 

(Notice that you can also now make suggestions from a Blog’s profile page on Skribit itself)

Another cool thing about having RSS feeds is you can use it to show suggestions on your blog if for some reason you cannot use the widget.  For example, I just moved my blog from a self-hosted WordPress blog to one hosted on WordPress.com.  Unfortunately, we currently don’t have our widget available WP.com, but I was able to use the RSS Sidebar Widget to show my Skribit Suggestions:
 

Here’s something else you can do:  From the Manage Suggestions page, you’ll now find the RSS feed for your posted suggestions.  Combine this with the RSS sidebar widget, and now you can show your recently posted suggestions on your Blog.

Blogger Justin Hernandez interviewed me this week for Tivate.com, an inspiration blog of sorts that commonly interviews people doing interesting things on the interwebs. The interview covers where I get my inspiration from, challenges I’ve dealt with and what I have planned for the future. Oh and there’s a picture of my work desk if you want to see how dirty it is.

Stammy is a nice easy-going guy with a positive attitude. The most difficult thing about him is pronouncing his last name (Stam-uh-tee-you), hence the nicky Stammy. In this interview, Paul talks about his accomplishments, shows us his work desk, reflects on his public speaking skills and admires his idol Steve Jobs (with quote!).

Thanks for the interview Justin!

The Skribit team has been busy for the last few weeks and now we have something big to show for it. Our latest release has several notable new features but I want to focus on one of those now: OpenID and Clickpass support.

OpenID is a free online identity service allowing users to manage and use a single digital identity on many OpenID-supported websites without the need for remembering additional accounts and passwords. To begin using OpenID, you will need an OpenID provider. Many providers exist but chances are you already have an account with a company (such as AOL or Yahoo!) that provides OpenID service.

Once you have setup an OpenID account you are given a special URL to login with. You can use that URL on Skribit, as well as with other OpenID-supported websites, and you will automatically be logged in after authenticating your OpenID account.

This release also includes support for Clickpass. Clickpass is an OpenID provider and also has technology allowing users to login to Clickpass-supported sites with a single click.

Visit the Skribit login page to try out your OpenID account. If you have any questions about OpenID leave us a comment or checkout a post on my blog about why I’ve started using OpenID.

Looking for extra security? Try using Verisign as your OpenID provider and pair your account with a Paypal Security Key for two-factor authentication.

Some of you might have noticed that we had some uptime problem today.  The cause of the interruption was that one of our Skribit bloggers had a post that got dugg heavily today:

Here’s where we are at the end of the day:

• First, congrats to Jobmob on getting their post dugg.  Great post.
• Despite the downtime on our site and our widget, this did not affect the page load times of any of our user’s blogs.  We consider that a very (very) minor victory.  I wish I can promise you that we’ll never suffer from downtime again, but that is unrealistic.   What is realistic is to expect that your site will not be negatively affected when we have problems on ours, and that we’ll fail as gracefully as possible when something on our side does go wrong.
• About an hour ago, we made a patch to Skribit which should withstand the level of activity we saw today, and we’re continuing to explore other ways of squeezing more performance out of the system.

Lastly, I want to express that we don’t consider any downtime from a blog being dugg as being acceptable level of service.  We should be able to withstand many diggs without any noticeable affect on site performance, and are taking whatever action necessary to make that happen.

Ever since we opened up the doors to the Skribit beta, we kept hearing that widget customization is a must. Today we pushed out a working widget customizer along with the ability to change the title of the widget. You can change everything from font, font size and border width to colors.

These widget customization features are just the first steps on our way to completely revamping the widget as well as offering other ways of interacting with Skribit. As usual, feedback is always welcome.

We registered ourselves today on Get Statisfaction.  Get Satisfaction is a service that creates a place where users can ask questions, request features, and just plain talk about companies and products.

Because our service offers functionality very similar to Get Satisfaction, we did discuss the possibility of re-purposing our service to do this as well.  We decided against this because 1) we wanted to open ourselves up to receiving feedback from a larger community, and 2) we want Skribit to be the best service for bloggers to build conversations with their readers, and stretching our service to do this additional thing only dilutes that message.

So our Customer Service site is open for business, please visit the site and leave us some feedback!