Skribit Blog

If you have been experiencing some odd Skribit behavior, including but not limited to random short bursts of downtime and 500 errors on our homepage, we are aware of the issues and actively working to fix them. With our new servers we have been working with a new setup with Apache, Phusion Passenger (“mod_rails”) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Passenger occasionally takes down Apache until we can come up with the perfect configuration, for which we have employed the services of Matt Manning, another local Atlanta startup guy.

Bear with us a little while longer and we hope to have these issues sorted out and have Skribit running faster than ever! In the meantime, you can keep tabs on our Twitter updates on @Skribit.

Thanks for sticking it out!

Skribit had an hour of downtime yesterday evening, as we mentioned on our Twitter account. I’m happy to report that our new 2 server setup, provided by the always helpful Media Temple, is flying along. The new setup will give Skribit all the headroom it needs to grow and test out new features. Should you spot anything funky happening, please report it to us. Thanks.

We’re always up for learning about ways to cure writer’s block – regardless if it comes from Skribit itself, a product in the same space like Plinky or an insightful blogger. Today’s post is about the latter. Chris Brogan recently posted an article called 20 Blog Topics to Get You Unstuck and he did a great job about highlighting a few topics and questions that can easily be employed by most bloggers when blogger’s block is in full swing.

Here are the first three topics Chris suggests:

1. What challenges are my potential customers facing. Do I have any advice for them?
2. What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
3. What bugs me? Can I write about another way to approach it?

and I recommend you visit the full post for the other 17 ideas! What tips or tricks do you have that relate to getting “unstuck” when it comes to blogging? We’d love to hear ‘em!

Last week we rolled out a complete revamp of the Skribit.com design and rolled in a few new features here and there. I’ll cut to the chase – we’re looking for your feedback! We’ve already tweaked some things like our menu based on feedback emailed to us as well as on our Get Satisfaction page.

The details of the new release can be found in my blog post about the design process. But the rundown is that this release, aside from looking a lot better, has support for more tags (groups, blogs and suggestions can be tagged – check your “Edit Blog Details” page to update the tags and description), and several “explore”-type pages that let you browse all of the blogs on Skribit.

As always, lots more stuff is in the pipeline. Stay tuned!

Along with the new year, Skribit will be welcoming its first full-time employee. After just having wrapped up my college career, I will be devoting my time and love to Skribit. What does this mean to the typical Skribit user? Better service and a better product. Changes will be rolled out to the server more frequently so you’ll be seeing new things in your account much more often. Also, your emails and support questions on Get Satisfaction won’t be left unnoticed for long.

Skribit mentioned on gatech.edu

For more about this, take a look at a recent press release from the Georgia Institute of Technology covering Skribit.

Skribit launched late on a Sunday night exactly one year ago today. It wasn’t much of a launch. At first it was just a mailing list signup form and splash page being pummeled by readers coming from a new TechCrunch post while we were scrambling to get the actual site up.

The new startup, called Skribit, is preparing for a beta launch. What is it? I really have no idea. It’s described as “a social software widget that allows bloggers to take suggestions directly from their readers. Widgets are shareable web applications that anyone can easily grab and post into the blog of their choice.” Sounds like a commenting system to me.

Like I said, I don’t expect much from Skribit and the other Startup Weekend startups, but the events have real value nonetheless.

Michael Arrington might not have gotten the concept when we launched but I sure bet he didn’t expect us to be around this long. Skribit is the most successful Startup Weekend company to date. If I had to pinpoint any particular reason for this it would deal with passion. Calvin and I have a strong passion to see Skribit become successful and grow a large community of happy users. To see that dream come true we have stayed motivated, listened to you guys and kept on trucking — not to mention received great advice from our self-proclaimed grey haired advisor along the way.

So what’s next? I wrote about some of that on my blog as well gave a sneak peak of a new feature we developed this past weekend at Atlanta Startup Weekend 2.

Thanks for sticking with us despite the bugs, downtime and miscellaneous issues that inevitably come with a small startup. The next few months should prove interesting.

The Skribit widget has remained largely unchanged – at least from the external point of view – for several months. The reason? We’ve been working on something much better! Today our new widget is open for test drives so you guys can help us find any bugs and share your feedback with us. Here’s the low down: the new widget doesn’t use an iframe and as such, you can style it however you like with your own CSS. It also weighs only 4.6KB so it won’t affect your website’s loading time, as compared to our old widget which included a hefty JavaScript library.

The new Skribit widget customized on PaulStamatiou.com (left) and blog.codeeg.com (right)

Additionally, there are some notable usability improvements. When you click the title text (“What Should I Write About” in these examples) in the textbox, it moves down and lets you type your suggestion directly in there – as opposed to flipping to a new screen and hiding the current suggestions.

As mentioned, we are currently beta testing the new widget. You can give it a whirl by either checking it out on our blogs (Paul, Calvin), or installing it yourself with our new WordPress plugin. The plugin helps install the widget on WordPress blogs using widgetized themes. If your theme doesn’t support WP widgets, drop us a line and we’ll provide you with the code snippet to manually install it on your blog.

As usual, feel free to provide us with any comments, suggestions or feedback on our Get Satisfaction page.

Here at Skribit HQ we realize it’s hard to get lots of blog post suggestions if you are just starting out or don’t have a large, engaged readership yet. We’ve planned out a slew of Skribit enhancements aimed at solving this problem and today we’ve rolled out the first one.

The next time you’re browsing Skribit.com and spot a suggestion that you would like to write about, or just gauge the interest of your readers, click on the “add” button. If you have multiple blogs, select which one you’d like to add the suggestion to from the drop-down.

The suggestion will then be copied over to your account as well and your readers can vote on it too, through your widget or blog profile page.

As for related features in the works, we have been developing groups and browse pages. More on that when we’re ready to push them live!

Got feedback? You can comment on this post or visit the Satisfaction page.

Thanks to a feature suggestion by Get Satisfaction user Rarst, we have created a Skribit FeedFlare unit. If you use FeedBurner, a service which helps optimize your website’s RSS feed and provides you with detailed statistics, you can add this FeedFlare unit to let your readers know that you use Skribit and have a link to your profile page to accept suggestions.

To install the Skribit FeedFlare unit in your FeedBurner’d RSS feed, log into your Skribit account, click on the “My Blogs” (the manage page) link and follow the instructions on the “Goodies” page.

Now this begs the question, do you use FeedBurner?

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.