Skribit 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!

What better way to wrap up April than with a few Skribit features? Let me be the first to say that these features are just the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot planned and are happy to announce that Erik Peterson has joined the Skribit core team, which also consists of Calvin Yu and myself. Below are some of the changes in this release. You will notice the widget has undergone a few changes. As a sidenote, we plan on heavily reworking the widget so if you have any thoughts to impart, please drop us a comment.

• Fixed some issues with widget login and registration in Safari.
• Users can now upload an avatar, which is currently being displayed on select pages on the website and will be better integrated throughout the site in the next release.
• Removed the description from the widget – all you have to enter now is just the suggestion.
• Widget changes: removed the “What’s Hoppin?” banner from the widget, moved the Skribit logo to the bottom of the widget, the top of the widget now says “What should I write about”, the suggestions box has a character countdown.
• You can now vote on the blog profile page. You can get to this page by clicking on the “# of # suggestions” link at the bottom of the widget.

No longer do you have to wait for someone to approve your account after registering for Skribit. We’re ready to take on more people eager to give Skribit a whirl! All you have to do is signup and either add a blog if you’re a blogger, or just use the account to interact with other Skribit-enabled blogs.

If you’re making a suggestion via Skribit, the main benefit of registering for an account over being an anonymous suggestor is that you’ll be able to track your suggestions and see if they were blogged. It also gives the blogger an idea of who suggested each suggestion and therefore some incentive to write on the topic compared to writing for an anonymous user.

Along with Skribit’s leap into a public beta, there are a few new features such as email notifications for new suggestions and comments for suggestions. Skribit is still hopping and we have a bunch of ideas and features in the works. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear what’s on your mind. Stay tuned.

Are you a hip & hoppin’ blogger with a nice following of readers? If you’d like to see what your readers care about, sign-up for the Skribit beta and let us know where to find you.

Yes, Georgia is in a drought, but we’re ready to grow the size of our pond!

It hasn’t even been a month since Atlanta Startup Weekend took place and Skribit has gone from an idea to an engineered application ready for deployment. After Startup Weekend, Skribit was in a closed beta for the co-founders to squash bugs and slap on a new design. As the guy who has been harboring the idea for Skribit for a very long time, it’s glad to say that we’re ready to let others test our app and take in some helpful feedback.

If you’re just joining us now, you might be interested in hearing what problems Skribit solves and what it can do for you, regardless of whether you’re a blogging maven or just a casual blog reader. First off, let me tell you where I’m coming from. To put it conservatively, I’m a blogging enthusiast. I love technology, sharing my knowledge with others and gaining wisdom from those that comment on my articles. The only problem being what to write about. Coming up with a truly original piece takes great effort and only happens once in a blue iPod.

Enter Skribit.

As a blogger you can use Skribit to get feedback from your readers as to what they want to see you write about. Your readers can register to use Skribit or provide you with suggestions anonymously. Suggestions can be voted upon and a myriad of magical algorithms displays the hoppin’ suggestions, or what we like to call skribits.

Readers get to keep track of suggestions they’ve made across all Skribit-enabled blogs and websites, discover related blogs and find other readers interested in the same topics. When a blogger posts an article from a reader’s suggestion, the post is linked to the suggestion.

Here’s a teaser screenshot of the My Blogs management page.

Want to try it out for yourself? Head over to Skribit.com and signup!

Sponsor plug: Skribit would not be possible without great help from Media Temple webhosting. I gave Alex at Media Temple a call in the middle of Startup Weekend and we had a production server that night. When our development team wanted to switch to another Linux distribution, Media Temple was right there with us and promptly set us up another box. Thanks guys!