Add RateItAll to Your Site by Copying and Pasting

We just launched a new feature that we hope will make adding RateItAll to other sites as easy as copying and pasting.

We're calling this thing the RateItAll Review Widget.

Here's how it works. On every item page on RateItAll (e.g. iPod (widget), Pixar's Up (widget), Abraham Lincoln (widget), Red Bull (widget)), you will now see a little embed icon that looks like this:



Clicking that icon lets you format a little module (widget) that can be pasted onto your blog or website. Don't be fooled by the small size of the widget - you can post reviews into this thing, and you can also read the reviews of others. You can login via your RateItAll or account, or via your Facebook account. It's like a little mini RateItAll to go.

So what are the implications of this? If you are Randyman and write an awesome blog about boxing, you can include reviews of some of the great fights in history on your blog. Or if politics is your thing, you can include reviews of any US President, or any issue from RateItAll controversial list of political issues.

Anyone who has spent time on RateItAll knows we have something for everyone. There are now more than 2.2M little review widgets for your copying and pasting pleasure. Message me with questions.

Here's a widget for Disputed Iranian Election.



(Note: if you were using the old widget, replace the old code with the new - it's way better)

Are you on Twitter? Follow RIA's accounts

Here are some fun Twitter accounts to follow for RIA addicts:

/AllReviews - this account gives you a real time feed (with links) of everything getting rated on the RIA network



/AllComments - this account gives you a real time feed of all new comments



/AllItems - This account gives you a real time feed of all new items added to RIA (minus LongTail)



/AllQuiz - real time feed of all quizzes taken



/RateItAll - Editorially selected pages from RateItAll

One More Big Fix Live

Since the launch of V3, one of the biggest complaints we've heard from folks who use the site a lot was in regards to the Home / River page.

Here was the problem:

If you paged down a few pages to see recent reviews on the home page, then clicked off on something, and then clicked back on the browser - the page was not remembering that you had paged down. In order to get back to the view you were on, you had to page down again.

This was annoying for a lot of folks.

This is now fixed - please try it out.

Host Maintenance

Our host is doing some maintenance today and site availability has been sporadic.

I will post an update when I have it.

Best of May

Here are a couple of stats from the month of May:

Top Three Helpful Vote Getters:

Irishgit
edt4
FranksWildYears

Newcomers of Note (follow these folks!)

Gris
Ayn
SK4U2009
quarterhorse51
kat15lee
cinnleigh
darkpalace
irishprincess3279

Most Visited Review / Comments Page:

Torture Should Never be Used (review by Ridgewalker)

Most Visited Member List:

90's Music (jamie mcbain)
(more than 22K people visited the landing page for this, and many more hit item pages on it)

Perfect Review Sharing

We've spent the last few weeks working very hard on improving the sharing functionality associated with various parts of RateItAll - specifically, Lists, Items, and Reviews.

We've focused our efforts on three ways to share in particular:

- Email
- Facebook
- Twitter

If you look at the top of the right hand column of any List, Item, or Review page, you will now see a "Share This Page" module:

First, let's look at the email sharing option.

Let's say I wanted to share my awesome list of Mexican Beer (which I am very proud of) with my friends via email.

Clicking the envelope icon on my Mexican Beer page pops open the following form:



With this form, I am able to type in email addresses one by one, and include a brief note.

I can also pull in contacts from my address books on services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail by clicking the "Use Your Address Book Instead" button:


This tool lets you select friends from your address book to receive an email with a link pointing to your list (or item, or review).

Now let's look at Facebook. By now, just about everyone has a Facebook account, and Facebook's newsfeed format is a perfect way to share your lists, reviews, or items with your Facebook friends.

Clicking the Facebook Icon (farthest one on the right), will do one of two things depending on if you are logged into Facebook at that moment:

If you are logged into Facebook, you will see a prompt from Facebook that looks like this:



If you are not logged into Facebook, you will be prompted to login to your Facebook account before seeing the posting prompt above:



When you share a RateItAll story on Facebook, your Facebook profile will look like this:



And when my Facebook friends share RateItAll stories, this is what I see on my Facebook home page:



Now let's talk about Twitter. I know that folks on RIA are a bit skeptical, but this service is taking off like a rocket right now.

Clicking on the light blue "T" icon:

Will automatically open up a new browser window that includes a link to the page (list, item, or review), as well as some text that indicates whether it's a list, item, or review that you are sharing. Here is what it looks like - note that the posting field is pre-populated with the link and text, all you have to do is click "update":



One thing to note - you can share any list, item, or review page to Facebook, Twitter, or Email, whether or not you created the page, and whether or not you are even logged in to RateItAll.

These sharing features are available to everyone, and we hope they will be a great way to get more exposure for your reviews and lists.

Please poke around and let us know what you think.

We just pushed a couple of improvements live

We just made a couple of enhancements to the site:

- We added perfect sharing tools on every List, Item, and Review page. You can now push out any of these pages with one click to Facebook, Twitter, or Email, whether you are logged in or not. This will be a full post shortly.

- The home page river now remembers what view you were on if you click away, so that if you click back, you don't have to reconfigure your view. For example, let's say you are on your home river / feed page, and have used the filters to isolate just comments. If you click away from your home page, and then click "back" on your browser, you will see the same view that you left - just the comments. The only view state we are not remembering yet is the paging - this will be added soon. Sounds minor, but this is a big improvement.

- We have created a short form URL of all of our item and topic pages that can be more easily shared. Here's an example of the long form URL:

http://www.rateitall.com/i-839549-should-never-be-used.aspx

And here's the short one:

http://rateitall.com/i-839549

- We have fixed some annoying formatting issues when publishing reviews to Facebook - things like apostrophes and quotations should work fine now.

Congratulations to our Book Review Contest Winners

There are a couple of folks on the site who have realized that by focusing their efforts on a particular category for a day, they can walk home with some serious loot.

Congratulations to:

1) Irishgit
2) Twansalem
3) CinnLeigh

A close honorable mention goes to edt4.

In this particular contest, it took 42 qualifying book reviews to walk home with a $100 Amazon gift certificate. For some of you folks with 2K, 4K, 10K reviews... it would have been child's play to finish in the money.

Don't get me wrong - We are happy to keep shipping gift certificates and loot to Twansalem and Irishgit - both are very strong writers, and write consistently helpful, amusing, and thoughtful posts. But it surprises me that more of you don't lay off the silly stuff and / or the politics for a day, and put your reviews to work.

Prize delivery will go out today, via email.

Congratulations to those who participated.