New Section on RateItAll

We just added a section on Newspaper Columnists - make sure to add your favorites by clicking on the light bulb icon on the respective topic.

So far we have sports columnists, political columnists, humor columnists, advice columnists, and technology columnists.

Another New Feature

You can now add descriptions and images to any item page on RateItAll - these are the descriptions that show up in the "About" section in the upper left hand side of every listing on RateItAll.

For those of you familiar with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, this is a similar, group-editing type feature. Currently, however, you can't edit existing descriptions on RateItAll - just add new ones.

A global audience

This is a snapshot of where RIA's overnight traffic came from last night. The larger the bubble on the map, the more visitors are coming from that particular geography. Our top performer last night in terms of visits was Lancaster in the UK. The two blips in the Middle East are Riyadh and Dubai.

As you can see, we are getting visitors from around the world. In fact, only about 75% of RateItAll's traffic comes from the US.

RateItAll's top 10 countries in terms of visitors are: 1) United States; 2) Canada; 3) United Kingdom; 4) Australia; 5) Germany; 6) France; 7) Netherlands; 8) Italy; 9) Mexico; and 10) India.

The top 100 are rounded out by: 99) Ghana; and 100) Guam - which both sent us nine visits in the last week.

I think it's kind of neat that so many folks from around the world are reading what the RIA community has to say.

Adding links to your reviews

Apologies for the slow blog posting recently - it's been pretty busy around here.

We've just added some new functionality to the site. It's the ability to link out to other Web pages from your reviews. I think this is a pretty important feature - many times, it's helpful to reference other resources when writing a review.

So now, if you write a link in this format:

http://www.google.com

It will automatically hyperlink out to that site like this:

http://www.google.com

You can also make words links to other pages. For example, if wanted to do this:

There's this great search engine called Google that I use all the time.

Here's how you would do it:

There's this great search engine called (!Link Url="http://www.google.com" Name="Google"!) that I use all the time.

It looks kind of messy, but I think it's easier than you think. All you do is copy / paste this format for the word you want to link, and fill in the url and word:

(!Link Url="xxxxxx" Name="xxxxxx"!)

We're working on ways to integrate this functionality into the RateIt pop-up window.... stay tuned.

Spell Checker Live on the Search Engine

Check it out

Intelligent Design

Yesterday the Kansas Board of Education ruled that arguments against the theory of evolution, raised primarily by the Intelligent Design movement, will have to be taught in the state's public schools.

RIA member Szinhonshu wonders what issues the Kansas School Board will decide to tackle next.

Here's more on Intelligent Design, evolution, Darwin, and creationism:

Theory of Evolution as a political issue

Is Intelligent Design based on the bible?

Creationism as a Christian sect

Should evolution be taught in public schools?

Charles Darwin the Scientist

Charles Darwin as one of history's most influential figures

Scopes Monkey Trial

Origin of Species as a Banned Book

What should TO do now?

Numbah poses the question.