How to add a photo to a review

1) Go to www.imageshack.us

2) Upload your photo file and click "Host It" (don't enter in your email, or check any of the other options)

3) Copy the url called "Hotlink for Websits" (it's the third one from the bottom)

4) Paste this url into the body of your review.

This only works for reviews posted from the item page (the one with the formatting tools like bold, italics, etc.). It will not work from the Rate It! pop up window on the list pages.

I think that images can be especially helpful for travel reviews personally, but it will be neat to see how folks choose to use this feature.

Back from Vacation

Hi All, I'm back from my mini vacation and am working my way through a few hundred site feedback messages. If you sent in feedback over the last few days, I should get to it shortly.

Site Search is Down

I'm getting reports that searching on RIA is down and returning errors. The search provider has been alerted, and hopefully this will be resolved shortly.

Jessica Alba Movie Widget - Testing

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More Testing

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Widgets with Images

Here's another neat thing you can do with the new RIA list widgets - you can add a background image. Here's an example:

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To do this, just select the middle widget design, and then enter in the url for the image. The best way to generate an image url is to use imageshack.us, upload your image, and choose the "Direct Link to Image" option. It's free and there's no registration required.

Put Any RateItAll Rating List on Your Page / Site

OK, RateItAll lists are now totally mobile. You can put them on your MySpace page, on your blog, and even on your RateItAll profile page. There's three cool designs to choose from, and each design is totally customizable in terms of color and size.

GTH has embedded a list of anti war songs on his profile page. Numbah has put a list of Star Wars characters on his MySpace page, Randyman has added a list of classic fights to his blog, and Kamylienne has embedded a list of hot sauces in her blog.

I'm pretty excited about this. I feel like we've just set all of our lists free. To try it out for yourself, click on the third link in the "Actions" box on any list page.

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Another test

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Testing - More New Toys!

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Home Page Tweak

Guys, you can now start making a new rating list right from the home page - check out the middle panel of the yellow section. No need to dig down through your profile page.

Time Stamp Bug - Fixed

New reviews posted via the item pages are no longer getting buried deep in the recent comments page.

Time Stamp Problem

A number of folks have reported a problem with the time stamping of reviews submitted via the new HTML editor. These reviews are showing up with an older time stamp than they should, pushing them down the recent comments page.

We're aware of the issue and are working on it.

RateItAll To Go

Testing a new toy that we hope to roll out soon.

View and Manage Reviews Within Your Weblists

OK, we've turned on a feature that lets you view all recent reviews that have been posted to your Weblists. You can view all, or using the drop down filter, isolate the reviews for specific Weblists.

We've also included the ability for you to delete specific reviews that have been posted to their lists. I encourage you to use this feature only in extreme instances. To delete a review, click the scissors icon next to the review.

To access this feature, click the link under your profile image that says "Create / Edit / Manage Weblists."

Here are some screenshots:


















And here's a view of the actual display and delete icon:

Top Ten Ranked RateItAll Members

1. MADuron
2. Vudija
3. Jamie McBain
4. Indierocker
5. Ridgewalker
6. Numbah16tdhaha
7. VirileVagabond
8. GenghisTheHun
9. Magellan
10. Jed1000

What are these rankings for you ask? These are the top ten contributors of new item suggestions (you have to use the sort tool at the bottom of the page) - folks that are helping to make existing lists better.

If you've published a weblist before on RateItAll, there's a good chance that one, if not more, of these folks have suggested new items for your list.

In my opinion, this is one of the unsung activities of the site. Cooperation makes for better lists, and as someone who's made more than a few lists myself, it is a huge help to the publisher.

And don't forget - if you suggest a new item for a list that gets approved, you get "credit" for that page for the purposes of the RateItAll Economy Program. What does that mean? It means that you share ad revenue on that page for as long as the program continues.

February Traffic Growth

RateItAll has just posted its sixth straight month of solid growth. February is a short month, but visits per day were up 6% over January, which is all the more impressive considering we had two days in which the site was all but unreachable due to server overload. Here are monthly visits for the last six months:

February (extrapolated to 31 days) - 1002K
January - 942K
December - 851K
November - 802K
October - 794K
September - 699K

I'm not going to count this as a million visit month because of the extrapolation involved, but I'm pretty pleased nonetheless. I'm hopeful that March is going to blow the roof off.

Item Relocation Tool

Good news - we just fixed our tool that lets us relocate items from list to list. For example, we can now start paring back our Current Release Movies list into something a little more current.

So if you see an item that is miscategorized, please feel free to drop me a line.

We're also working on turning the feature back on that allows Weblist publishers to view and manage all the reviews that are coming through their Weblists. Old timers will remember that we used to offer this, but it got lost in last year's redesign.