Get your free Demon St.... I mean Happy Star Stickers

Our popular little friend, who we've sadly been seeing less of since the site has been optimized, has been immortalized on a sticker.

Whether you refer to him as Happy Star, Demon Star, Carl's Junior, or Devil Star, he makes an attractive addition to any smooth, dry surface.

Here are some shots:



And a more somber, menacing shot:



If you want some free HappyDemonDevil Star stickers, please send a self addressed envelope with a stamp to:

RateItAll Global HQ
Attn: Jose Jimenez
2601 Mission Street, #402
San Francisco, CA 94110

Logging in to RateItAll with Your Facebook Account

A few days ago, we introduced something called Facebook Connect.

Basically, what it does is allow you to login to (or join) RateItAll with your Facebook login information. It also gives you the choice if you want to publish any of your RateItAll reviews on your Facebook page.

I use this feature all the time; because A) it's easier to login with one click than to fill out the fields; and 2) Sometimes I like to share my reviews with my FB friends.

Want to try it out? Try clicking the Facebook logo on the RateItAll login / registration page:



Here's what you will see if you are not logged into Facebook already (if you are, it will just log you into to RIA):



And here's what you see if you write a review while logged into RateItAll via Facebook Connect:



If you choose to publish your review to Facebook, here is what your Facebook profile looks like:



And the link goes right to your review on RateItAll - you don't have to deal with any apps.

The only problem some of you might run into is if you didn't merge your RIA account to Facebook back when we were pushing the Compatibility App. In this case, Facebook Connect might set up a second RateItAll account. If this happens, you can just back out.

More Performance Enhancements

Today we've taken what I consider our biggest performance jump to date. The RIA Dev team moved some code from our web pages into the database, and the site seems to have really responded.

This was a major enhancement that touched a lot of pages. Please let us know if you see anything screwy - but in the meantime, please enjoy a site that is seeming pretty fast.

The Return of Featured Lists

Numbah posted an interesting review the other day regarding v3 list discovery that we talked about for a while here at the RateItAll Global HQ Compound and Campus:

Its hard to break out into new topics at times, like you're stuck...

And then Twansalem chimed in as follows:

So I'm not the only one who feels like V3 is telling me what to rate? Magellan had previously referred to the feed as the river, and it sure feels like a river to me. Easy to navigate if you want to go where it's taking you, but hard to buck the current if you don't. In the previous version, it seemed a lot easier to just go rate something else. But a couple of days ago when it seemed like all anyone was talking about was either gay marriage or the economic stimulus package, I got bored and just took a couple days off from RIA. I don't think I would have done that with the older version.

We've also heard chatter from other site heavyweights that the Featured Lists (and also the Hottest Lists and New Stuff pages) were missed in V3 as jump off points.

Well, Featured Lists are now back. You can see them on your home page, in the sidebar.

Please keep the feedback coming. We're listening.

Couple of Optimizations for Site Speed

We've just pushed a couple of site speed optimizations. Your Home page should load much faster now - my account's home page load time has been cut in half.

We've also made some changes to how we manage images that should help site speed on every page. We are experiencing a temporary issue where our placeholder animal images are showing up on item pages for folks who have real profile images - this should be fixed shortly.

Finally, item pages should load a bit faster now as well.

Pushing some performance improvements

We are pushing a few bug fixes and performance optimizations - we should be back up shortly.

Heads Up: Helpful Vote Adjustments

There are about 73,000 "orphaned" helpful votes in our system (out of a total of over 2M). These are either votes from reviewers who are no longer with us, or votes on reviews of items that are no longer with us.

We are deleting these votes as they are causing us some synchronization issues.

There will be some impact in the Hall of Fame rankings, but it should be fairly evenly distributed.

Major Performance Enhancements

We've rolled in a few significant performance enhancements that should make the site noticeably faster.

While every page should be affected, the page that you should the most impact is the list page. I think we have these loading pretty quickly now.

One of the enhancements that I like the most is the inline rating on the list pages. You now don't have to wait for the review field to slide open - it just snaps down. No more happy star here.

We're going to continue to work on speeding the site up over the next few days, and then hopefully move on to some other things.

This Week's Priority: Site Speed

I hope that you'll agree that V3 has been getting tighter and tighter (and hopefully, better and better) over the last few weeks. Thanks again for all the feedback- it's very helpful for us in terms of prioritizing fixes.

This week we will be focusing on optimizations to increase the speed of the site. I'm hopeful that we will see some big performance increases by week end.