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

Check out RateItAll

More Testing

Check out RateItAll

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:

Check out RateItAll

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.

Check out RateItAll

Another test

Check out RateItAll

Testing - More New Toys!

Check out RateItAll

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.

Photo Editing Problems

*Update: This Should be Fixed Now*

Some folks are reporting errors when they try and change their profile photo. We're aware of the issue and are working on it.

Thanks to HKK and aWiseguy for bringing this to my attention.

Do you like the new formatting tools?

Now that we've had a few days to mess around with the new review formatting tools (links, bold, italics, etc.), I'd like to get some feedback.

You can let me know how you feel here.

Email Alerts Fixed

I'd say that the installation of the new quad core server went incredibly smoothly. There was limited downtime, and as of yet, no serious bugs that arose.

The only moderately impactful glitch that I'm aware of was the inability of the new Web server to talk to the email server. This meant that stuff like email alerts when someone sent you a message wasn't working.

I'm happy to say that we've resolved this, and that all email alerts should be working again.

HTML Editor

So, we're trying to add an html editor to the item pages that would let folks easily add links to their reviews, or use bold and italics.

We're running into two problems:

1) The editor loads very slowly in IE
2) The editor doesn't allow folks using Firefox to leave new reviews from an item page (though they can edit existing reviews)

Unfortunately, if we can't get these two bugs sorted out soon, I'm may have to table this feature for now.

Fast Enough For You?

The new server is up, and the site is screamingly fast for me right now. Holy smokes - what a difference.

There's an issue with profile pages that we're working on. Hopefully we'll have this fixed shortly.

Update

So we're not flipping the switch on the new server today. It's taken longer than expected to get the new server configured, so it looks like it's going to be tomorrow.

We've also finished development on some very cool publishing features. I think you'll find that these new features will allow for better self expression, as well place RateItAll posts more directly in the conversation that takes place in the blogosphere.

More on this to follow, and we expect to turn these new features on tomorrow as well.

Cutting Over to the New Server Soon

We may have up to 30 minutes of downtime starting very soon.

Scheduled Downtime - New Server Going In

Guys, it looks like there's going to be some scheduled downtime today when we put the new quad core online. I'll let you know when I have a definitive time.

Big Day Tomorrow

Two big things happening tomorrow:

- We're putting the new quad core web server online
- We're turning on some cool new publishing features (I think you'll like them)

Most Helpful Reviewers

For the first time in a long time, things are getting awfully tight at the top of the most helpful reviewers list.

Is it time to introduce a "#1 Reviewer Tag?"

Besides IG and the jedi in training that is Numbah, who else has a shot for the top spot? It seems that GTH has plenty left in the tank (though currently he is putting in some serious work on the RateItAll Wikipedia entry), and CanadaSucks has been slowly and steadily rising, despite, I presume, not much support from RateItAll's Canadian reviewers. IJR seems hampered by a late night schedule, but still is in striking distance, despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that he now only refers to himself in the third person. Castlebee has slowed down a bit, but she's certainly not to be counted out.

Sadly, despite visiting RateItAll just about every day for seven years, Magellan would appear dead in the water.

Server Update

That new, rocket-fast, quad core web server will be arriving this afternoon. We should be able to have it up and running by tomorrow or Wednesday. I can't wait.

Pets Mashup - Take 2

So here's another version of that Yahoo Pipes / RIA Pets mash up:




And here's the Pet List itself:

Yahoo! Pipes

Check this out - I made this widget by merging an RSS feed of the RIA Pets list and a Flickr feed of photos tagged with the types of pet. These sorts of mergers can be done, even by non-technical people, on Yahoo! Pipes.

Wikipedia Entry for RateItAll

Guys, GenghisTheHun is starting an entry for RateItAll in Wikipedia. Anybody who wants to contribute can do so here.

I'm going to stay out of it, as I am so clearly biased, but anybody needing historical or factual data can feel free to ask me.

Please be aware of Wikipedia's guidelines, and be respectful of the site's volunteers.

Widget Style

I really like the way these rating list widgets come out with MuseStorm. I'm going to see if there's some easy way to make this tool available for everyone so anybody can export any list in cool formats. To build your own, just click on the "Add To Your Web Site" link at the bottom.

Super Bowl Ads

Guys, I got the first 30 or so 2007 Super Bowl Ads embedded. I would have gotten them up sooner, but I was sitting at a neighborhood bar called Elixir, and people started giving me a hard time for pulling out the laptop.

Server Update

Well, I bit the bullet and put in an order for about the most powerful Web server on the planet. It's only been on the market for a few months, and is supposed to be rocket fast. I asked my web host about what kind of upgrade I can expect over what we have in place on the Web server now. Here's his response:

The difference is insane, think VW Bug to Ferrari. The AMD 2400MP was good when it was new, but it's nothing compared to this setup. The QuadCore can process 32 times the information per cycle, with 8 more cycles per given period, not to
mention it has over double the cache per processor.

So we should be talking significant, visible improvement. The pages should be snapping fast once we get this new box in there.

The parts should arrive on Friday, and we should have the new box in early next week. I'm pretty excited.

In the mean time, Google has kindly slowed the rate that their crawler is hitting RIA pages. This has given us a reprieve, and there shouldn't be any significant problems until we can get the new box in.

942K Visits in January

Five months of solid growth in a row. Let's go for six.

Visits:

January - 942K
December - 851K
November - 802K
October - 794K
September - 699K

The Ultimate Collection of Hot Sauces

Kamylienne is now covering 800 different kinds of hot sauces on her best hot sauce list. That's EIGHT HUNDRED. Is there a more complete collection on the web - or in the world, for that matter? Shouldn't she win an award of some kind? At a minimum, somebody should be supplying her with a lifetime supply of the hot sauce of her choice.

Growing Pains

We're wrapping up another month of double digit growth (percentage terms) - that's five straight months of solid growth.

Unfortunately, our Web server is feeling the strain now. You may have noticed that during mid day hours, the site gets really sluggish.

We've been scrambling for the last few weeks to keep things moving - blocking over-aggressive bots, slowing down Googlebot, and doing little optimizations. These are all short term solutions, however, and are not going to cut it for much longer.

To make a long story short, I've decided to bite the bullet and just put in a quote for a new high end, quad Web server to complement our monster database server. With luck, we'll have a new box in on Friday or early next week.

Best Ads List - another YouTube powered video list

Let's add the Best Commercials List to the group of video enabled rating lists. RIA'er extraordinaire (and the original creator of this list) Kamylienne has gone through and added videos to most of them.

Thanks Kamy!

YouTube to Emulate RateItAll

At a recent conference in Davos, YouTube founder Chad Hurley announced that soon, YouTube would begin allowing contributors of video to share in the advertising revenue associated with their contributions. This sounds a lot like the RateItAll Economy Program, right?

And I think it's great news. Back in August of last year I wrote a long rant on this blog about how I felt that too many sites were exploiting the contributions of their members. Here's an excerpt:

Now big companies and venture capital firms are realizing that people are happy to work for these Web sites for free. Thousands of new "user generated content" sites are launching. Thousands hoping to be the next YouTube, the next MySpace - thousands hoping they can slap together a site, and have volunteers make it worth millions.

It ain't right, and it ain't sustainable. It took me a while to realize that revenue sharing is the only possible direction for RateItAll, but I'm happy to say that we are still one of the only sites on the Web to step up to the plate on this.

I'm thrilled that YouTube has come around, and I hope that others will follow.

I hope that the primary reason to visit RateItAll never becomes money. If that happens, something about our community will have been lost. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do things the right way and reward contributors.

RIA Review Widget

Check this widget out:



I built this on MuseStorm, using the RSS feed available from Magellan's profile page. Anybody can do it - it's easy. Let me know if you need help.

We're working on something similar that you'll be able to grab on your own profile page... it should be ready in a few weeks.

Very Cool Search Feature Just Launched

OK, we now have the ability to filter search results by "just items" or "just lists." Among other things, this makes it much easier to discover if a Weblist of a certain theme has already been published.

Here are some examples:

Here are the search results, site wide, for Beer as an item.

Here are the search resuls, site wide, for lists about beer.

To use this feature, just do a normal search to trigger the advanced search filter options. Use the "Show Me" option in the drop down to indicate whether you would like to see everything, just items, or just lists.

Site Search Tweak

Guys, the site search engine may be a little dicey for a bit - we're rolling in a new feature that will let us search for just lists, or just items. This should be very helpful in figuring out if a Weblist has been done before or not. Stay tuned.

Video Lists

Man, these video lists are addictive. When somebody takes the time to pull together the best video clips within a particular genre, the result can be pretty impressive. And I think we're only at the tip of the iceberg - I'm getting ready to fire up RateItAll's annual Super Bowl Commercial list... this year we'll have the videos embedded.

If you haven't checked out Planetary Gear's list of Chapelle Show Skits, do so now... it's excellent.

Also, if you make a list with videos, try and remember to tag it with "riavideos" - this way we can keep them all together.

Sharing Revenue on RateItAll

Has anyone checked in on their Google AdSense earnings via the RateItAll Economy program recently? Mine are showing a bump. RateItAll has posted five straight months of growth, and it makes sense that all of us should be seeing more traffic to our lists, listing suggestions, and profile pages.

Here's one glitch that started for me yesterday, however - because I never verified my AdSense account with Google (put in my SS# and address so I can be paid) - they started running Public Service Annoucements on my pages (not ads). I went in yesterday to verify my account, and they asked me for a pin number that they had supposedly mailed me. I never got it, and had to request a new one (which takes 2-4 weeks). I'm trying to get in touch with Google to see why they are showing PSA's now while I wait for the new pin... it doesn't seem fair. I'll keep you posted.

But in the meantime, if you are participating in the RIA Economy program and have not yet verified your Google AdSense account, I recommend that you do so by going to the AdSense site and signing in.

Daily Show List

Check out Loerke's list of Daily Show Correspondents. He's dropped in videos for a number of the pages... I wasted about 45 minutes this morning watching Daily Show videos. This is a fantastic Weblist that makes use of all of the media tools that RIA has to offer.

Best. Bug Fixing. Day. Ever.

Your feedback was almost unanimous about how we governed the reposting of a review. You wanted the ability to edit and repost reviews without losing helpful votes, and also pointed out a couple of bugs in the process. Here is what we've done:

In the last fix of the day, we've switched up the rules regarding reposting of a review. Before, this is what happened when a review was reposted:

- all of the helpful and not helpful votes were cleared

- anyone who has voted a review helpful or not helpful was not able to vote again

- all comments associated with that review got erased


Here is what now happens when a review is reposted:


- the review retains its helpful / not helpful votes

- people are free to change their helpful vote to not helpful and vice versa

- comments associated with the review are retained.


Thanks for all the feedback.

New Item Suggestion Tally Faxed

The tally on everybody's profile page that displays how many new items that people have contributed to ratings lists is now fixed and displaying the correct number.








The site leader in this category? MA Duron. For those keeping score, he's contributed 657 new pages to existing ratings lists. We're working on flipping this contribution page around so that the most recent items are listed first.

A Wake Up Call

Yesterday a pretty good reviewer left the site. He hadn't been around long, but he was prolific. He wrote very solid reviews, and made some good weblists.

He left the site because he was growing increasingly frustrated with some of the buggier aspects of the site. I think the straw that broke the camel's back for him was when he spent some time on a weblist, only to see 6 duplicates of each item show up.

Anyway, he said some pretty nasty stuff and deleted his account.

This is bad news, any way you look at it. If there is a silver lining, it's that this loss lit a fire under us to get around to fixing some of these nagging bugs so that it doesn't happen again.

The challenge from an administrator point of view is finding time to keep the "little stuff" working, while continuing to try and move the site forward with the "big stuff." Sometimes you need to just stop what you're doing and sharpen the knife a little bit.

I'm please to say that we've knocked out the most nagging bugs facing the site (dupe items, search, out of control alerts, and a few others - and it feels good.

Email Alert Bug Fixed

We've fixed that bug that was automatically signing people up for an email alert for every item that they rated.

You now have to opt in to this alert, and we've added a check box to be low the alert field that makes it perfectly clear what you're signing up for.

Search Bug and Dupe Item Bug Squashed

OK, the search bug - which causes an error if you try and search for something before the page is fully loaded - has been solved.

So has the dupe item bug. You can now disable items and hit back on the browser without duplicating your items. However, if you hit back on the browser and resubmit the same items twice, they will of course be duplicated.

Let me know if anybody sees any more weird weblist publishing bugs.

This is a good day - those two bugs had been, uh, bugging me for a while.

Inching Towards Consolidating Weblists and RIA Lists

I think I've mentioned in a previous post that the plan is to combine the weblist channel, and the RIA list channel. To a new user, there's no difference - everything is rating lists. Some are created by members, some are created by RIA staff (who are also members). An artificial division between the two doesn't make a lot of sense. Also, this consolidation will allow us to simplify and standardize some of the more confusing aspects of the site.

You may have noticed some formatting tweaks to the main Weblist pages as we inch towards this standardization:

- Specifically, we've gotten rid of that big yellow bar that says "This list was created by....." and instead by the list owner and publishing date in parentheses after the list name. (soon, there will be a similar indicator for RIA lists that displays the data and "RateItAll" as the list owner)
- We've gotten rid of a duplicate display of the weblist title
- We've (finally!) added the weblist scale at the end of every weblist description (e.g. 5=great!)

I'm happy that the important content on each page seems to be moving up.... as always, please keep your feedback coming as to how we can make this site simpler, cleaner, easier, and more fun.

Bug Eradication

We are working today on eradicating the following bugs:

- Weblist Dupe Item Bug
- Search Bug (if you launch a search before a page is fully loaded, you get an error)
- Alert Bug (everybody is getting default signed up for new review alerts on anything they review - this is annoying, and unintentional)

Duplicate Weblist Item Bug

Guys, I'm really looking to nail down exactly when the bug that causes new weblist items to be duplicated occurs. If any of you serious weblisters can give me examples or theories as to when this bug happens, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm going to try and stamp this particular bug out tomorrow - it's been lingering too long.

Barrack Obama Video

Democrat Barrack Obama announced his presidential candidacy recently with an embeddable video. You can see it on RateItAll's Barrack Obama page on the 2008 Democratic Candidate list.

This sort of list will be a lot better once we can add videos for all the candidates, don't you think?

Did You Know: Adding Videos to Item Pages

Did you know that any logged in RateItAll member can add a YouTube video to any item page - in real time?

Here's how:

Click the link on the item page that says: "Edit Description"
Copy and paste the YouTube embed code into the item description field.

That's it.

I added Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" here. It's easy.

Content is Moving Up, Ads are Moving Down

Some of you may have noticed that we got rid of the big Google Ads at the top of every list and item page, and instead placed an additional Google Ad block at the top of the right column.

This means that the main content of RIA - lists and reviews - is moving up on the page. In other words, you don't have to scroll down through ads to see some good stuff.

This is an experiment to see if we can convert some more new folks to regular users by showing them more content, without damaging ad revenue. If ad revenue plummets too much, we may have to undo this (RIA actually bounced its hosting check today, gulp).

RateItAll Growth

We've put up four straight months of pretty solid growth. Here are the numbers of visits per month since September, 2006:

September - 699K
October - 794K
November - 802K
December - 851K

January is off to a pretty good start - I'd like to see us push the streak to five in a row.

Ambitious Spammer

Wow. An RIA user recently set up more than 100 different accounts in order to spam Eddie Van Halen to the top of the best guitarist list.

I have to give this guy high marks for persistence - but low marks for ethics and brains.

In addition to the scores of regular users who keep in eye out for these sorts of spam attacks, we also have automated detection tools to pick up unusual behavior.

The end result? This guy has been permanently blocked at our firewall - no warnings or explanations required.

As always, your feedback in helping us to be aware of suspicious activity is appreciated.

Weblist Suggestion (Thanks GenghisTheHun!)

Guys, the very polite tradition that many RIA'ers have about giving additional attribution to new item suggester's using parentheses is actually a bad idea.

For example, let's say GTH suggests adding "Dingoes" to a list of "Dangerous Animals to Babies." The list owner may be tempted to add the new item to his/her list like this, in order to thank GTH for the suggestion:

Animals Dangerous to Babies

1) Dingoes (Thanks GenghisTheHun!)
2) Snakes
3) Alligators
etc.

Here's the problem with this - RateItAll relies on Google for a lot of its traffic. The newly added page about dingoes has excellent potential to attract Google traffic for searches like:

"dingoes baby danger"
"are dingoes dangerous to babies"
"dingoes baby animal danger"
etc.

However, I can guarantee you that NOBODY, with the possible exception of GTH himself, is searching for:

"Dingoes Babies Thanks GenghisTheHun
"Thanks GenghisTheHun Baby Danger Dingoes"
etc.

So unwittingly, by giving credit to GTH via parentheses in the new item suggestion, the list owner is actually putting obstacles up to people who might be looking for the dingo page.

This hurts the list owner by hiding his list from folks who might want to rate things, it hurts GTH by preventing new users from visiting the page he added (for which he gets ad sharing credit), and it hurts RIA.

Fortunately, RateItAll already tracks who submits what items to lists, and gives public attribution to the submitter on the item page in a way that won't mess up search traffic.

So please... let's change this polite, but damaging custom of adding a (Thanks!) after the item name on a weblist suggestion.

Batch Delete for Alerts

Guys, we really need a way to delete alerts in bulk. I'm aware of it, and it's on the list of pending enhancements.

Site Search

OK, we have the site fully indexed again, meaning that any page that was created before today should be findable via the RateItAll search engine.

I'm working on a tweak that will allow searchers to indicate whether they are looking for a list, or an item. This should be very helpful in figuring out if a certain Weblist is a duplicate or not.

Rough Week

RateItAll has had a rough week. We've had a power supply fail, our mail server crash, and a DDOS attack. The site's most important page, the recent comments page, has broken and is taking 10-15 seconds to load. In our efforts to protect ourselves from the bot attack, we accidentally banned our search partner from the site, which broke the search engine. We've had to adjust our firewall to give us more control over who we let into the site, and who we keep out.

And of course, all of these things pale in comparison to what Ridge and Stark are going through.

I feel like we're finally getting things under control. Search is working again, though things that have recently been added to the site will most likely not start showing up in the search engine again. The power supply has been fixed. Our lead developer is working on recoding the recent comments page to make it faster and more stable. I've put in an order for a new mail server which should be up and running early next week.

Hopefully next week will be a better week than this one.

Scheduled Downtime for 3PM EST TODAY

Hi all, RateItAll will be going offline between 3PM and about 4PM today. We're making some changes to our firewall that will allow better protection against the rogue bots that have been hammering us recently.

Ridgewalker Update

I know a lot of us have been worried about Ridge. In a lot of ways, he's the heart and soul of the RIA community - a true gentleman who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, helps out newbies, and is always quick with an encouraging word.

Here is the full update from Stark:

"You can tell folks (post it on the blog if you want) that Ridge thought that he had been struck with the worst flu bug of his life. He thought he might feel better in a couple of days if he drank lots of fluids and got plenty of sleep. Only it turned out not to be the flu. The pain seemed to be getting worse until it was difficult to breath. At that point I took him to the emergency room. He had been through a full blown heart attack and the local ER put him in an ambulance and transported him to the cardiac hospital in the next town.
They did an angiogram and put a balloon in the artery to open it up, then inserted a little spring like tube to keep it open.
He's not out of the woods yet, but he's doing much much better.
His humor is returning, and that's a good sign.
Ridge is one tough bird. He's survived cancer, a stroke and a heart attack. And he's still grinning."

Well wishers can chime in here.

Site is stabilizing.... slowly

We almost have things under control. We were hit by a couple of malicious bots that slowed the site to a crawl, which started a chain reaction of certain process breaking.

One of the processes that got screwed up is the tabulation of helpful votes on the recent comments page. Folks trying to visit the recent comments page while logged in have been reporting long load times.

In an effort to speed things up while we figure out the root cause of the issue, I've limited the most recent comments page to the most recent 100 - I'm now able to pull up the page while logged in (but it's taking 10-15 seconds).

And in the category of "when it rains, it pours," the search engine is currently not returning any results.

We will spend the day tomorrow trying to work through these remaining issues.

t-shirts went out today

Guys, look for your t-shirts in the mail over the next few days... all but two went out. For those of you who ordered black baby t's, I'm going to have to resend them. The ones that were sent to me came out terribly... i need to tweak the design a little bit in order to make them legible.

Power Supply

Hi Guys, we've had a power supply fail on one of our primary servers. We're working on replacing it... stay tuned.

Recent Comments Page

Some members are reporting problems getting to the recent comments page while logged in. We are aware of the issue and are working on it.

The Site is Very Sluggish

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

Updated Senators and Governors

Thanks to a lot of help from GTH, most of the newest Senators and Governors have been added to our lists.

Backlogged New Item Suggestions

Well, I spent most of my New Year's Day going through about 2,000 backlogged new item suggestions on both RIA topics and Weblists. I'm happy to say that the new batch delete feature made it infinitely easier to manage this project, and that I am almost completely caught up on RIA and Weblist new suggestions.

I still have about another 200 local suggestions to go through, but I've tried to approve any local suggestions from RIA regulars.

Happy New Year! (and t-shirt update)

I hope everyone had a fun and safe New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

The t-shirts have finally arrived, and the plan is to spend a few hours on Wednesday packing them up and shipping them out. Everyone who got their names in should have their shirt by early next week...

Merry Christmas

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who makes RIA the diverse, crazy, and unique community that it is.

Have a great Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate), and I am looking forward to a great 2007 for all of us.


- Lawrence

Batch Delete for WebList Suggestions

We just added a useful tool for the serious Weblister - the ability to delete batches of Weblist item suggestions at once. Just check the box next to all the suggestions you want to remove, and click the big delete button at the bottom.

This is the first of a number of tweaks planned to make it easier to create, manage, publish, and distribute rating lists.

Any Francophiles out there?

New member Frenchboy2000 has created some excellent France related rating lists:

Top French Champagnes
Top French Cheeses
Top French Beer
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Video Weblists

HKK has a couple of new video Weblists out.

Check out her lists of Christmas videos and Funny videos with stuff she's pulled from YouTube and Yahoo! Video.

T-Shirts Ordered

Folks, I ordered t-shirts for everyone who messaged me. They're all getting sent here, and then I'm going to pack them out and send them to you all.

I wouldn't count on them for Christmas day :)

Two Small Fixes Just Went Live

We just rolled in two little fixes:

1) we changed the layout of the item page in order to give more width to the review column. Before the rating associated with the review had its own column. The rating associated with the review now appears below the RIA nickname of the reviewer. This is less crammed looking, I think.

2) We fixed the RSS feeds on all ratings lists pages. Before they worked some of the time - now they work all of the time. I'm talking about the link in the "actions" box that says "Follow This List Through RSS."

One neat thing that you can do with this now is to plug any list's RSS feed into the Springbox RSS Feed Reader widget like this (you can then embed any list on your blog, or MySpace page):

Get this widget!

T-Shirt Update

Guys, I'm working on processing the t-shirt orders today. To those who missed out, I'll try and open up another batch in a few months.

Happily, I was able to get a t-shirt over to Ridge at his moon dwelling. Here's a quick shot that Stark snapped from the shuttle:

Simplification

Over the last few years, I think RateItAll has gotten a bit too complicated. We've been piling on features, and developing our own terminology for things that nobody outside the world of RIA understands.

We have three channels - RIA, Weblists, and Local all of which consist of basically the same thing.... ratings lists. We have so many things jammed into the home page that I'm not really sure newbies have any idea what the heck the site is about. There are six calls to action packed into the yellow header on the home page - this message needs to be simplified into something that is easy to understand.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to work on simplifying the site. I plan on collapsing the three channels of the site into one and placing the emphasis of the site on the related activities of finding a list / publish a list. I'm going to make it so it doesn't take three clicks to start publishing a Weblist. I'm also going to invest heavily in the weblist publishing tool - with the availability of things like Ajax, there's no reason that we should have to reload a page to add a new item to a list.

The goal is going be across the board simplification - you may even see the disappearance of a few bandwidth intensive features that people aren't using much.

As these changes progress, I'll be asking from feedback from some top RIA members. If you'd like to be included in this feedback loop, please feel free to message me.

Can I Get a Price Check Please?

Here's a sort of neat, unintended consequence of the Yahoo! Shopping feed. Need to a quick price check on something for your holiday shopping? Add that product name to one of your Weblists. Product images and prices will be immediately fed into your weblist page - I tried it with this digital picture frame.

I quickly learned that these things are pretty expensive.

Formatting Problems with your Widgets?

Here are two easy formatting tips to help your pages look better when you embed YouTube videos or Streampad Music Players or other widgets.

The line of space is particularly helpful between text and widgets in an item description of a Weblist. The Center command is particularly helpful for making YouTube Players look better.

Just type the appropriate code snippets above directly into the same field where you are pasting the widget (before the widget code).

Let me know if anyone needs help with this.

RateItAll is PC Magazine's Web Site of the Week

Wow, RIA just got some love from the press. PC Magazine has named RateItAll its Web site of the week.

It's obvious that the editor really dug into the site - he gets that it's not the mainstream stuff that makes RIA unique - it's the bizarro, off the wall stuff.

Here's a quote that demonstrates this:

"The results that one encounters are equally fascinating, informative, and maddening. Users can not only discover what people think about a product—something that can be found just about anywhere on the Internet (for more comprehensive listings of actual products, you might do best to consult those other sites)—they can find out more than they could ever possibly want to know about people's opinions on just about every angle of the product on RateItAll. For example, the Dell Inspiron 8600 scores 3 stars; company CEO Michael Dell earns a nice 3.94 stars; one-time mascot "Steven" manages a respectable 3.5 stars (dude!); and his unloved replacements, the Dell Interns, get a paltry 1.69 stars. Clicking on a result will display an explanation of the subject, individual ratings, and user comments."

And I think this is the money quote:

"RateItAll is perhaps not the most professional of all consumer-based rating Web sites, but it's quite possibly the most fun."

Merry Xmas / Happy Holidays

Hi everybody, first 25 people to send a message to lawrence from their RateItAll account get their choice of one of the new RIA t-shirts displayed here on the sidebar.

Here's the info I need:

name and address where you want the shirt sent
size, model, and color of shirt (probably easiest to send me the Zazzle URL)

That's it - if you want to send me a quick note to lock up the shirt, and then figure out what style you want, that's fine.

Feel free to tell your favorite RIA reviewer to check the blog.

I really wish I could buy everybody a shirt... but they're expensive, and I'm broke.

Widgets on Profile Pages

Guys, can I just say that I'm really enjoying what folks are doing with their profile pages? IJR has a few new videos up that had me cracking up.

This whole widget thing is really cool - and by widget, I mean anything that you can grab off one site (like a YouTube video) and plug into another site (like RIA).

Anybody who is interested in finding the latest and greatest widgets to plug into their profile page should check out another blog I write called Sexy Widget.

Ad Network Slowing Down the Site

Apologies, folks. There's an Ad network that we run on RateItAll called Adbrite. When a RateItAll page is called up, Adbrite serves an ad from their servers.

Right now, for the second time in the last two months, the Adbrite servers are not responding, and it's breaking our site. Our pages won't load properly, because they're getting hung up on Adbrite's not-responsive server.

So we're ripping these guys out permanently now, as we speak. Things should be working properly again soon.

Who says Yahoo! Shopping doesn't have a sense of humor?

Check out Yahoo! Shopping's matches for "proctologist" (in worst jobs in america).

You can buy either a "your proctologist called, he found your head" t-shirt, or "fanny floss" (whatever that is).

Christmas / Holiday Shopping on RIA

Some of you may have noticed that we've just rolled in a Yahoo! shopping module on many of RateItAll listing pages. The cool thing about this module is that it's all dynamic - we send Yahoo! the name of the page (e.g. Nintendo Wii), and Yahoo! dynamically feeds us the lowest priced merchants from their shopping network for a product that matches that query. This communication between RateItAll and Yahoo! happens instantaneously, every time a page is loaded.

What this means is, no matter what page of RateItAll you are on, you will always see competitive, real time prices.

I think that this will be a useful feature as we approach the Christmas shopping season. So before you buy, see what your friends on RIA have to say about the product, and see what the lowest prices are. That's a pretty powerful combination, I think.

Here's a screenshot:

Doing a DB Back Up

Site might be a little sluggish for the next few minutes.

Big Traffic

Today was our biggest traffic day in quite some time. By the time midnight strikes here in SF, we will have done more than 32K visits to RateItAll for the day.

That's not bad for site run out of a living room, and I'm thrilled that the site seems to be stable again, and pages seem to be loading crisply.

Between big traffic and the aWiseguy video, it's already been a good RIA week :)

Display Your RateItAll Reviews on Other Sites

Hey, check this out. I've set up a feed of Magellan's reviews in this widget. It's easy to do, and it updates in real time - in other words, as Magellan leaves reviews, this display will update.

Get this widget!

So what does this mean? It means you can display your RateItAll reviews on your MySpace page (or any other social networking site) or on your personal blog or anywhere else that lets you embed widgets. If you want, you can display this feed right on your RateItAll profile page.

Here's how you do it:

1) Go to your RateItAll profile page. Click on the link below your photo that says "Subscribe to USERNAME via RSS." Copy the URL in the url field.
2) Visit this page.
3) Paste your RateItAll RSS feed URL into the line that says "param."
4) Click the icon that looks like this (it's right next to the MySpace logo)
5) Copy the widget code, and paste it into your MySpace profile, blog, RateItAll profile, or anywhere else you want to display your RIA rants.

Cool, huh?

Best. RIA Video. Ever.

aWiseguy has outdone himself with this one, I think. Check out the choreography on this RateItAll Video.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving RIA'ers one and all.

In true RateItAll spirt, here is a list of Thanksgiving related ratings:

Rate Thanksgiving Foods

Rate Thanksgiving Guffaws

Rate Thanksgiving as a holiday

Rate not having school or work on Thanksgiving

Rate Poor Thanksgiving (i don't know what this means either)

Rate the Dr. Quinn Episode called Thanksgiving

Rate Thanksgiving Dinner (in Numbah's favorites)

Rate Thanksgiving (in American Foods)

Rate Thanksgiving (In usurped American Holiday Symbols) (?)

Rate Thanksgiving (in things to love about autumn)

Rate the Agency episode called Thanksgiving

Rate things that sound dirty at Thanksgiving but aren't

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

New Comment Alerts Now Live on old Reviews

OK, we've run the script. Any time anybody comments on any of the hundreds of thousands reviews in the RIA db, the publisher of that review will get an alert.

This is helpful for us old timers who have been on the site for a while...

Weblist Duplicate Item Bug

You know that bug where if you add items to your Weblist then click "back" on your browser, the new items duplicate?

Well, we're working on it now.

Here's the schedule for fixes:

This Morning: Fix a bug that made it impossible to change their email addresses in their RIA account

Tonight: Add new review reply alert for every review in the database

Tomorrow: Fix that Weblist duplicate item bug

Comment Alerts Rolling in Tomorrow Night

Guys, I've postponed rolling in the comment alert stuff on legacy reviews until tomorrow night. Traffic is very high today, and I don't want to risk slowing the site down.

Shoot me a note if there are any little annoying bugs that you'd like to see fixed tomorrow evening. Maybe I can put numbers back in the rankings per your request.

Keeping Track of Replies to your Reviews

One obvious thing we need to do is to provide a better way for folks to know when their reviews have been commented on. There's some discussion of this issue HERE.

I think we have this solved. We've written a script that will set as a default an email alert for all new comments on any review.

The problem is that RateItAll is SO big, with so many reviews, that it's going to take a while to run this script over the whole site.

We're tentatively planning on running this thing tonight at midnight PST. The site will most likely be down for a few hours while this happens.

Once the default option is for folks to be notified when someone responds to one of their reviews, they'll be able to turn off those alerts as required.

Site Wide Search

We finally have site wide search.

Searching for something will now show all the results across the whole site for a given query. Here's an example with Jessica Alba.

In my opinion, this makes the site INFINTELY easier to use.

Some Fixes

We've been pretty busy. We've expanded out the reviews to full length, so that you can now read the first 20 reviews of any item without having to go through that "click full review" stuff. You can give feedback on this tweak HERE.

We've also fixed the email alerts for new reviews on a given item. You can now activate and disable email notifications for new reviews directly from the item page, by clicking the link in the "actions" box in the right hand column. In this example, it is displaying the turn off alert option, because I already had the alert on.












We're also working on implementing a default site wide search (RIA, Weblists, Topics). The search engine may be a little buggy for a few minutes as we work through the issues.

aWiseguy Video

Check out aWiseguy's profile page. He's embedded a video in which he discusses RIA, partisanship, and some ideas for a weblist. I think it's pretty cool how he uses this new medium to communicate with his readers.

How did he do it? He shot a video of himself, uploaded it to YouTube, copied the embed code, and pasted it into his RateItAll profile page.

Let me know if you see other folks doing cool things like this with their profile page, and I'll mention them on the blog.