I'm looking forward to the end of election season

The political rhetoric, my own included, is starting to give me a headache.

I miss dog food and grizz reviews, and ratings of "4-Good!" with the review "three."

Any RIA'ers on Twitter yet?

If so, you can follow us here: twitter.com/rateitall

Those that click through can check out pictures of the fire that grazed our office building today.

Fewer Crap Reviews from MS and FB

You may have noticed a slow down on one word nonsense reviews from FB and MS.

This is intentional.

Irishgit, this one's for you.

The Passing of a RateItAll Reviewer

Harlock (formerly known as SpanishGonzo) has apparently passed away. She wasn't one of our community's most prolific reviewers, but she made an impact. From my limited interaction with her, I thought she was a sweet and nice young woman. She will be missed.

There are some memories being posted HERE.

All Time Record Traffic Day Yesterday

According to Google Analytics, we eclipsed our all time traffic record yesterday, finishing at over 42K visits.

I'm happy to say that our servers handled the load without even a hiccup.

Movies, Movies, (directors), Movies, Movies

Guys, we have recently added MASSIVE amounts of movies, directors, and actors to our database.

Our friends at Netflix have made their entire catalog of movies, tv shows, actors, and directors available to us (and other sites) via what's called an API.

We've loaded much of this stuff in - and are still loading.

So I challenge you to try and find a movie, a director, or an actor that we don't have. Seriously. Use the search box and search for anything. Click through to check out the Netflix Movies or Netflix Directors.

Oh yeah, this is also cool.... if you look in the margin of movie or director or actor pages, you'll find related items - movies that the director has directed, or actors that have appeared in the movie.

For example, check out this listing for the classic surfing movie Big Wednesday. Here's what you'll see in the margin:























For you movie buffs out there, I think it will be fun to follow the trails of actors, movies, and directors around the site.

Lots of New Categories

Those of you hitting the "browse" link in RateItAll's header will notice lots of new categories. We are in the middle of spring cleaning / re-categorization of all of our lists. As the number and diversity of the lists has grown, so has the need to create more specialized landing pages for various themes, such as religion, military, the arts, pets, and relationships.

The other thing you might notice is that RIA lists and Weblists are all mixed together now - this is a sign of things to come.

We are managing this project on the fly, so you may notice some odd and/or wrong categorization of things for the next week or so... please do not be alarmed.

Rate Your Credit Card

Let's all pile on the credit card industry when they're down.

We've added a pretty comprehensive database of cards for credit card reviews to our site - find your card(s) and rate it (them)!

One more plug for the RateItAll Toolbar for Firefox

I am loving the RateItAll toolbar for Firefox. I love it so much that I abandoned the new Google browser, Chrome, and came back to Firefox 3 - just so I could use the toolbar.

I use the toolbar to 1) rate sites (and add them to ria) as I browse around the web; 2) directly access my reviews and my network's reviews; and 3) search RIA from anywhere.

If you use Firefox and haven't yet taken the toolbar for a spin, why not try it out? Click here to download it.

Some Changes to Search

For the last several years, we have been using a third party search service to deliver search results on RateItAll.  They did a pretty good job, but there were a couple of problems:

- There was a one day lag in new things showing up in the search results

- Their search engine was a general search engine that had been tweaked to try and meet our needs - it was not build from the ground up specifically for RateItAll.

- The search results were hosted on a third party site, causing a very slight delay 

No longer.

Our newest engineer, Jonathan, has built a site search engine for RateItAll that is better and faster than what we had before:

- There are no more lags.  If you add a new page (weblist, review, item) to the site, it will immediately be reachable via search.

- Search is rocket fast now - no bouncing back results from a third party site

- Search quality is better - because this search engine has been built for RIA, I think you'll find that the results are a bit better.

Please hammer away on the search engine and let me know if you see anything screwy.

Social Media Poem

A guy named Greg K. has written a poem about web 2.0 / social media - pretty clever, no?:

I’M PRETTY WELL CONNECTED

(a Web 2.0 poem)

By

Gregory K.

I’m pretty well connected:

Facebook’s got my face.

I AIM and blog.

Of course I vlog.

Come see me at MySpace.

I Flickr, and I Twitter.

I wiki and Squidoo!

I’m Live. I Ning.

I’m there on Xing.

I’m really LinkedIn, too.

I Hulu, Yelp, and Google.

My YouTube channel’s hot.

I share Goodreads,

Have many feeds,

And Digg and link a lot.

Second Life and Classmates?

Xanga? RateItAll?

I’m on those four

And dozens more

Plus some I can’t recall.

I’m pretty well connected:

My friends are EVERYWHERE.

I bet I’d meet

Them on the street…

If I’d just leave my chair.

RateItAll Toolbar for Firefox

We've just launched a neat Firefox toolbar for RateItAll.  If you are a Firefox user, you can take it for a spin HERE.

Going from left to right on the toolbar, here's what each button does:

Read Reviews Button:

As you browse the web, the Read Reviews button will turn yellow if RateItAll has reviews of the site.  This is helpful if you are, say, thinking about buying something at an ecommerce site that you haven't used before.  If you see the "Read Reviews" button light up, you can check out reviews from other folks that may have used the site before by clicking on the button.  If it doesn't light up, it means that noone has reviewed that site yet.

Search Button and Search Box

The search box and button does exactly what you might think - it lets you search RateItAll's database from anywhere on the Web.  Clicking "search" will pop open a new tab on your browser and display results from RateItAll.

Rate This Site Button

This is my favorite button on the toolbar.  As you browse the web, this button lets you rate and review whatever website that you are on.  Clicking the Rate This Site button pops open a new browser tab, and takes you to the right page on RateItAll to rate the site.

And here's where it gets neat - if RateItAll doesn't already have the site in its database, it directs you to the new item submission page on RateItAll, with our best guess as to the proper information already populated into the page (web site name, web site url, web site description, etc.).   

This tool is for rating domains (e.g. CNN.com), not rating individual articles or pages within a domain (e.g. CNN.com/wall-street-collapse).

My Reviews and Friends' Reviews

The My Reviews and Friends' Reviews buttons do exactly what you might think.  They take you directly to the pages where you can view your own review archive, as well as recent reviews from your network.  On RateItAll.com, you have to click a couple of different links to get to these pages... I find it's really helpful to be able to access them with one click.

Inbox

The Inbox link takes you directly to your RateItAll inbox where you can check messages from other reviewers.

Sign Out / Sign In and Home

Sign Out and Sign In are self explanatory.  Home takes you to RateItAll.com.  And clicking the little drop down takes you to important RateItAll pages like Recent Reviews and Hall of Fame.

Many thanks to RateItAll programmer Alexander for building this cool new toy!

Eventually we will get to building something similar for Internet Explorer.

Google Case Study

Our friends at Google have written a nice case study about how RateItAll uses AdSense for revenue sharing.  Check it out.  My favorite quote comes from some guy named Lawrence Coburn:

“Treating your users fairly is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for business.”

Date-Able App for Facebook

Aileen, RateItAll's awesome intern, has built an application for Facebook around dating called Date-Able.  There are a bunch of dating related quizzes on there that will help you find (or avoid) that special (or unspecial) someone.

Facebook users can click through to add the Date-Able app.

Oh yeah, if you have ideas for more apps or quizzes, talk to Aileen.

What Browsers Do We Use?

A new browser from Google launched this week called Chrome.  There are already some pretty good Google Chrome reviews on the site.

So it got me thinking.... which browsers does the RIA community prefer?  Well, here's a snapshot of yesterday's activity:

IE is still the big fish here, but I find it impressive that Chrome accounted for 1% of all visits yesterday.

Here is RateItAll's ranking of top browsers:

Check out RateItAll

Working Hard Over Here at Expanding Our Coverage

For a long time, there were very few new rating lists added to the main RateItAll section. The vast majority of the new stuff came in from members in the form of Weblists. This dynamic was mostly the function of RateItAll not having any resources, and partly the function of not having efficient tools to add new listings.

Well, now I have some help over here and some new tools, and some folks have been working very hard at expanding our product coverage. I wrote already about all the new baby product review sections that we've added. More recently we've been focusing on pet product reviews (pet beds, pet carriers, dog health products, etc), health and beauty reviews (hair styling tools, bath scales, fitness shakes), and sporting good reviews (archery products, badminton racquets, baseball bats, etc.). We've also added sections for radar detector reviews, luggage reviews, and Christian books.

Weblists continue to be a crucial part of the site - I think they are largely responsible for giving RIA it's unique "rate anything" flavor and personality. But I also think it's time for the RIA team to start pulling OUR weight in making sure we have coverage for popular product rating categories.

If anyone has ideas / requests for product rating categories that they would like to see covered, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

We've Gone Baby Crazy

A certain member of the RateItAll team - he/she shall go unnamed - has a baby, and has been complaining about the lack of baby rating categories on RateItAll. Waah.

So we've gone a bit baby crazy, adding sections for Crib Reviews, Cradle Swing Reviews, and Baby Gate reviews to the site. We've also considerably beefed up our stroller reviews section.

So if you have a baby, know a baby, or ever were a baby, I'd encourage you to please click through and write some baby product reviews.

A New Logo!

Guys, check it out....

RateItAll is the proud owner of a sleek new logo.

It reminds me of fireworks! Or a sleek rocket ship! Or shooting golden stars through the night sky!

OK, maybe I'm getting carried away... but I REALLY like the logo.

Our old logo was originally designed to be very "business-y" - this one seems a lot friendlier to me.

If you have kind words to say, please send them to Lena.

If you have harsh words to say, please send them to Jose.

And if you want to rate the logo, click HERE.

And we're back....

... two hours ahead of schedule. Thanks to Automatt for his hard work in getting us cut over and all the prep work he did to make this a smooth transition.

If you see anything not working properly, please let me know.

Cutting Over to a New Host - DOWNTIME IMMINENT

Guys, as we continue to deal with site and rating engagement growth, we will be cutting over to a new host today.

Currently our architecture looks like this: one pretty good database server, one very fast web server, one OK web server, one weak web server.

As of later tonight, our architecture will look like this: One very good database server, five very fast web servers.

We expect a noticeable improvement in performance, and of course, the ability to handle several times the amount of traffic that we can today.

We're going to be down for about six hours while we transfer our massive database to the new host.