How does this work? Just visit our new and improved login page — keep in mind that you’ll need to be logged out of Protagonize to see it.

This is all courtesy of an awesome service called RPX that I discovered a few weeks back, that allows sites to integrate their tools, in turn letting our authors (and future members) use their pre-existing social network credentials to register and login to the site.

What does this mean to you, you ask? Please allow me to enlighten you…

If you’re a new user…

The main thing gained here is that new users no longer need to remember yet another password when signing up for a Protagonize account. They can still register in the traditional way, but they also have the option of signing up directly via an existing account on one of the following 3rd party sites or services:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Yahoo!
• Microsoft Windows Live
• Google
• OpenID

When they click “Sign in with Facebook” (or any of the other services listed), Protagonize will import all of their publicly-accessible information from the service in question, including the basic profile information and your profile image (if you have one available.)

That means that they’ll be able to (almost) magically create a Protagonize account without lifting a finger, aside from verifying their handle and email address when their account is created. Pretty neat, right?

If you’re an existing user…

This isn’t necessarily quite as cool as for new members, but you can still utilize the new RPX-driven login system if you’re an existing Protagonize member. If you select the option to sign in using one of the 3rd party services listed on our new login screen, you can attach your Facebook or Twitter (etc.) account to your Protagonize account and use it to login in the future.

What’s cool about connecting your accounts is that, down the road, we’ll be able to use this to publish information back and forth between Protagonize and your other services (if you so choose), and you can sign into the site with a single click, instead of entering your Protagonize account information every time you need to login.

So, definitely a win-win for everyone, right? :)

P.S.: The new login system has been up since the wee hours last night — if you notice anything strange (and thanks muchly to those who’ve already sent in bug reports), please let me know. Cheers, and enjoy the new hotness!

From the six finalists we had listed previously, we were to select one story as the Editor’s Pick for this week, and the second story’s author would be the Featured Author. Wouldn’t you know it, while we had a nearly unanimous 1st place winner, we managed to deadlock on the 2nd place finisher. So, I’ve decided to have three winners, instead.

(ubiquitous drum roll ensues)

1st Place: A Slice of Life (mature), by Faltarego

2nd Place (tie): Irrefutable Evidence, by lostmidtranslation and 17abbi

2nd Place (tie): Human no Longer (mature), by JackRubashevskiy

Due to the mature nature of Faltarego’s post, he’ll be our Featured Author this week, as with Jack next week, and Irrefutable Evidence will be our Editor’s Pick. As for prizes, I will have those contest winner badges ready for you guys by the end of this week — I’m in the process of showing my house and it’s a little hectic trying to get any work done there, for now. I’ll notify all the winners when the badges are ready!

Congratulations to our winners and thanks again to everyone who participated. We’ll be running these contests regularly, now that I’ve seen what the participation and reaction is like. Keep your eyes peeled for the next one — we’ve already got a spiffy prize ready to go!

Apologies for not getting these posted sooner, but I spent the day with my office out of commission and two Polish cleaning ladies demolishing our apartment, prior to our realtor taking photos of the place. Okay, they were cleaning it. It just felt like it was being demolished. In any case, it’s so clean now that I can see my reflection in the sink. Not a particularly flattering reflection, mind you. Anyways.

I’ll keep this short and sweet since it’s 2am and I’m supposed to be working in a few hours. And I’m sure many of you are getting started on NaNoWriMo (check out our Protagonize participants group if you are!), so I won’t keep you.

Our finalists for the first annual Protagonize “Tales of Terror” competition are, by category…

(drum roll please)

Supernatural:
Hottest: Irrefutable Evidence by lostmidtranslation
Top Rated: Treygandon; Stalker of the night by FutureBestseller1896

Horror:
Hottest: Human no Longer (mature) by JackRubashevskiy
Top Rated: A Slice of Life (mature) by Faltarego

Mystery/Thriller:
Hottest: A Horror Confession by d.f.m
Top Rated: The Grand Hotel by Lyre

Congratulations to all of the finalists! We’ve got the majority of our moderator votes in, only short a couple, so we should have the two winners listed tomorrow.

I’ve also been forced at gunpoint (not really), by my lovely wife, to give an honorable mention to redhat’s Jack-o-lantern. Apparently she thought it was so awesome and in the Halloween spirit that I’m a bad guy for sticking to the contest rules and not making her favourite entry the winner. ;)

I’ll do my best to get those winners’ badges ready to go in time. Due to my home-selling situation, it may take a day or two longer to get the badges out the door to the winners, but I’ll do my best. :)

And a big thank you to all 16 entrants in the competition! Considering you only had about four or so days to enter and promote, you guys did a great job. We’re already planning the next contest, with an awesome prize donated by a Protagonize member who-shall-remain-nameless until they tell me it’s okay to name them, so keep your wits about you for the next few weeks. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

I realize this is a little last-minute, considering we have three days left until Halloween, but I figured I’d get everyone’s attention with the title. Oh, and the pic. :)

In the spirit of this week of goblins and ghouls, and since this is the week leading up to the trials and tribulations of NaNoWriMo, why don’t we have a little fun with it?

How about a little friendly competition between Protagonize authors? In these last few days before good ol’ Samhain, I want to see what you folks can do when working together on a “Tale of Terror.”

Here’s how it works:

Both the top rated story and the highest-ranked hot stories posted between now and midnight on Halloween (well, 11:59pm Pacific Time on October 31st, 2009) in each of these three categories will be considered finalists for the competition:

• Horror
• Mystery / Thriller
• Supernatural

The rules

Anyone can enter, obviously assuming you’re a Protagonize member.

Make sure your story (prose or poetry are both fine) is newly posted (and no, I don’t mind if you delete an old, orphaned story and re-post it for the competition) between now and the end of Halloween night. Stories will need to be appropriate to the category they’re posted in — we won’t select you as a winner if you post a totally miscategorized story.

You’re allowed to submit the story to multiple categories, but if you write a Halloween love story, it had better be a zombie romance story if you want to throw it in under Horror as well as Romance. :)

Collaborative stories are fine, as are solo stories. You’re welcome to post multiple stories, and we encourage everyone to collaborate with each others’ tales as well. The winners will be the original story posters, mind you, so keep that in mind when posting stuff.

Again — the winners will only be selected from those categories. Once we have the winners tallied up (the #1 Hot Story and the Top Rated story for each of those three categories, solely during the timeframe of the contest, and not prior), the moderators and I will judge all six finalists. The top two stories we select will win the competition.

Addendum: Mature stories are okay, but your story will not be featured if it’s mature. At best, you can win second place with a mature story, and be the featured author (yes, you’ll still get the badge.) Keep this in mind when writing, as you’ll rule yourself out of one of the two possible prize-finishes if your story is mature.

Prizes! (yes, they’re virtual)

• The two winners will be featured on the site for the week post-All Hallows Eve! Our first-place winner will have the featured story for the week, and the second-place winner will be the featured author. Sorry, there is no third place. :)
• Both first- and second-place winners will receive a shiny badge on their profiles declaring them the winners of our inaugural 2009 Halloween “Tales of Terror” competition (and no, I haven’t designed it yet.)

Spread the word!

Feel free to send your story to your friends on Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you post a link to the story on Twitter, mention @protagonize and we’ll retweet it to all Protagonize followers! Just make sure to use the #protagonize hashtag if you’re talking about your story on Twitter. :)

That’s it! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask below, or over in the Protagonize Pub group.

The competition starts now. Get writing!

• First, I wanted to make the ratings a more reliable source of feedback/information about your writing.
• Second, this will make all of our “Top Rated” and “Hot Stories” rankings a much more accurate gauge of quality and/or popularity of content; it prevents the ratings systems from being gamed (intentionally or not) by people ratings their own work and not being rated by anyone else.
• Finally, it will help me provide more accurate recommended reading once the site’s recommendation engine is plugged in.

I’ve had feedback from a couple of people already today, wondering what happened to their ratings. All of your prior self-ratings have been removed, so your rating is now solely the ratings provided by your readers. If you’re seeing a big dip in your rating or in your total number of ratings… well, that’s something we’ll all have to live with. But at least this way, you’ll know more accurately where you stand amongst everyone else on the site.

For those of you wondering if this change came out of the blue, I’ll assure you that it didn’t. It was well thought-out and discussed, and the folks who responded to the survey were overwhelmingly in favour of the change: 93% of respondents voted for the change, and only 7% against it, along with a hearty discussion below my original survey question.

If you’d like to see the survey results, you can browse the thread over in the Protagonize Pub group. If you have any issues with the change, please feel free to contact me via my profile with your concerns. Although a few may be affected negatively by this update, I’m confident that it’ll be a boon to the site as a whole in the long run.