Skribit Blog

New Skribit Homepage Arrives

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:29:25 +0000

It has been a few busy weeks since our last post here and we’re happy to announce that we have redesigned a few of the front-facing pages of Skribit in hopes of making it easier for people to understand what Skribit is, how it works and how it can help them cure writer’s block. I just came back from WordCamp Birmingham 2009, where Skribit was a sponsor, this past weekend and had a blast.

Updates

First off, we added the ability to sort your manage page (based on feedback on our Get Satisfaction support page). We also revamped the actions. Instead of having lots of icons, we just ended up with a simple mouse hover-activated menu.

When you complete a suggestion, you can now link up as many relevant posts as you want. Great for bloggers that answer a suggestion with a series of posts, or if you want to refer to some older, yet still related posts.

You can now change your blog’s public profile URL as well as that of your user profile.

So what’s the next step? Aside from the typical development and fine-tuning we’ve always been doing, we are going to start marketing Skribit. To this date we’ve just been working on building out a product and now we’re ready to start telling people about it. We still have a ton of development to get to the picture of Skribit we have in our minds but that doesn’t mean we can’t have you guys ride along while we get there.

I (Paul) will be at Blog World Expo in a few weeks so please let me know if you’ll be there and want to meetup (and get some Skribit swag!). I will be in San Francisco after that as well.

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Skribit, Now in Handy Sticker Size

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:26:43 +0000

Our sticker printers, StickerGiant, just made a quick video of them testing out their new digital press. These are the new Skribit stickers being cut! Enjoy.

The stickers will make their debut at WordCamp Birmingham, and whatever we have left we’ll be sure to find a way to get them in your hands.

Skribit Sponsoring WordCamp Birmingham

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:08:19 +0000

Yup! As the title says, Skribit is a sponsor of an upcoming WordCamp, held September 26-27th, in Birmingham, Alabama.

What’s a WordCamp you ask? The main site puts it best:

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

Considering that most bloggers use WordPress, and therefore most Skribit users, we figured it would be a great event to support (and spread the good word about Skribit). WordCamp Birmingham will be especially interesting as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg will be there! If you’re going to be there, let us know and look out for Paul (me!). I’ll have some new stickers, printed off by the awesome StickerGiant, to hand out.

See you there!

Follow Me on Skribit!

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:22:22 +0000

Last week we rolled out several updates and a few features. Not a huge release but still some things you’ll notice around the site. Rather than keep talking, I’ll just show you what we’ve been doing:

You can now follow users! We are working on an activity stream feature for a next release, so it’ll all make sense then.

A new security feature – we can automatically move suggestions with bad words into your spam bin on the manage page.

Ohh pretty! There’s a new icon under actions now. The icon with a user and a red delete? That lets you ignore suggestions from a particular person or IP. Just another feature aimed at helping control the quality of your suggestions.

Submit a suggestion (”unclaimed” as we call them) with no particular blogger in mind, and let anyone add it to their blog. You’ll be notified of updates and when bloggers write about your suggestion.

We’ve changed the pricing structure for our Pro accounts. From $5/month to a one-time $24.95 for a year. More than 2x cheaper now!

As usual, thanks for using Skribit and we have some cool stuff in the works!

Updates Ahoy! Dashboard, Tooltips and More

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:09:06 +0000

We recently rolled out several substantial changes to Skribit.com and I’ll take this time to briefly show them off a bit. First off, the homepage has been restructured. The point of this update was to help new visitors easily understand what Skribit is all about as well as help direct users to the signup flow. Below the fold, we show off some featured blogs and recently active blogs while highlighting their recent posts. This is contrasted to our previous layout that listed popular and recently blogged suggestions. We think the new layout should help bring bloggers more visitors and fans!

In addition the main menu navigation was updated to promote some of our pages that had previously been only linked in the footer. Our about page is one of those pages. We want to promote Skribit and tell our story to show you guys that we’re not just some random startup, so prominently linking to our about page is a great way of doing that.

Tooltips!

This is one of the tiny new site features that I loved implementing. Throughout the site you can hover over certain links (for example a blog name, user, status indicator) and get more information in a little window that appears next to your mouse. Quite handy and makes browsing the site much more enjoyable.

Here are a few live examples:

User Dashboard

Instead of logging in and seeing the homepage again, Skribit users now get redirected to our new dashboard. Admittedly, its utility is currently a bit on the low side but we have big plans for the dashboard in the future and hope to make it easy for Skribit users to control their suggestions and find other great blogs and content through it.

Explore, PRO accounts, Groups, etc

Last but not least with this feature rollout, we made an Explore page to highlight some of the content throughout the site and make it easy to find more of that. We’re still tweaking the layout and pondering how to best present that information so things might change on that page.

One of the biggest reasons for the homepage update was to grow awareness about our PRO accounts. Previously they were somewhat hidden among upgrade links, but now they are on center stage and people more readily know that their account can get more features with a quick upgrade.

And one small note – we have currently removed Groups functionality from the site pending a complete overhaul. We hate to admit when we’re wrong but Groups just wasn’t working out and was getting more spam than actual usage. That being said, we are planning a relaunch sometime later in the summer of a feature called Topics where topics/groups will automatically be formed around popular areas of interest, so they don’t have to explicitly be made by any one user. That’s the idea at least. Final execution will vary. If you have any ideas about how we should build out Topics, please let us know! We’re always open to new ideas and feedback.

I think that’s it for this blog post. There are of course many tiny updates throughout the site, as always. For example, the login page was restructured a bit and forms were made larger.

Once again, thanks for using Skribit!

New Feature: Suggestion Status

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:32:37 +0000

If you’ve been to your manage page recently, you might have noticed a new “status” button. Clicking this will give you the window below, and allow you to update the status of your suggestion. The logic behind this is that you can inform the author of the suggestion with your plans for the suggestion; maybe you need more information about the suggestion before you can write about it, maybe it’s not a good fit for your blog, or perhaps it’s brilliant and you’ve just started working on it. This will give the suggestor a better idea of what you’re doing with their suggestion; they’ll receive an email every time you update the suggestion status.

In addition to this new feature, we’ve tweaked a little suggestion tools bar that appears on all pages of suggestions for your blog. Just click the “Manage »” button. This should be more convenient than always having to go back to the manage page and finding the suggestion you wanted to edit or update.

Recent Downtime Issues

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:29:18 +0000

If you have been experiencing some odd Skribit behavior, including but not limited to random short bursts of downtime and 500 errors on our homepage, we are aware of the issues and actively working to fix them. With our new servers we have been working with a new setup with Apache, Phusion Passenger (”mod_rails”) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Passenger occasionally takes down Apache until we can come up with the perfect configuration, for which we have employed the services of Matt Manning, another local Atlanta startup guy.

Bear with us a little while longer and we hope to have these issues sorted out and have Skribit running faster than ever! In the meantime, you can keep tabs on our Twitter updates on @Skribit.

Thanks for sticking it out!

New Servers!

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:59:26 +0000

Skribit had an hour of downtime yesterday evening, as we mentioned on our Twitter account. I’m happy to report that our new 2 server setup, provided by the always helpful Media Temple, is flying along. The new setup will give Skribit all the headroom it needs to grow and test out new features. Should you spot anything funky happening, please report it to us. Thanks.

Brogan’s Tips to Get Unstuck

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:03:42 +0000

We’re always up for learning about ways to cure writer’s block – regardless if it comes from Skribit itself, a product in the same space like Plinky or an insightful blogger. Today’s post is about the latter. Chris Brogan recently posted an article called 20 Blog Topics to Get You Unstuck and he did a great job about highlighting a few topics and questions that can easily be employed by most bloggers when blogger’s block is in full swing.

Here are the first three topics Chris suggests:

What challenges are my potential customers facing. Do I have any advice for them?

What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?

What bugs me? Can I write about another way to approach it?

and I recommend you visit the full post for the other 17 ideas! What tips or tricks do you have that relate to getting “unstuck” when it comes to blogging? We’d love to hear ‘em!

Skribit Redesign Launched! Feedback?

Paul Stamatiou — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:12:20 +0000

Last week we rolled out a complete revamp of the Skribit.com design and rolled in a few new features here and there. I’ll cut to the chase – we’re looking for your feedback! We’ve already tweaked some things like our menu based on feedback emailed to us as well as on our Get Satisfaction page.

The details of the new release can be found in my blog post about the design process. But the rundown is that this release, aside from looking a lot better, has support for more tags (groups, blogs and suggestions can be tagged – check your “Edit Blog Details” page to update the tags and description), and several “explore”-type pages that let you browse all of the blogs on Skribit.

As always, lots more stuff is in the pipeline. Stay tuned!