tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-135708982008-07-22T08:56:00.522-07:00lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comBlogger796125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-81802465842005361492008-07-22T08:54:00.000-07:002008-07-22T08:56:00.568-07:00

Guys, we need your help. What's the best way to describe the folks that you have added to your "trusted network?" We somehow feel that "trusted network" doesn't quite do it. Any ideas? Here's the list - please send in suggestions.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-65116082570366263792008-07-18T11:17:00.000-07:002008-07-18T11:35:08.722-07:00

Guys, we rolled in some important improvements to our revenue sharing program. Specifically, we are now sharing revenue 50/50 with program participants on every Google ad block on qualifying pages; Your Profile Page, Your Lists, Items You Contribute to Others' Lists, and your Review Pages. I expect that this will result in a moderate increase in earnings for participants. Also, we've

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-47026532471989389552008-07-11T05:17:00.000-07:002008-07-11T05:32:42.681-07:00

One of the things that makes RIA so great is the creativity that folks have shown in using our Weblist tool to build fun and engaging content. We've seen the RIA rating engine used for everything from product rating, to travel diaries, to music rating, to video rating, and even reviewer rating. But every once in a while, I believe our lists can start to stray from RIA's wheelhouse of rating /

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-5876177506829055772008-07-10T09:23:00.000-07:002008-07-10T09:28:28.147-07:00

It's now time for our ongoing, tri-annual series entitled "Did You Know?"  In this segment, we examine little used, but monstrously helpful features that are cleverly hidden from most users. Did you know that you can sort our list pages by: - # of ratings- # of reviews- alphabetic- (and my favorite) Low to High Low to high is particularly useful for finding the lowest rated item in a list (ie "

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-25357481332329987462008-07-07T14:44:00.000-07:002008-07-07T14:49:03.582-07:00

Guys, two new folks recently joined the RateItAll team: Lena, who is a UI designer extraordinaire, and Vijai, who is a super sharp senior web developer. If you have a second, please shoot them a note and help me to welcome them to RIA.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-9677305310932020612008-07-05T13:09:00.000-07:002008-07-05T13:10:58.547-07:00

Guys, there's plenty of ways to rate each other as reviewers, as well as other ways to scratch each others' backs. I'm going to be hiding all new "rate the reviewer" lists for a while.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-89409528404203971632008-07-03T19:52:00.000-07:002008-07-04T08:50:29.274-07:00

Guys, a couple of minor display changes were made to the site today: We are now showing the top 70 items on any list page before making you page. This will only affect long lists, like this list for Horror Movie Reviews, for example.Similarly, we are now displaying up to 70 reviews on any item page. Here's an example.We are hiding reviews of fewer than 10 characters from appearing on the item

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-5507883129855200002008-07-02T18:56:00.000-07:002008-07-02T19:06:47.012-07:00

RateItAll Randyman writes well on just about any topic. But if there is one area where he reaches back just a little bit more, it's in writing about boxing. What you might not know is that Randyman hosts a popular boxing blog at boxing-ring.blogspot.com where he talks about the LA fight scene. The photos alone are worth a peak, and not surprisingly, the writing is top notch. Randyman was just

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-17054970527191156202008-07-02T12:07:00.000-07:002008-07-02T12:15:48.805-07:00

RateItAll's friends over at iWidgets built us a neat little app that shows off your recent reviews on Facebook. Here's what it looks like (and you can add it yourself, here):

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-75566866626264983512008-07-01T22:05:00.000-07:002008-07-01T22:06:20.073-07:00

Guys, we will be tuning our database tonight at midnight. We expect the site to be down for twenty to thirty minutes.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-81431773809667752542008-06-28T17:06:00.000-07:002008-06-28T17:28:14.230-07:00

Late yesterday afternoon, we had our best web server fail. The traffic load was too much for the remaining two web servers to handle, so performance tanked. Our host was unable to troubleshoot the issue, and we were told that they would take another shot at it Saturday (today) AM. So, at this point, we knew a couple of things; we knew that our remaining two servers were not up to our traffic

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-64980384527717511852008-06-28T12:00:00.000-07:002008-06-28T12:25:32.075-07:00

Guys, we are working on the site. Tread carefully rating stuff... site performance will be dicey for a while. I'll post a full debrief shortly of the last 18 hours - it's been an interesting experiment.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-16115818180943887992008-06-28T05:26:00.000-07:002008-06-28T05:27:42.130-07:00

Site should be available to all over the next few minutes. Thanks to Automatt for the long night of work put in to get us live.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-81899641653253817802008-06-28T00:58:00.000-07:002008-06-28T00:59:23.612-07:00

We are making progress, but expect it will be another hour before we are back online.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-81293428880183482882008-06-27T22:41:00.000-07:002008-06-27T22:45:01.149-07:00

Automatt and I decided not to wait to see what happens with our lead web server tomorrow - we're moving over to another service provider tonight, so that we can have a snappy website through the weekend. We expect to back online by 1AM PST.  More update to follow.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-49566822150148376702008-06-27T18:11:00.000-07:002008-06-27T18:14:57.136-07:00

Our biggest, baddest web server fell off the grid a few hours ago, and is not responding. So, we are currently running on two smaller web servers, which are pretty much pegged under our regular load. We'll know more tomorrow AM about whether this box is recoverable - best case scenario is that it's just a power supply issue, which would be resolvable. Expect performance to be sluggish until

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-40321063996179317652008-06-27T16:10:00.000-07:002008-06-27T16:16:14.654-07:00

You'll notice that we've moved ads on the recent reviews page from the right sidebar into the river. We're trying out different stuff to try and find the balance between what converts, and what isn't uber annoying.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-65304499424117578382008-06-27T15:39:00.000-07:002008-06-27T16:09:46.473-07:00

You can now access comments on your reviews from your MySpace account. Here's a screenshot. This also means that folks using RIA from MySpace will receive your comments that you post on their review on RIA. With great power comes great responsibility :)

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-75725865872345965292008-06-25T18:37:00.000-07:002008-06-25T18:39:19.281-07:00

Not that we intend to serve up many error pages, but in the off chance that we do.... we now have the best error page ever. Try clicking this link - and make sure to keep refreshing (the photo will change).

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-75570715124987682882008-06-24T12:13:00.000-07:002008-06-24T12:15:06.682-07:00

There's nothing I like better than a good RIA trip report... Zuchinibut has just set one up for his recent trip to Oregon.  Has anyone else been to these places?  Chime in!

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-6256316297653666562008-06-24T12:07:00.000-07:002008-06-24T12:08:10.581-07:00

We're on it.... stay tuned.

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-24936772674508758112008-06-23T12:22:00.001-07:002008-06-23T12:27:03.388-07:00

I'm sure everyone has noticed that annoying little bug in which RateItAll personal message threads reverse the names of who is saying what. For example, when people send me hate messages, the thread might read something like this. AngryUser69: I'm sorry you feel that way. We do the best we can. Lawrence: RateItAll Sucks! My pet monkey could do a better job moderating this site!

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-78777040457184544032008-06-19T15:20:00.000-07:002008-06-19T15:45:10.409-07:00

For those of you using RIA for MySpace, the invite tool is now working. You can challenge people to take a test, you can share a review, or you can share the app itself. The only catch is that you have to invite one at a time.... you click on the name of the person that you want to share / invite with, then click on the next one after the box pops up. The invitation shows up in the recipient's

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-1121868785399536222008-06-19T12:25:00.000-07:002008-06-19T12:29:13.424-07:00

My friends over at Hyve Up have created a cool video with background techno music of me trying to explain what RIA is: You can rate HyveUp with this widget:Technology Blogs on RateItAll

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13570898.post-75692923912697971212008-06-19T11:39:00.000-07:002008-06-19T11:54:20.188-07:00

Hey All, just a heads up that RateItAll has raised some funding. The good news is that not much is going to change, other than than our ability to provide a better service to the RIA community. A few more developers and an awesome designer will be joining Automatt and myself. This will mean they we will be able to fix things and add features at a must faster rate, and that things should work

lawrencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15614875093460854610noreply@blogger.com