Skribit Blog

Skribit launched late on a Sunday night exactly one year ago today. It wasn’t much of a launch. At first it was just a mailing list signup form and splash page being pummeled by readers coming from a new TechCrunch post while we were scrambling to get the actual site up.

The new startup, called Skribit, is preparing for a beta launch. What is it? I really have no idea. It’s described as “a social software widget that allows bloggers to take suggestions directly from their readers. Widgets are shareable web applications that anyone can easily grab and post into the blog of their choice.” Sounds like a commenting system to me.

Like I said, I don’t expect much from Skribit and the other Startup Weekend startups, but the events have real value nonetheless.

Michael Arrington might not have gotten the concept when we launched but I sure bet he didn’t expect us to be around this long. Skribit is the most successful Startup Weekend company to date. If I had to pinpoint any particular reason for this it would deal with passion. Calvin and I have a strong passion to see Skribit become successful and grow a large community of happy users. To see that dream come true we have stayed motivated, listened to you guys and kept on trucking — not to mention received great advice from our self-proclaimed grey haired advisor along the way.

So what’s next? I wrote about some of that on my blog as well gave a sneak peak of a new feature we developed this past weekend at Atlanta Startup Weekend 2.

Thanks for sticking with us despite the bugs, downtime and miscellaneous issues that inevitably come with a small startup. The next few months should prove interesting.

The Skribit widget has remained largely unchanged - at least from the external point of view - for several months. The reason? We’ve been working on something much better! Today our new widget is open for test drives so you guys can help us find any bugs and share your feedback with us. Here’s the low down: the new widget doesn’t use an iframe and as such, you can style it however you like with your own CSS. It also weighs only 4.6KB so it won’t affect your website’s loading time, as compared to our old widget which included a hefty JavaScript library.

The new Skribit widget customized on PaulStamatiou.com (left) and blog.codeeg.com (right)

Additionally, there are some notable usability improvements. When you click the title text (”What Should I Write About” in these examples) in the textbox, it moves down and lets you type your suggestion directly in there - as opposed to flipping to a new screen and hiding the current suggestions.

As mentioned, we are currently beta testing the new widget. You can give it a whirl by either checking it out on our blogs (Paul, Calvin), or installing it yourself with our new WordPress plugin. The plugin helps install the widget on WordPress blogs using widgetized themes. If your theme doesn’t support WP widgets, drop us a line and we’ll provide you with the code snippet to manually install it on your blog.

As usual, feel free to provide us with any comments, suggestions or feedback on our Get Satisfaction page.

Here at Skribit HQ we realize it’s hard to get lots of blog post suggestions if you are just starting out or don’t have a large, engaged readership yet. We’ve planned out a slew of Skribit enhancements aimed at solving this problem and today we’ve rolled out the first one.

The next time you’re browsing Skribit.com and spot a suggestion that you would like to write about, or just gauge the interest of your readers, click on the “add” button. If you have multiple blogs, select which one you’d like to add the suggestion to from the drop-down.

The suggestion will then be copied over to your account as well and your readers can vote on it too, through your widget or blog profile page.

As for related features in the works, we have been developing groups and browse pages. More on that when we’re ready to push them live!

Got feedback? You can comment on this post or visit the Satisfaction page.

Thanks to a feature suggestion by Get Satisfaction user Rarst, we have created a Skribit FeedFlare unit. If you use FeedBurner, a service which helps optimize your website’s RSS feed and provides you with detailed statistics, you can add this FeedFlare unit to let your readers know that you use Skribit and have a link to your profile page to accept suggestions.

To install the Skribit FeedFlare unit in your FeedBurner’d RSS feed, log into your Skribit account, click on the “My Blogs” (the manage page) link and follow the instructions on the “Goodies” page.

Now this begs the question, do you use FeedBurner?

I know it’s not the most amazing announcement but I just wanted to make it known that we have rewritten the about page to correctly display the current team working on Skribit. That would be myself, Calvin Yu and the indispensable Lance Weatherby. In addition, we went through some Skribit press and pulled out some interesting quotes. If you have written anything about Skribit in the past or know of a good piece for us to consider putting on the about page, please let us know.

Visit the the about page.

We here are at Skribit are big fans of Get Satisfaction.  They do a great job of giving our users a way to easily bring up issues to our attention and for us to interact with our users.

Here are couple topics that are currently going on at Skribit’s Get Satisfaction site:

We’ve been discussing internally about about implementing a reputation model for Skribit and what it would look like.  To get some external feedback, Paul twittered for some feedback, which eventually led to this discussion on Get Satisfaction.

We’re beginning to lay the ground work for creating PRO accounts, and want to hear your thoughts what you would like to see.

Finally, I started a discussion for people to share tips on how to encourage their readers to make suggestions.  If you did something that worked for you, please consider helping out your fellow Skribit users and comment there.

Yup, this is another look-we’ve-added-some-more-features post. These types of posts will become the norm as we churn away here, aiming to make a great product. This time the update was mostly aesthetic and aimed at helping new Skribit visitors understand exactly what we do. It’s a little slideshow showcasing some of our key features. Do you think it gets the point across? Let us know how we can help people understand what we do.

Oh and if you received a few emails yesterday morning stating that some users had blogged a suggestion and the email provided no blog post link, that was our mistake. We had a bug on our end when we pushed the code live Friday night. It was fixed as of 11am on Saturday.

Continuing with our series of posts highlighting new enhancements from our latest release, today I want to show some of the most obvious changes. First off, the homepage no longer just displays a simple list of suggestions. We have changed it to provide more information about recent suggestions, popular suggestions and recently blogged suggestions.

The management page also received some tweaks, notably iconifying the main action links. One of our next releases will move those icons up to a toolbar in favor of clearing up the interface.

Lastly, you might have noticed a few new options on the install page. Skribit now embraces multiple methods of interaction in addition to the widget. Since suggestions can also be given on blog profile pages, such as mine, you don’t need to use the widget if that’s not your thing. You can simply link to your profile page. However, as we have recommended with the widget, placement matters. The higher the badge, link or widget on your website, the easier it is for your readers to check out Skribit.

As Calvin talked about in the last post, you can also interact with Skribit using your account’s RSS feeds - a sort of “roll your own” approach.

Being bloggers and/or readers of blogs, we all love RSS feeds.  Not only do they give us a great way to keep track of what’s going on a website, but it also makes it easy for people to share content across them as well.  That is why in the latest release of Skribit we rolled out a set of RSS feeds for everyone to use.  So if you don’t want to receive an email every time you get a suggestion, you can disable those notifications and instead subscribe to your suggestions feed with your favorite feed reader.

So where can you find the links for these RSS feeds?  They’re available on a User’s public profile page:

And also, on a Blog’s profile page:
 

(Notice that you can also now make suggestions from a Blog’s profile page on Skribit itself)

Another cool thing about having RSS feeds is you can use it to show suggestions on your blog if for some reason you cannot use the widget.  For example, I just moved my blog from a self-hosted WordPress blog to one hosted on WordPress.com.  Unfortunately, we currently don’t have our widget available WP.com, but I was able to use the RSS Sidebar Widget to show my Skribit Suggestions:
 

Here’s something else you can do:  From the Manage Suggestions page, you’ll now find the RSS feed for your posted suggestions.  Combine this with the RSS sidebar widget, and now you can show your recently posted suggestions on your Blog.

Blogger Justin Hernandez interviewed me this week for Tivate.com, an inspiration blog of sorts that commonly interviews people doing interesting things on the interwebs. The interview covers where I get my inspiration from, challenges I’ve dealt with and what I have planned for the future. Oh and there’s a picture of my work desk if you want to see how dirty it is.

Stammy is a nice easy-going guy with a positive attitude. The most difficult thing about him is pronouncing his last name (Stam-uh-tee-you), hence the nicky Stammy. In this interview, Paul talks about his accomplishments, shows us his work desk, reflects on his public speaking skills and admires his idol Steve Jobs (with quote!).

Thanks for the interview Justin!