Written on May 19th, 2008 by Graham
Hello Entrecard Members,
We’ve just made a ton of HUGE updates to the site, and so we have a lot to announce!
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ADD MULTIPLE BLOGS TO YOUR ACCOUNT
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Today we rolled out a feature everyone has been asking us for since we launched:
the ability to add more than one blog to an account!
Starting today, you can add all your blogs to Entrecard simply by going to your Dashboard and clicking “Linked Blogs” in your Dashboard navigation.
You will be able to choose whether to link your account with another EXISTING account, or to register a NEW BLOG with Entrecard, and automatically link it to your account.
You can switch from one blog to another, and drop or advertise as either one, from the very top right of your Entrecard screen. Where your email address is displayed there will be a link to “switch” to another account of yours.
Add just one more blog to your account, and you’re automatically entered to win 15,000 credits!
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ENTRECARD OFFICIAL E-BOOK
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http://entrecard.com/static/entrecard_official_ebook.pdf
Our free ebook has arrived for everyone to download! If you’re new to Entrecard, and wondering what to do first, this E-Book will guide you along the way. And if you’re an intermediate or advanced user, it’s packed full of strategies you can use to get the absolute most from our service. Download from the link above.
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BLOG POST CONTEST - WIN 2000 CREDITS!
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We are holding a contest to help us spread the word about our “add new blog” feature and our new E-Book, so anyone who posts on their blog, mentions our new “add a blog” feature, and posts a link to our new E-Book on their blog wins 2000 credits. Just leave a comment on this blog post with the link for us to see.
Credits will be paid to all winners on June 25th
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MULTI BLOG CONTEST - WIN 15,000 CREDITS!
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We’re giving away 15,000 credits to people who add new blogs to their accounts. We will randomly select one winner in each of the following classes:
2-5 blogs in account
5-10 blogs in account
10-15 blogs in account
15-20 blogs in account
20-25 blogs in account
We’re giving away a total of 75,000 credits, as there will be one 15,000 credit winner for each class. All you have to do is use our new feature to add Entrecard to your other blogs, or simply link your other blogs together using the “switch” button in the top right of the site. Winners will be picked on June 25th.
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NEW HOMEPAGE
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If you haven’t been around in a while, then you haven’t seen our new homepage! It automatically posts links to YOUR posts, every time you update your blog. You can also use it to see in real time what Entrecarders are talking about on their blogs!
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NEW CAMPAIGN PAGE TABS
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On your “Campaign” page we added quick jump tabs to easily see the Most Popular, Newest, Cheapest, and more at just the click of a button. The “Search” tab on the end of the campaign navigation will bring you to the browser that you are currently familiar with.
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TOP DROPPERS RSS FEED
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The people who visit your blog more frequently than any other members are known as your top droppers. We just created an RSS feed, found on your “Statistics” page, that will allow you to subscribe.
Whew, so that’s what we’ve been up to. We hope you love our new E-Book and find it incredibly helpful. We also hope our new features make things easier for you, make you’re Entrecard efforts more fruitful, and all these new features are designed to help you get MORE traffic, MORE exposure, and MORE value for your blog and your time. Don’t forget to enter our contests by adding other blogs to your account, and posting a link to our new E-Book!
Entrecard Team
http://entrecard.com
Written on May 18th, 2008 by phirate
We have a minor outage coming up at 10:45pm (click for more timezones), probably only about 5-10 minutes but there could be small follow-on outages (after-shocks?) depending on how it all merges in. This is a feature release, please check the support forum in the event of problems.
Outage complete: no serious problems encountered. I am full of joy.
Written on May 12th, 2008 by Graham
Esteemed members of the blogging community, I am proud to announce that today marks an honorable step forward for us all.
For as long back as columnists have been writing articles in newspapers, comics have been along side them every step of the way, giving daily readers a little entertainment and a little laugh, a little food for thought and above all, just a little break from our own lives.
Today, it is no secret that newspapers are dying. Their advertising revenue is drying up as advertisers spend less and less on print, and more and more online. Their staffs are shrinking. Many are facing either bankruptcy or firesale to major conglomerates. And though blogs have bravely stepped forth to replace their predecessor the newspaper, more so by the hands of fate than anything else, one member of the family has been noticeably absent from the party.
Not present on our blogs’ is the comic. It is true that we all grew up with the comic. It gave us a laughs on Sunday morning. It provided a brief distraction during the workday. The comic says in two frames and ten words what a blogger says in 450. You may have thought that comics were dying out as Newspapers fade into obscurity, but you are wrong. Comics are thriving online. Dubbed “Webcomic” these creative endeavors are sprouting up all over the internet, and are already mainstream in Europe and Asia. I can’t help but feel that it is my duty, with the representational voice of the blogging community that Entrecard has given me, to announce the arranged marriage of the Blog to the Webcomic.
After all, throughout history, next to every great column has been a great comic. Bloggers, I urge you to proudly approve these artistic works, these gems of creativity, to take up daily residence on your Entrecard Widget, and by doing so offer your readers the same laughs, distractions, and escape from daily life that comics have offered us for over a hundred years.
Webcomic artists, I welcome you to discover all that Entrecard has to offer you in your quest to find readership for your comics. I hope you find us to be a truly rare and amazingly useful opportunity to promote your comic. What we are offering you is thousands of blogs you can advertise on for free, and thousands of bloggers you can promote yourself to via dropping, not to mention the wonderful blogs you will discover in the process.
By the power invested in me by the state of California, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may have your honeymoon in our luxurious forums.
This comic, for example, is Li’l Nyet, a humorous political comic aimed at the erosion of democracy under Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Find others in the Web Comics category of Entrecard. It’s small now,but it will grow.
Written on May 10th, 2008 by phirate
When building a site like Entrecard, there are dozens, sometimes hundreds of decisions, big and small, that need to be made every day. In general, no one decision is ever the difference between life or death, but the wrong approach will lead you into groups and chains of choices which can be.
It is important, before you get to the point where you’re making these decisions, to try and evolve a larger guiding set of principles to help ensure that - on average - the decisions you make are consistent with your vision of where you want the site to be. Some of these are primarily ethical choices (”I will not lie to my users”), some of them are practical (”I will not implement anything that needs my constant attention”), and of course they will change as time passes and you gain experience. The important thing is simply that they are in place, helping prevent you from getting lost in a sea of detail decisions and losing sight of the bigger picture.
Lets take a look at some of the core principles we try to live up to with the decisions at Entrecard, and some of the side effects.
We will not lie to our users
This is a fascinating one, mostly because the same positives and negatives exist with this as you get in any interaction. Deceiving people is, in general, counter-productive, and you can win a great deal of trust in a market in which players are generally deceptive, simply by being aggressively honest - to the good of both you, and your clients.
I’ve been delighted with how well we’ve managed this overall, especially given a number of tricky scenarios - for example, what do you do when the situation demands an immediate response, but you don’t know the facts? this is often a challenging situation that requires some quick thinking, but the important thing is that the quick thinking should always be with the interests of your users at heart.
Another area that qualifies as a semi-exception is security. Security is as much about deception as it is about solid design, defense in depth is fundamental to solid security and revealing information is counter-productive. At the same time, there is a difference between deception *for* security, and deception *about* security. The first is critical, the second to be avoided at all costs. An example might be the difference between a security system that lets a security flagged user continue to act while silently ignoring their actions, vs saying “Our system is completely secure” when you’re looking at an email with a known security flaw.
We will try and avoid making unnecessary promises
This is a key one, a generalization of the “Don’t announce upcoming features” concept. The problem with an upcoming feature announcement, or indeed any promise, is that you are expected to fulfill it. Failing to do so, no matter how good your reasons, impacts on your trust. In addition, when you have relatively few promises, it is easier to fulfill them in a timely fashion, and thus people can generally come to trust that when you say you’ll do something, it will be done.
This one is hard to keep. It’s so tempting to announce stuff that’s coming up, especially if you’re feeling a little bit like you haven’t released anything interesting recently. It’s also difficult to avoid promising something when someone is having trouble - I’m particularly bad at this, I say I’ll deal with something, and 80% of the time I do, the other 20% of the time something more urgent turns up and it slips my mind. Bad phi.
The bloggers blog is their space, we have no right to say what should go there
I throw this in as an example of something key to our particular niche. While we do have rules about what kind of site we’re willing to have an Entrecard on - something that is necessary to the functioning of the system - we try desperately to avoid any further imposition on the hosting blog. We consider the widget to be a useful guest, not something that is there by right.
This influences a number of our smaller areas of policy, for example we always give our users ways to cancel an ad that is currently showing - the space it’s showing in is on their blog, and therefore it’s theirs to decide what should go or stay.
If you’re currently running, or looking at building, a site - especially a community site - I highly recommend you take some time to sit and think your way through stuff like that. It’ll save headaches later, and it’ll give a consistency to your values that your long-time users will come to understand, making it easier for them to predict your actions in uncertain circumstances.
It’s not about you or the company, it’s about the people you’re interacting with who are taking part of their lives and putting it in your care.
Written on May 6th, 2008 by phirate
We’re having an outage at 10PM Boston time (click for more timezones) (about 30 mins from this post) to resolve the slow-start issues we’ve had over the last few days during periods of the day. We anticipate this will significantly improve the responsiveness of the dashboard and, under certain conditions, dropping. I’ll go into more detail after the outage, gotta get my coding socks on.
update: Since this has been at the top of the blog for a while, just a note that it was completed.
Written on May 5th, 2008 by Graham
I’m compiling information, tips, tricks, and uses of Entrecard for an official Entrecard E-Book. This Ebook will be available for free download on the site. In addition, a link to download it will be sent to all new Entrecard members when they complete signup.
This is where you come in. I want to know from you, the Entrecard members, what sections you think we should include in the ebook? What information is going to be especially helpful to new members of the service? What would you include if you were writing the Entrecard Ebook?
I already have a large chunk of the Ebook done, and it covers all the basics: adding the widget to your blog, anatomy of the dashboard, the credit economy, drops vs advertising, reducing bounce rate, selling in the shop, advertising. You know, the basics.
What I’m looking for, and hopefully some of you out there can help me out, is ideas for topics to cover and expand upon in the ebook that are not “the basics.” These are strategies, tips, and tricks that you’ve found helpful enough that you feel they deserve a section in the official Entrecard Ebook.
Feel free to reply here on the blog, or in the forum. Who knows, you’re section might show up in the official ebook!
Written on May 2nd, 2008 by phirate
Everything should be working again now, sorry everyone for the problems we’ve had today, the introduction of new code is always slightly risky, but this particular update was significantly more difficult than most due to the fact that it was stuff that basically managed the very core of the Entrecard system - the drop tracking and credit balances.
So we had a few hiccups and a few things didn’t link together the way they were supposed to, however it’s all pretty much settled now and everything seems to be moving along nicely.
What we got in this update:
1. Fast, accurate credit balance tracking which works even under tricky situations
2. Fast, accurate drop tracking with immediate response - no more waiting for the batch processor to put your drops into the system, and no more drops going mysteriously missing. The new system should be 100% accurate - if your drop didn’t count for any reason, it’ll tell you. Your credits are applied to your balance instantly.
In addition, a number of minor fixes are in place, including one for the RSS feeds - hopefully they’ll start updating properly now.
I’m pretty tired, for those who are programmers or aspiring programmers out there, I highly recommend living out your entire life without performing a major system upgrade via a cellphone 3g connection. There is a remarkable level of frustration and stress involved.
I’ll be watching the support forum, and we’ll try and deal with any issues that come up as soon as possible, but most of the stuff that was problematic today seems to have settled down. Thank you everyone for your patience.
Written on May 1st, 2008 by Lee Doyle
Introduction:
This is a personal favourite of mine. I have been meaning to Interview Mona for sometime now but always felt I might offend her with some of my questions… But here is the interview and I hope one day to get a follow-up.
Mona runs the personal Blog Rebellious Arab Girl and is known for her straight talking no nonsense blogging. In my personal opinion she is the best blogger around today and is a addictive read unlike any other blogs I have found.
Without sounding like to much of a stalker, I feel I have grown to know Mona through her blogging and random rants. She has a great style and is always a pleasure to read.
Mona has also changed my views of my stereotype of the Arab culture. Without going to deep into what I perceived as a normal Arab, she has greatly changed my views in a positive way.
She has also started a Live Webcam which fans can sit at home and watch her look blankly at a screen all day (She does smile from time to time… Not that I watch it much….).
For anyone who is not a Rebel reader, please check out her archive and you will find some gems from the personal blogging world! It is simply a MUST READ!
Interviewer: Lee Doyle / EC Page
Interviewee: Rebellious Arab Girl / EC Page
Interview:
1. You are one of my personal favourite bloggers and have a big following that grows everyday… What do you think it is about your blog that gets people so hooked?
My blog is truthful. I am not fake and I express my self sometimes sarcastically or humorously or just plain dramatic.
2. Your not afraid of annoying people you know in real life while blogging. Do they know about your blog or is it just that you really do not care? Read the rest of this entry »
Written on April 30th, 2008 by phirate
Ok, we have an outage coming up at 3am Boston time, the outage will run for an hour max although probably less. This outage will introduce the new drop and credit management code which should lead to a considerable speed boost for the site, as well as resolve a number of irritating outstanding issues with credit and drop tracking.
This will be new, shiny, fresh code, so we may have a few bugs initially but the basic approach is vastly superior to our current one. Chat will be opened after the update has been made for anyone experiencing immediate issues.
Written on April 29th, 2008 by Graham
Ok, ok. So it certainly isn’t breaking news that Alexa changed their ranking algorithm. The story is so last week. However, a lot of people have asked me about Alexa’s new algorithm, and what it’s based on. Everyone knows that it used to be based on the number of people with the Alexa toolbar installed visiting your site. Apparently, people were steadily ditching the spyware Alexa Toolbar, so to stay on top of the game, they had to grow and adapt.
Enter the New Algorithm
So, about two weeks ago, Alexa changed their Algorithm. No longer was it based on people with their toolbar visiting your site. It was now based on some new top-secret sauce. Across the board, ranks dropped tremendously. For example, Problogger and John chow went from around 2500 to 12,000 and 17,000 respectively. Alexa is tight-lipped about their new formula, so no one knows quite how to improve it. Except for me, of course.
Blowing the lid off
A few days ago John Chow ran a contest about Entrecard. To enter to win his credits, you had to write a post about the contest, and link it. About 50 people entered the contest. Entrecard’s traffic didn’t increase noticeably, in fact we did exactly the same amount of traffic the day before. But the Alexa spike almost went off the chart.
What caused this spike in Alexa? LINKS LINKS AND MORE LINKS. The sudden burst of links is exactly what did it. Everyone posting about the contest, and linking to us. The number and the freshness of links is now what controls Alexa’s algorithm. So, what this boils down to, is if you really care about Alexa and want to pump it up, simply devise some way to get a sudden burst of fresh links through the blogosphere, and watch the spike climb.
Shhhh… it’s a secret.
