A couple of months ago, I announced support for blog feeds in member profiles. Today I want to point out a neat little feature of that tool which may have gone unnoticed: feed autodiscovery.
What’s that, you ask? Aha! Those of you asking that question are exactly the target audience for the feature. As it turns out, not everyone who has a blog understands all the nerdy details of how RSS and Atom syndication feeds work. Frankly, they shouldn’t have to. That’s why our software tries extra hard to be clever and helpful. If you enter the web address for your blog’s home page it works behind to scenes to figure out the magic URL for your syndication feed.
More often than not, the feature works beautifully. I just took a quick gander in our database and discovered that more than half of the members who have entered blog feed data have actually entered something other than the feed URL itself. And yet everyone’s profile seems to be working fine.
So… If you’re a member with a blog but you’ve resisted setting this up because it sounded too technical, fear not! Give it your best shot and let our software do the rest. Odds are it’ll work out fine.
Tags: membership
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Just about a month after the Flickr announcement, we’ve got some more bling for your online member profile!
If you’ve got a blog somewhere, the odds are pretty good that you’re publishing a feed (either RSS or Atom). Well, you can now enter your feed url into your profile settings and it will automatically pull and display snippets of your recent posts. Here’s what mine looks like.
This site gets a lot of traffic, and it’s pretty well targeted for your audience, so hopefully this is a nice way to drum up some interest and get a little exposure.
Let me know if you have any questions or have trouble getting it to work.
Tags: marketing, membership
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For a few years now, the buggiest piece of software on the Fractured Atlas website has unquestionably been the stuff we used to power our member image galleries. (I won’t even reveal the name of the software because it was such a disappointment and I don’t want to badmouth a free open source software project.)
Today, that system has been put to bed. It has been replaced with a far simpler mechanism for displaying your photos on the Fractured Atlas website: Flickr integration.
If you’re logged in, just go to your user profile and click on the “Photos” tab. Clicking the “Edit” button will bring up a simple form where you can enter your Flickr username. That will automatically set up a slide show from your Flickr photostream. Easy peasy!
You’re going to see more of this kind of thing over the next few months. One of the big advantages of the “social web” is that services like Flickr (or YouTube or blogs, etc.) allow for simple syndication. For an organization like Fractured Atlas, that means we no longer have to re-invent every wheel. For our users, it means you only have to maintain one image gallery instead of two. Win-win.
NOTE: if you had an image gallery and you’re wondering where it went, don’t worry. We’ve still got it; it’s just not online any more. If you’d like a copy of your photos just send us an email and we’ll send you a zip file.
Tags: community, membership, unsentimental
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It’s time to start putting (user)names with faces!
The Fractured Atlas website now supports Gravatars. Gravatars are globally recognizable avatars. Basically you can associate a small picture with your email address and have that picture be associated with your username across any number of websites. There are already thousands of websites (particularly Wordpress blogs) out there that support Gravatars, so it seemed like a good idea to join in the fun.
Right now Gravatars are being displayed with blog posts and comments as well as the staff list and bios. We’ll be rolling them out throughout the site over time, wherever and wherever your username appears.
Tags: community, membership
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It’s that time of year again. You know, the one where we bribe you to tell us how we’re doing. That’s right, it’s the 2008 Member Survey! As usual, we’ll thank you for your feedback by giving you a free month of membership.
This only takes about 5-10 minutes and it’s really incredibly valuable for us. We need to know what we’re doing well, what we’re doing poorly, and what ideas you have for things we could do differently or better.
Take the survey.
Tags: membership, survey
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In a demonstration of our undeniable hipness (or perhaps we’re a few years too late and I’ve inadvertently revealed our profound squareness?), Fractured Atlas has launched its own YouTube channel. Henceforth, www.youtube.com/LiberateTheArtist shall be a repository for our own video content and (more importantly) our members’ work.
There’s not much up there right now, but hopefully it’ll fill out over the coming weeks and months. In fact, if you’re a member of Fractured Atlas, you can help make that happen! Our main goal for the channel is to showcase a diverse selection of video content from our members. If you’re a member and would like to include a video in our playlist, simply post it on YouTube and let us know about it. We’ll get it up there ASAP.
Tags: membership, YouTube
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