rss

We made some improvements and fixed a few bugs recently. As always, these enhancements are proof that we really do read all of the suggestions you send us through Get Satisfaction.

RSS Feeds

We added a bunch of RSS feeds, which makes me enormously happy (Hi, my name is Dawn, and I am an RSS junkie). You can get to these feeds from the customized search, and we have feeds for most searches. You can get feeds for people near a place, with certain tags, and more.

Search

We made a few improvements and fixed a few bugs in our search functionality. We’re assuming you didn’t notice those bugs, since they were never posted on Get Satisfaction. So forget I mentioned anything, and maybe search will just magically work better for you this week.

Invitations

Ryan was kind enough to add some admin functionality to give me better visibility into the people sending the most invites along with the number of used invitations and remaining invitations for each person. Some people haven’t been inviting their friends. Now, I know who you are …

As usual, we fixed a few other bugs and made some additional enhancements. We can only fix the issues that we know about (our telepathic abilities are severely limited), so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

We made some improvements and fixed a few bugs over the past week (ok past 2 weeks, but who’s counting). Organizing Ignite Portland and ThrivePDX left me a little behind on letting you know about the changes, but these enhancements are proof that we do actually pay attention to all of the suggestions you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Amazon S3

We’ve offloaded our images to Amazon S3. This will free up our server to do bigger and better things. We might even have a little announcement this week about what we plan to do with all of those free server resources *hint, hint*.

RSS Feed Improvements

We are now including people images in the RSS feeds, and we have added the shout message to the RSS feeds by popular request for those of you building interesting things using our RSS feeds.

Notification Tweak

Added place address to email notifications to help you identify exactly which Stumptown Coffee Shop your friend just shouted from.

Dashboard Changes

By popular request from people tired of having to visit the place page to leave a place, we’ve added a leave button to the dashboard! You can also leave with a message from the dashboard.

@Replies Link to Accounts

In your shout message, @replies will now link to a person’s account page. For example: “I am here having drinks with @ryansnyder” will link to Ryan’s Shizzow home page.

We also fixed a few other bugs and made a couple of additional enhancements. Keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

A few weeks ago, we turned the switch to make the RSS feeds for shouts publicly available. While we have a few people using them for something interesting, the rest of you slackers haven’t done squat with them. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.

• FriendFeed: Add your shouts to your FriendFeed account using the generic RSS feed.
• Widgets: Put a cool widget on your blog with your most recent shouts.
• Life streaming: Add your RSS feed to the rest of your life stream.
• RSS Reader: Add certain people to your RSS reader for more close tracking.
• Yahoo Pipes Filtering: Or use your favorite tool to do some cool filtering on RSS feeds.

OK, enough slacking … I dare you (double dog dare you even) to come up with ideas more awesome than the ones here. How are you planning to use the public RSS feeds to do something cool?

Now that the RSS feeds for Shizzow are public, we would love to have a widget that takes an RSS feed from Shizzow and makes it look awesome in a blog sidebar. Yes, yes, we know this isn’t hard to do, but would you rather have us spend an hour on a widget or spend an hour working on SMS support and m.shizzow.com?

So here’s the deal:

• Email the code for your widget and a URL where we can see it in action to dawn at shizzow.com with the subject: “awesome contest entry” before midnight on 9/13.
• The Shizzow team will make an entirely subjective judgment call to pick the one we like the most.
• We will buy the winner a drink at Beer and Blog or a similar tech event here in Portland.

We don’t really know exactly what we want, so there are no specs for the widget. Use your best judgment to come up with something cool.

We will post the code for the widget on the Shizzow site for anyone to use while giving credit to the original author. In other words, you are doing this for fame and glory.

We made some pretty cool changes this week with some enhancements that you have been begging for us to include. … You’re welcome!

Leave a place

We are no longer the Hotel California of online apps. Shizzow is now new and improved with more leaving capabilities. If you are leaving a place, you can go to the place page and click the “leave” button. Your shout page will show that you “left” the place x minutes ago.

Public RSS Feeds

You can now get public RSS feeds of any user or place page. The only exception is for private users. Users with private accounts do not have RSS feeds, and shouts from private users will never appear in the RSS feed for a place. We’re excited to see what interesting new uses people will have for the RSS feeds.

Scott Kveton

Did you know that Scott Kveton, Portland’s preeminent pizza connoisseur and bacon enthusiast, is an advisor for Shizzow? How could you know, since we forgot to include him on our about page. This is a bug fix, not a new change, since Scott has been providing us with advice for months.

As always, keep logging those issues and suggestions for improvements in Get Satisfaction, and we’ll keep making Shizzow work better for you!