The Fluther Blog

We’ve added a few small features in the last week or so.

First, we’ve added sub-tabs when browsing all the topics, so you can see questions sorted by date, activity, and whether or not they’ve had any answers (poor little orphan questions).

We also have added the first steps in integrating your Facebook account with your Fluther account — you can now choose (per question) whether to post your question to your facebook friends as well — it’s already been quite useful for me (though I usually get better answers on Fluther).

Let us know what you think.

Hey guys! I know it has been some time since the last interview and so hopefully you are looking forward to a new one. Based on the thoughtful suggestions given by all of you in this thread, I have decided it is time to add a new component to the interviews.

Since the whole point of Fluther interviews is to let the community learn more about one of their very own, it makes sense for you to have a more active role in the process. Use the comments section below to play interviewer and suggest questions that you would like to see asked in the next Fluther interview. Since we are trying this for the first time, we will be incorporating only a few questions into the interview so please don’t be offended if yours isn’t one of them! The questions selected will be based on creativity and how well they relate to the interviewee.

The next Fluther interviewee is our favorite British ex-Fluther community manager (see what I did there) richardhenry.

Please have your questions submitted by 11th September, 2009. Ready set go.

Who won?
Watch to find out (the video cuts out but you can hear the winner):

And what is the grand prize gift (which we customized for our grand prize winner)… After looking at the user’s profile, we’ve decided to get:

• A copy of Helvetica, the movie
• a $50 gift certificate to Amazon
• a Fluther T-Shirt

Congrats to the winners, and thanks to everyone who put badges up on their site!

We’ve been testing this feature for a while, and we’re pleased to unveil the new ask process to everyone on the site.

Overall, we’ve seen fewer first questions pushed to moderation and the ask process run more smoothly for users.

The new data we’re collecting will give us a lot of room to play with how we can filter the questions on the site, as well as allowing us to add more features to continue to give you the highest quality, most accessible way to get your questions answered.

In other news, we’ve been eaten by a PR monster.

Hello Flutherites!

We have good news. We’ve just built a new way for you show your Fluther Lurve on your own website: the Lurve Badge! This is what it looks like:

My profile on Fluther

And to kick off the launching the Lurve Badge, we’ve decided to have a little contest. Oh, what fun!

Here’s what we’re giving away:

• Runner-up gets a free Fluther T-Shirt
• Grand Prize winner gets a secret, custom gift chosen personally for you by the Fluther Founders based on your profile. It’s going to be awesome.

Here’s how to enter:

• If you don’t already have a blog or website, create one. (I recommend tumblr for something super easy.)
• Paste the widget code into your blog directly as HTML.

UPDATE: Check out this great tumblr how-to screencast from JohnPowell. http://www.pillowpersuasion.com/fluther/vids/wid.mov

The Fluther Podcast #3: Paris from Fluther on Vimeo.

More pictures on the vimeo page, as well.

We’ve updated YUI, so IE8 should work now without having to switch into compatibility mode.

We’ve also fixed a long nagging bug where the @link dropdown menu wouldn’t work at the start of your second paragraph.

Bigger features should be dropping later this week.

a&b

As part of a little long-term project, we’ve wrapped up porting our custom Textile engine from python to javascript.

What does that mean? It means that the previews you see will be much, much faster to render, and it means that during peak times, Fluther should be much more nimble. We’ve also added a few new flourishes (like making vulgar fractions much more pretty — try typing in 1/4).

We’ll be releasing the codebase for the javascript side of this very soon (once I’m able to clean it up a bit).

In the meantime, if you happen to see any discrepancies between what you see in your preview and what posts on the page, let me know. There might be a few edge cases we weren’t able to suss out.

On to more features!
a&b

We’ve added a new setting so you can control who sees your list of answers on your profile.

We’ve also changed up the RSS and twitter feeds to raise the quality of list of questions, as well as include attribution to the users who ask them (since mysteriously, questions still are showing up on another answer site).

Get ready for more features to come!

a&b

If you hadn’t pieced together from all my questions about Paris and electricity and cell phones and whatnot, Ben and I are doing a work sprint from Paris this month (Ben will be arriving tomorrow, so expect updates from him as well).

We look forward to pushing a bunch of the new features we’ve been working and planning during the next few weeks. And of course, suggestions for things to do in Paris are great as well.

A few photos from my brick of an iPhone today:
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