When we originally built the commenting system on the old PTE (pre-Tumblr era) Say Yeah website, we required users to create an account and sign in before they could comment. This created an unnecessary barrier to entry that reduced the likelihood that a user would comment. It just took too long.

At the same time, we wanted to ensure that we weren’t dealing with moderating spam comments all the time and the account creation process pretty much eliminated this. Additionally, the same user account for commenting allowed a user to post or like an event on the TO Events Calendar, so the barrier to commenting for calendar users wasn’t as high.

With all that in mind, and to encourage the conversation by making the process less painful for users, we took a fresh look at the relationship between commenting and user accounts on the Say Yeah site. For users who weren’t using the TO Events Calendar, it was clear they had no reason to make an account unless they wanted to comment, so we worked to combine these actions.

In short, we encouraged people to create accounts by attaching the creation process to a rewarding action.

Here’s how it worked.

The initial form is just two fields, asking only for an email address and comment.

Once the user enters their email address, and progresses to start writing their comment, we do a quick look up using AJAX to see if their address is in the database.

If we find it, we welcome them back and present a password field to confirm they are in fact the user we think they are.

If the email address isn’t recognized, we note that it’s their first time commenting and ask them to select a username and password.

We also suggest a username using the first part of their email address as the name. This is probably not what people will use as their name, but it gives them an idea of what we’re looking for in a username.

The button language also changes from ‘Post’ to ‘Register & Post’ to indicate that the user is indeed creating an account with us that can be used for other purposes, such as creating events on the TO Events Calendar.

The result of the change to the commenting system was an increase in comments to articles, and subsequently an increase in user accounts.

We’ve since moved away from commenting in favour of Tumblr’s system of Likes & Reblogs, but we know this process of creating accounts during the commenting process was a valuable addition to our site, as it allowed users to sign up at a time when they’re most engaged with content on the site and made an otherwise cumbersome process as simple as possible.

Would we have had more comments if we allowed users to post a comment using just their email address? Sure. But you can be sure it would have all been spam.

The post Towards better commenting on the Web. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

robynchell:

Ever search for a topic on Tumblr and notice that one blog consistently posts under the given category? Yes? Do you ever think, Hey, I should follow this person, launch their blog and realize you already are?

It then occurs to you that despite already following them, they never appear on your dashboard because most of their posts appear while your not online, right?

Much like Twitter, you take a chance that when you dip into the stream you’ll not just get something great to read, but you won’t miss anything great from someone you’re following. There are always those select followers that you don’t want to miss, but it’s real hard for the cream to rise to the top when all you have is a date based feed. And, as Robyn suggests, it’s just not possible to follow everyone individually. Facebook’s done some work to prioritize people you connect with more often. I’d like to see a main feed from Tumblr and then a feed based on some smarts around the articles I’ve liked/clicked on.

This also brings us back to group blogs like this one. People can follow us, but I can’t follow them back from the group blog. Might make us look ungrateful, but there’s simply no option for it. Right now you only have one Tumblr dashboard with a single feed, but if I Need Sugar is about music, and Say Yeah is about design, then it would make sense if I could start to create feeds around these topics and follow people from a group blog to automatically add to these feeds. (You know, groups.) Right now my personal feed is full of photography and pulp culture stuff because the kids post more than the designy types. And while you can track tags on your dashboard, that’s still not quite as specific as organizing by blog or directly assigning a topic to a blog. As Robyn suggests, groups could solve this and really help us stay connected with our fellow designy types.

The post Keeping track of great content on Tumblr. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Author bios

Tumblr doesn’t have a place where I can write a little bit about myself. As our colleague Danie-j said when she was hacking together her blog “What’s the point in putting a blog up if no one can contact me?” With Khoi Vin and John Gruber lamenting this on their recent posts, the lack of identity on Tumblr is being noticed outside the community as well.

In fact, in order to get my name & photo in the sidebar (look left) using Tumblr’s theming variables while maintaining the Say Yeah design standards, I’ve had to change the name and avatar of my primary Tumblr blog.

We also lost the ability to show all the articles by a specific author, which we had on our previous platform (see image below). This means we can’t show how active our authors are or collect their posts together for easy reading.

It’s also unclear what order Tumblr is putting the authors in. It appears to be completely random; neither alphabetical or in order of when we added them.

Tumblr is all about content, but doesn’t have a home for information about the people creating the content. The addition of user profiles would be welcomed.

Multiple layouts per site

In the interest of simplicity, I can see why Tumblr sites only support one template. However, with the addition of pages, and more complex data types, allowing me to specify base layouts for different sections of the site would be welcome. It’s not necessary in the majority of simple blog sites, so I understand why it’s not available.

That said, with the absence of more Author Bios, we thought we’d build some custom bio pages, pulling in Twitter feeds and other content. There’s simply no way to do this without supporting more than one template.

While we’re on the topic of programmatic wants, it would also be nice to have page level variables passed through to the templates, to allow for page specific CSS. For example, highlighting the current page a user is on in the menu. To handle this for now we’ve had to use Javascript, which isn’t exactly ideal.

Queued daily

The queuing feature is great. We can line up articles for the week, and get back to our daily lives. The only trouble here is that there is no option to exclude weekends (or any specific day for that matter).

As a result, we’ve had to opt for the more granular control of manually setting post dates for each article. With multiple authors, it would be easier to manage if we could just throw everything into the queue and have the system sort it out but, as a business blog, we don’t see much benefit to posting over the weekend.

Items in the queue note when they’ll be published in minutes, which is totally useless if the publish time is greater than one hour. It would be much easier to understand when something is going to be published if the queue used a date format like the one you use when you set the post date for the future. (ie, Aug 18, 10am). Instead, we see this:

Consistency for group blogs

Primary blogs have neat tricks like using your profile photo as a favicon. Not so on group blogs.

What would be really nice is having a quick edit button on each post. On your primary blog, you’ll see these quick links in the top left:

But a group blog is treated like any other stranger’s blog, so instead of having a quick edit option on Say Yeah posts, we’ve got this:

With no way to filter or search posts in the Tumblr admin, that means I have to scroll through dozens of posts to find the one I want if I need to edit an old one. A terrific waste of time!

Import options!

Of course, the most important feature if Tumblr wants to get existing blogs to move to their platform is to help users get their existing content on the system. Now that we’re on Tumblr, we’re not concerned about that, but man it sucked recreating all of the articles from sayyeah.com and ineedsugar.com.

So that’s our wish list. Happy Tumbling!

The post Dear Tumblr, please bring me these features appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Last week we announced that we had moved Say Yeah’s website to tumblr. Today, we’re announcing I Need Sugar now has a refreshed site, also running on tumblr.

The original 2009 I Need Sugar website was designed before there was a logo, so the move to tumblr was more than just a behind the scenes switch. With a design refresh called for, the site now also supports flickr, facebook and Twitter widgets.

See it in action at ineedsugar.com

The post I Need Sugar now on tumblr. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

We made the decision this year that we wanted to focus on one thing and one thing only, building apps that help make your life easier and more enjoyable.

For the past three years we’ve been building and maintaining an app that makes our life easier for publishing content, but we haven’t shared this with you. That’s just silly. This left us with two options, focus on getting that app out there for you or put ourselves in a position where we didn’t have to keep maintaining our own publishing platform.

Recent developments in online publishing (tumblr, posterous and squarespace for example) have meant that we now have access to other publishing tools that make it a breeze to share content, maintain sites, and solve most of our feature set desires. Additionally, we have other apps we want to focus on now. So we made the decision to back away from our publishing app.

This meant we needed to find a tool that would allow us to do just one thing as effortlessly as possible: share content. And after looking at tumblr, posterous and squarespace, we’re now pleased to say this site is running on tumblr!

Now, we’ve certainly made some sacrifices in this transition, not the least of which is having no control over the URL format (so any old links are broken, including TO Events Calendar event links. Whoops!). Matt will be sharing a post shortly on what’s missing, changed, or what we’d like to see from tumblr. Stay tuned!

The post Let’s Tumbl. appeared first on Say Yeah!.