The fellas at the far end of the hall have just wrapped up another round of tweaks to StepRep. Most of the changes they made were in the “back end” – that is, they’re invisible to schmoes like you and me. But they also made a couple of “front end” changes that will affect – for the better! – the way you and I interact with the product.

For instance,

1. In the past you might have created a new search and were annoyed to discover that StepRep didn’t allow you to save it. That’s because, for the present, users are limited to creating 5 searches at a time. Now there’s a handy error message to explain what’s going on when your sixth search gets snuffed out.

2. The numbers next to the menu on the left, showing how many stories you have in each category, used to be a little sluggish to update. Now those numbers will change immediately when you move a story from one category to another.

3. You know your StepRep public profile? Wait, you didn’t know that you had a StepRep public profile? That’s probably because you had to dig around in the settings to find the link. Now the profile link is prominently displayed at the top of the screen, where users are more likely to stumble across it…and maybe now that they know it’s there, they’ll start filling out their profile with information about themselves and their business.

4. Speaking of your public profile, it’s been redesigned. If you’d like to see what it looks like now, I’ll modestly provide my own page as an example. It’s nothing fancy, but the profile page is designed to be super easy for search engines to find and index. For example, as of February 12, if you Google my name, my StepRep profile page comes up fourth in the results. My profile page, in turn, points search engines toward the stories that I’ve chosen to promote using the StepRep widget.

5. One more thing about the public profile: we’ve changed the URL. I don’t quite understand the technical reasons, but apparently the new URL is a little Google-friendlier than the old one. If you’re using the StepRep widget on your blog or website (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?), you might want to re-install it so it points to the new URL. But if you don’t feel like re-installing, no worries, the old link will redirect to the new location.

6. Are you a StepRep user from outside the US and Canada? If so, you were undoubtedly irritated at sign-up time by the fact that your home country wasn’t available in the drop-down box when you selected your location. We apologise for the inconvenience. For new users, we’ve created a comprehensive list of countries for the drop-down box. And if you’ve already signed up using a fake address, you can now go into your settings and select your actual country from the list. So all you users in the South Sandwich Islands can stop with the hate mail, already!