StepRep Blog

Over on the Spokesmonster blog I itemize the three flavours of bad review. When bad reviews appear on your site it’s really tempting to just hit delete and make ‘em disappear. But is that really the best way to deal?

Well, dang it. Over at the Spokesmonster blog this morning I posted what I thought was the latest in StepRep update news:

• We discovered a handy trick for getting your StepRep widget stories to show up on your Facebook profile.
• We recently (finally) managed to buy the steprep.com domain from the dude who’d brazenly snatched it out from under our noses back in late 2008.

Then about five minutes after I hit “publish”, Shawn over on the StepRep development team sent out an email announcing that a new update had just been deployed. Grr! Now I gotta write a whole ‘nother blog post.

Oh, well, beats working.

1. Optimization. Shawn and his witch doctors have rattled their monkeybones and danced the dance of the feathered serpent, and now, he tells me, the pages in StepRep will load a little faster.

2. My Content. It seems that some of y’all found it a little crazy that there was a category for “My Content” but there was no button to allow you to easily move stories into that category. Well, you can stop tearing out your hair – there’s a “My Content” button now.

But don’t worry, you can still assign domains to zap directly into “My Content” by going to the Links tab in the Settings screen.

3. Terminology. There are a number of little wording changes throughout the site, designed to make things clearer (hopefully) to new users. Most of these won’t affect you. But one new term might throw you a bit:

Promoted.

Here’s what it means. We’ve been finding that a lot of people just don’t get the widget. They don’t understand what it does and they don’t understand why they should use it. As I’ve explained before, the purpose of the widget and your StepRep public profile is to create multiple links to – and thus increase the search ranking of – the stories that you want people to see.

Which is another way of saying, you use the widget and the public profile to promote stories.

So we went ahead and changed the “Add to widget” checkbox to “Promote”. When you check off a story, instead of going into a category called “Widget”, it’ll appear under the “Manage Promoted” link on the right-hand side of the screen. And of course, it’ll appear on your StepRep widget and public profile.

We’ve got some work to do to make the new terminology consistent throughout the site, so bear with us. As always, we’re interested in hearing what you think about the changes, so don’t hesitate to leave comments, tweet us at @steprep, or use the Feedback link in StepRep.