dearinterblog

It has been a busy month for us here at dearinter.net. Chris had a paper deadline and I’ve had various school things, but really that’s no excuse, so to make it up to you we’re giving you an extra special feature. In addition to the usual fare of bug fixes and small improvements, we’ve released a preview of a secret forthcoming feature. We’ve called it activity and it let’s you quickly and easily see everything that has happened on dearinter.net within the last 24 hours. We think this provides a lot of power to the user, but we also think it is a bit rough, so we’d love feedback before releasing it as a proper feature (with cute icon, etc).

Among other new things, we’ve added an invite form so you can quickly and easily get all of your friends to join the mob of dearinter.net voters.

a few more updates to dearinter.net this evening!

1. our homepage now features best-of-dearinter.net, the ten highest-rated questions of the week. this is where questions go when you click you “loved it” a bunch.
2. exciting new messaging features: now send private messages to other questioners! if that sounds a bit creepy to you, we’ve also added new user preferences which let you limit messaging to friends, and change whether we email you when they do.
3. feeling overwhelmed by the previews shown on each question? new display preferences will help you to restore the suspense behind each questions’ title.

in the future look for even more ways to navigate the vast querosphere at dearinter.net! as always, let us know what you think with comments and suggestions.

p.s. to our visitor with a old version of Yiddish-locale Safari, we’re sorry our site gave you so many errors! they should be fixed now.

We did a small update this evening–mostly it was just some fixes, but also we added the ability to retrieve forgotten passwords automagically, so that’s cool.

Some more interesting things should happen in the next few weeks. As always, contact us with any issues or suggestions.

We here at dearinter.net were so busy working on updates that we plain forgot about our one month birthday! We’re making up for that tonight with a) a birthday party (complete with balloons and cake) and b) updates, yaayyy!

So what’s new? Well we’ve changed the look of the site a little, we’re now using a darker gray, apparently it was hard to read light gray on white (who knew?). We’ve also added a new detailed question link thing, letting you see more about a question before clicking on it.

We’ve added metavoting. With each metavote, you decide whether you liked a question or not. Questions with a very negative metavote automatically get removed from circulation in the answer-o-matic and from the dear internet frontpage.

You shy question authors out there will be pleased to learn that you can now post comments anonymously on questions that you’ve asked anonymously.

We’ve also added a help section.

Let us know if you have any problems, or if you like/hate everything we’ve done, or if you really wish we’d do something more.

Also, we’ve been Dugg, which is exciting. (We like being Dugg.)

This evening we rolled out a number of small changes to the site. The most useful is a new parser that automatically recognizes and makes links of urls. We’ve moved away from the old markdown parser as it was a bit like screwing in a light-bulb with a team of ten highly trained light-bulb replacers–nice, but serious overkill. Instead, we just have one lone light-bulb replacing intern, he’s cheap, quick and getting college credit. So yeah, as usual, keep asking questions, keep voting, let us know if you see a problem or have a suggestion!

Oh and also, everybody wish chris a pleasant vacation! He’s off to Jamaica for a week, lucky duck.

hey dearinterfriends! we’re keeping the updates rolling with some new web awesomeness for you all! i cannot express how crazy-ridiculous-amazing it has been to see so many questions posted. but now we need more ways to keep up with the swarming inquisition that is dearinter.net.

first is the addition of an RSS feed of our latest questions. be the first to know when someone, somewhere is in desperate need of your advice. and yes, the dearinter.net RSS-based Mac screensaver will be coming soon.

next is the wonderful answer-o-matic, which has been updated in the style of our question browser to give you more q’s than you’ll ever be able to a. don’t bother leaving the answer-o-matic to read the comments, you can read’em right there and charge on through voting!

finally our hotness score is based on a complicated mathematical formula capturing the popularity of a question at a specific instant (in parts per million). the study of hotness is still an area of active research, so results may not reflect real hotness. however, the formula was developed on a whiteboard.

Hey friends. Another few days, another few upgrades. This time we’ve been busy mostly with under the hood fixes. International characters should work now, so you can call Amélie by her rightful name. We’ve sped-up answer-o-matic when you’ve already answered lots of questions. Also, we’ve added a new feature called profile messaging. Now you can leave little messages on user’s profiles, like this one on cce’s profile. To leave your own message, simply visit a user’s profile and click the leave a message link. You must be signed in to message people.

As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome. Oh, I almost forgot: today we’ve broken the 30,000 vote mark. We’ve come along way in a few weeks. Thanks to everyone who has used the site, sent us feedback thus far and have blogged about us!

okay, we think we’ve sorted out the site problems from this afternoon, let us know if you see anything weird.

also, as an added bonus, we’ve gone live with our latest new feature: voting periods! if you’re asking a question that is time sensitive, after which it makes little sense for people to vote, set a voting period for your question. I’ve asked one here.

Well, we recently passed 20,000 votes (we’re at 21,845 now, to be precise) and to celebrate Chris and I did the only thing that made sense, launched another new feature.

Now you can post questions anonymously. You still need a user account, but questions posted anonymously will show up as by an anonymous user, here’s an example. What’s more, to cover your tracks you’re even allowed to vote on questions you’ve posted anonymously. Also, just like with regular questions, you can edit and delete anonymous questions and responses to anonymous questions will show up in your “since your last visit” box.

We’ve just added a few new bits to the site. Users can now edit their profiles (including changing email addresses and passwords). We’ve also added a/s/l fields. You can edit your profile by clicking on the “edit profile” link on your profile page.

Also, we’ve added a third question browsing category, hotness. This is a measure of questions that have been popular recently. Check it out at http://dearinter.net/questions/hot.

As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.