PostRank

One thing I hate doing is signing up for new accounts. You may have felt this way before, too. You come to a new site for the first time and want to check out what they do and if it can help you. Before you get too far you’re redirected to a page, not with functionality, but with yet another registration form. I don’t know about you, but this is sometimes terribly off-putting for me (especially depending on the mood I’m in).

Glimpse of a better way

I use Flickr to share my photos online. When I was first investigating this I naturally assumed I would need to fill out a lengthy registration form. To my delight, Flickr (a Yahoo! property by this point) just let me log in with my Yahoo! account, like I do on other Yahoo! network sites. This was, for me, a huge improvement, but it only solved the problem inside one company.

Enter the failed experiment

Smart bloggers put their heads together to solve this problem. “A ha!” they thought, “We all have blogs, let’s just use our web addresses as logins!” This was and is a great solution for bloggers, but a lot of people just don’t have a blog or primary website, or find it clunky to type that everywhere.

Until recently, we also had this form of login prominently displayed on our login page. This has sometimes been downright confusing to people. “Why is there a box for a website address under the username and password section on the login page?” they would ask. Worse yet, sometimes people typed in the wrong box by mistake, and the system tried to log them in with an address that did not exist.

Enter the redesign

Using the power of a new open standard, OpenID 2.0, and using lessons learned from a lot of recent research on this topic, we decided to try improving the user experience of the PostRank login form. No longer are there three boxes, but only the two that you’re used to. This is good for people who have “traditional” PostRank accounts, because you just fill in your email address and password like usual, and off you go. No extra boxes or anything.

People who want to try using an account they have elsewhere will find that experience has also been improved. Entering an email address from a provider supporting OpenID 2.0 (such as Yahoo!, Google, or AOL) with no password will let you log in with your account from that provider. If you’re one of those bloggers with an OpenID-enabled blog (such as blogger.com users) you can enter your blog address in the Email address or OpenID field, and login that way. There is a drop-down if you click on the OpenID logo to display some of the most common providers.

Yahoo! and Google users may also now click on the Sign in with Yahoo! or Sign in with Google buttons in the right pane of the login page.

If you decide you want a local password anyway

Not a problem! If you login using an account from another service and later want to set a local password as well, just head over to the password recovery page and enter your email address.

Hopefully this new design will result in an easier experience for all.

No, it does, honest. It really likes what you’ve done with your hair, too.

Fear not, we’ve been informed of the widget’s issues (broken PostRank graphic, broken links back to our site), and as of a few minutes ago, a fix has been deployed.

That said, if you notice any other weird widget behaviour, do let us know.

Happy Hallowe’en!

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new website! We’ve added great features to make it easier than ever to help you tame information overload and Read What Matters.

We’ve also done some renovations and consolidated our websites to make finding out anything and everything about PostRank, engagement, and our company more accessible.

So what’s new?

• Customize feed subscriptions to filter feeds by PostRank and keywords so you can track exactly the topics you want.
• Tag subscriptions to create channels of feeds on similar topics.
• Bulk manage your feed subscriptions.
• Streamline importing and exporting for OPML files or individual feeds.
• Engagement analysis in action — a discovery engine for finding great new sites.
• A new PostRank Firefox extension that enables you to view PostRanks for articles you’re currently reading, create and manage synchronized feed subscriptions from anywhere on the web, and view a site’s Top Posts at a glance.

We’ve also consolidated links to everything you might want to know about us in a new footer — account information, learning about PostRank, resources for developers, how to get help, details about the company — it’s all there, just scroll down.

You may also notice some changes to the appearance and branding of the site. Because PostRank is at the core of what we do, we’ve made it a more prominent part of who we are. But don’t worry, if anything the snazzy new look will only make our efforts to help you become an information overlord even more awesome.

To learn more, we’ve created screencasts to introduce postrank.com’s great new features. Just head over to our Getting Started page for a visual tour of how to create and manage customized subscriptions, feed management, custom content channels, and the new PostRank Firefox extension.

Many thanks to all our beta testers for their invaluable feedback. And supersize kudos to our team for their snazzy ideas and long hours of chocolate-fueled hard work. Great success!

And, of course, we’d love to know what you think. Questions, comments, future feature requests — bring it on! Feel free to leave a comment, send me an email, drop by our Get Satisfaction page, or tweet at me. Cheers!

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger has published an excellent video post explaining:

• how publishers can use AideRSS to analyze their site’s content and determine what topics and styles result in the most engagement with their audiences
• how to tell when it might be time for a follow-up to a topic you covered in the past by seeing how long ago you published a popular post
• how to find inspiration for content on other sites by analyzing their feeds and seeing what’s been popular there, thus providing topics to which you can bring your own ideas and perspective.

Using AideRSS to Help Identify Hot Topics to Cover On Your Blog

This is a function of our service I’ve talked to a lot of people about, so I’m loving that there’s a great real world example out there, and an explanation in video format. (Some people grok things better in text, some in audio, some in video.)

How does AideRSS help you be a better publisher? And how can we help you become even more of a rock star? Let us know!

A week ago we had a pretty big day. The reaction to PostRank and the new Google Reader extension was fantastic. Thank you!

In one week we’ve served up 5 million PostRanks! (We’re coming after your numbers, Golden Arches…)
Of course, when lots of people start poking at your stuff, quirks and bugs will be found. We do the best we can before we launch, but hey, there are a lot more of you than there are of us. (We appreciate your impressive powers of observation.)

And so this week we’ve fixed a bunch of things and added functionality directly resulting from user requests.

The highlights:

• PostRank on/off toggle: Some folks have reported that having PostRank running is slowing down their Google Reader experience. While we work on figuring out why that is (the latest version should actually make things faster), if, for some unfathomable reason, you’d like to temporarily turn off PostRank, you can do it in one click (checked is on, unchecked is off). The toggle is located in the left Google Reader pane, right above Add Subscription.

• Itemings remaining with unread appearance after being selected/read: Intermittently reported issue that should be fine and dandy and fading the appearance of read items now.
• Pressing Ctrl and clicking on an item opens a new tab and forces focus shift to it: Yeah, I hate that, too. It doesn’t happen anymore. New tabs open in the background and you can click on over to them at your leisure.
• Duplicate stories in a feed cause the analysis to hang: This one doesn’t happen often, but it’s just one of those little quirks that can be annoying. Anyway, no more eternal spinner, just sweet, juicy PostRanks.

In one additional note, it was brought to our attention that there was an intermittent problem with the J and K shortcut keys in Google Reader ceasing to function. We’ve looked at the code, and we don’t touch that functionality anywhere, so we suspect it’s something to do with the Greasemonkey compiler. (Unfortunately, we don’t control that…)

If you’ve been seeing this issue and don’t currently use Greasemonkey, we recommend installing it and then trying our Google Reader extension for Greasemonkey and seeing if that helps. Give us a holler if you’ve been seeing it, too. You can either leave a comment in the Get Satisfaction queue that mentions it or drop me an email: melanie@aiderss.com.