Category Archives: features

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Email notifications

You can now be notified by email, if you choose, when someone comments on your profile or one of your word lists. If you go to your profile and click on the ‘edit contact options’ link, you can turn this feature on or off.

This is the default behavior for new wordies, but if you joined before this Saturday you’ll have to go in and turn notifications on, if you want ’em–it seemed kind of spamish to turn them on retroactively.

Suggestions for ways to improve this, for other kinds of notifications, or other ways to make it easier to follow Wordie are appreciated.

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Wordie hearts Facebook

I just added Facebook as an “also on” service, so you can connect your Facebook profile to your Wordie profile. I registered for Facebook a while ago and ignored it until it exploded recently, but I quickly got addicted once I realized that practically everyone I’ve met in the last five years is on there. I was late to this party, but it’s amazing to see that it actually sort of lives up to the hype. Unlike, say, MySpace, which I loathe, or LinkedIn, the suburban corporate office park of social networks. Or even Twitter, which is rad, but even more pointless than Wordie. Which is part of the appeal of both, I suppose.

It brings up a question, though. I plan on building a Wordie Facebook app in the coming weeks. I could just port over the existing blog widgets, and may, as a sort of warmup. But an app that takes better advantage of the platform might be more fun. I have some ideas percolating, but would love to hear suggestions. I’m thinking of something that would tie into both the friend connections on Facebook, and the word connections on Wordie, and that was simple and fun to boot, is the direction we should look in. If anyone has any brilliant ideas, please post them in the comments.

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News Feeds

Just added two new feeds: one displaying five random words, and one showing the last 20 comments made on Wordie. The feeds are available in the new “feeds & widgets” section (linked at the bottom of each page), to which I’ll soon be adding a “random words” widget, as well.

I’m planning on devoting more time to Wordie in the next few weeks, so please let me know if you’d like any changes to the feeds and widgets, or if there are any other features you’d like to see.

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Speed bump

I just added a bespoke caching mechanism to the front page, which makes it a good deal faster, and lets us gimp along on low-end hosting a bit longer. For those who care, it uses Ruby’s marshalling capabilities to store objects in the database, so the page is rendered each time, but the mongo db queries that were gumming up the page aren’t.

One small downside is, the cache is refreshed every two minutes, so if you add a word or a comment, you might have to pause a moment before you see it show up on the front page.

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Comment feeds for words and lists

Just added a feed for the comments attached to every word and word list, so you can more easily keep track of discussions, or see if anyone has responded to a comment or citation you left. As always, please send me suggestions or bug reports for improving this feature.

Someday I hope to add email notifications for keeping track of various things, but feeds are easier to implement, so that’s what we have for now. Occam’s razor guiding me, as usual.

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Word Clouds

A new way to view word lists: Word Clouds. Lets you see a list weighted visually, so that the more often the word has been listed, the larger it appears. Similar (ok, fine: identical) to the way Flickr does it.


To all you Christians out there, I’d like to wish you a very happy Christmas. And to everyone else, I hope you have the merriest of Mondays.