Here are the high level bullet points:

• easily connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts (no need to create apps through their developer sites and copy keys around – this feature enabled directly by MailChimp)
• allow any other authors on your site to broadcast their own accounts, as well as to any global accounts for the site
• broadcast your posts to Twitter and Facebook (with customized messages for each account)
• pull social reactions on Twitter and Facebook back in to your site as comments (this could be liking or retweeting your broadcast, replying with a comment, or just tweeting a link to your post)
• ability to reply to these social reactions from your WordPress site and send them back to the appropriate social network (keep the conversation going)
• your site visitors can authenticate with their Twitter or Facebook accounts when commenting (and they can optionally post their comment back to their social networks)

Pretty good feature list, right? Social also has a couple of great collateral features. When used in conjunction with the “users must be logged in to comment” feature of WordPress, you can choose to require your commentors to attach a more meaningful (and verified) identity with their comments. Removing anonymous noise from the mix always raises the level of debate.

Social also allows your site to be the place for your content. You can bring in conversations from both Facebook and Twitter back to your site, while still participating in the conversations on those social networks. Engage with people where they want to engage, but do so while providing a richer cross-network experience on your own site.

That’s Social in a nutshell. Which brings us to the “what’s new in this version” list. I did most of the coding on this release so I’m hardly unbiased, but I’m pretty darn pleased with the way this version has shaped up. I’ve been using development builds on this site for a bit now, and I really like the way the new features have removed that last little bit of friction from some of my more common interactions.

Before we launch into what’s new, I’d like to take a moment to point out that Social is built entirely in the open on GitHub. Developers, please send us awesome pull requests.

Facebook Improvements

I think some of the best changes in this version are in the improvements to interactions with Facebook. By default, when a post is broadcast it is sent as a link rather than a status post; regardless of if it has a featured image or not. The obvious exception here is for posts that have a status post format – those are still sent as status posts. To try to make this interaction clear, we show a nice preview of how the post will look on Facebook on the broadcast screen.

When comments are broadcast to Facebook, we try to do the Right Thing with it. There are two options:

1. The comment is replying to an existing comment thread and we should post it back to the same thread in Facebook. If this is the case, we try to do so. If for some reason (permissions, etc.) we aren’t able to do so, then we fall back on option 2…
2. Post the comment with a link to the post to the commentor’s timeline. It makes more sense. Their comment is on the link, and the link is posted right along with it. This should make the posts going back to Facebook more meaningful.

We also take the step of auto-selecting the “Post to Facebook” checkbox under the following conditions:

• The (admin/author) user has a Facebook profile attached to their account.
• The comment they have clicked “reply” was imported from (or was broadcast to) Facebook.

Social does this all for you – just hit reply, type your message and send. This feature is important to keep the conversation running easily on both Facebook and your WordPress site.

Twitter Improvements

Twitter integration got some nice improvements in this version as well. You were previously able to import tweets as comment directly by URL, but now you can do this from the front-end as well. Use the menu we add in the admin bar under the Comments item to bring in tweets directly (and look for social comments). This is really useful for bringing in replies to replies or other tweets that are part of the conversation, but not something that Social will pick up by default. Note that you have to be on a single post (permalink) view for this to be available.

One of the use cases that I think makes Social really interesting is the way it allows your WordPress site to interact with real-time happenings on Twitter. Did someone tweet something that prompted you to write a blog post? You can send your broadcast tweet as a reply to that user.

Tip: Make sure to include their @username in the tweet so that they see it as you expect.

We also improved the Twitter comment detection to auto-select the account that a tweet was directed to when replying to an imported comment. Huh? Basically, if @someoneelse sends a tweet to @yourusername and Social brings that in as a comment, Social will also select your @yourusername and check the “post to Twitter” box when you hit the Reply link for that comment. It also inserts @someoneelse into the comment box so that you can start writing your reply.

The last significant change we made is to widen the net a little and catch specific types of Twitter replies, then import them as comments. The scenario is basically this:

1. You broadcast a post.
2. Someone replies to your post, this is imported as a comment on your site.
3. You reply to that comment on your site, and broadcast it back to Twitter.
4. The other person (or multiple people) reply to that comment.

Previously we would have missed automatically importing the replies in step 4 above. Now we catch them.

We walk a fine line with the amount of content we try to find and import. In particular we want to make sure we don’t set up rules that allow Social to use up all of your API requests checking for comments on your broadcasts. However, we do want to bring in as many relevant reactions as we can. We were able to make this change without requiring an additional API hit. We are able to look for additional data in the API requests we were already making.

General Improvements

You can now send customized broadcasts to each account in a single action – each account has its own form that you can edit. By default, the first broadcast message for each service (Facebook, Twitter) is editable while any others are in “copycat” mode. They will all be updated along with the edits to the first message unless you click the Edit link for the ones you want to customize. We think this is a good compromise between convenience and control, and hope you like how it works.

The account management forms have been streamlined and cleaned up, on both the main Social settings screen and the user profile screen. For example, Facebook pages are always displayed so they can be selected, etc. We also consolidated the selection of “default” accounts into the main accounts list. We hope this makes these pages easier to understand and use.

Some of you have post broadcasts that get a ton of Likes and Retweets. These are cool to see in the (condensed view in the) comments list, but not as meaningful in the comments RSS/Atom feeds that WordPress generates. We’ve added some code to suppress these types of “meta” comments in the feeds.

When you have lots of comments, they come with a lot of in-page image requests. This can cause your site to load more slowly than you’d like, so we implemented support for the Lazy Load plugin. Install and enable this plugin, and the avatars for your Social comments only load when scrolled into view.

Social now functions as a platform for other social WordPress plugins. You can choose to disable any features that you don’t want on your site and just use the connections to social networks. Expect a new release of Twitter Tools, built on Social, very soon.

Of course we also fixed all of the bugs we were able to reproduce. This includes making Facebook comment importing more consistent, along with a number of other fixes and improvements.

A quick word about Google+ integration (by far the most requested feature – tracked here). It’s something we want to do and plan to do, but until Google+ has a write API we can’t attain feature parity with our Facebook and Twitter integrations. My guess? We’ll see a Google+ API featured next month at Google I/O.

Want to build cool WordPress integrations like this? We’re hiring.

Social is a plugin that allows you to maintain a centralized conversation on your site, while also participating in conversations on Facebook and Twitter.

Fellow Colorado web geeks, I made you a t-shirt.

The code that comprises the white stripe is a full, working HTML page with canvas code that draws the Colorado flag. Yes, it’s very meta.

Want one? We’re taking orders for the rest of the month, then we’ll place an order to get them all printed up. These are priced just above cost ($15, plus $5 if you need it shipped) – we’re not trying to make money on them. I initially ordered a batch for my team, but thought others might like it as well. If early response is any indication, I hope to see a few of these around town this summer.

As the version number indicates, this release is primarily to deliver a few bug fixes. Here is a quick overview of the significant changes:

• improved compatibility with changes introduced in WordPress 3.3
• properly handle entirely numeric category and tags names
• improved support for hierarchical taxonomies
• misc. cleanup of PHP notices (when the WordPress DEBUG setting is enabled)
• minimum required WordPress version is now 3.3

For a little more detail about just what this product is all about, check out my original post announcing RAMP.

The features for FavePersonal were driven by my goals for version three of this site. I wanted the site to be personal, be a great showcase for my content and to integrate with my other social interactions online.

Personal

One of the features I know people will enjoy playing with is the Colors feature. Instead of fiddling with lots of different color pickers, you can select from thousands of existing color palettes (via Adobe Kuler integration) and instantly preview and apply the scheme to your site.

The header options and bio widget features were created to help tell the “this is who I am, and what this site is” story. Most visitors arrive on an internal site page via search engine or direct link. These features serve to provide some context about both you, and your site.

All Kinds of Post Content

With FavePersonal we have integrated our post formats admin UI functionality to make it easy to post photos, galleries, videos, etc. Each of these types of content is elegantly managed and delivered, from the back-end admin interface all the way through to customized layouts appropriate for each type of content, and formatted elegantly for mobile devices (even extending to your RSS feeds).

See some examples on this site:

• Status posts
• Link posts
• Photo posts
• Gallery posts (be sure to check out a gallery post)
• Video posts

Social

If my site is going to represent me on the web, it’s not telling a complete story if it ignores my participation on other social networks. FavePersonal tightly integrates with (and includes) the Social plugin to create a two way integration between your website, Twitter and Facebook. You can post status updates on your site then pass them on to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Social will bring retweets, likes and reactions from those sites back to your site as comments.

Additionally, your visitors can log in with their social profiles when they comment directly on your site.

Mobile-Friendly

FavePersonal was designed from the ground up to be responsive. Not only does it look great on your computer, but also on your phone and tablet device.

Are you on a mobile browser now? Check out the online demo and see how it works. Be sure to rotate and see how it adapts to portait and landscape orientations.

Of course it is optimized for fast page loads and also features clean HTML5 markup that is both human and machine (SEO) friendly.

This is just a very brief sampling of what we’ve put into FavePersonal. We’ve been working on this theme for over a year.¹ We’ve given every feature a ton of thought, debate, tweaking, building, throwing away, re-building and testing to get things the way we want them. I’ve been told I can be a bit particular , which is a kind way of saying I’m a pain in the arse and we’ll re-design things as many times as it takes to get it right. My team has been very patient with me, coming up with great ideas and solutions and building them in elegant ways. We’ve built deep features on solid foundations that won’t break or surprise you as you lean on them and come to rely on them.

I’m going to be following up with a series of posts that go into more detail about the various features of FavePersonal, discussing some of the design decisions we made, and sharing customizations I’ve put into my own child theme. I’ll also point to some of the code we’ve released on our GitHub account for anyone who would be interested. I’ve got a pretty good sized list.

When I started using FavePersonal in August of last year (2011) it became the third version of this site since it launched in 2002 (check out original version from 2002 and the previous version from 2006). With each iteration I always received a number of “is your theme available?” inquiries. In the past, my themes have always been built with too many content assumptions, etc. for me to effectively share it, but I made sure we didn’t do that with FavePersonal.

Check out the FavePersonal page on the Crowd Favorite website to see our feature videos, try out online demo and purchase (our new store² supports PayPal as well as credit cards).

I hope you like it as much as I do!

I’ve always struggled to write up the job descriptions we are hiring for. As I was trying to describe our current openings last week, I had a bit of an epiphany. The biggest reason I struggle to write up job descriptions is that we’re looking for certain kinds of people, not someone to fit into a specific position.

Instead of posting a bunch of individual designer or developer positions, we instead have a list of designer and developer skill sets. Everyone on our team has cross-functional skills and we consider this a real strength. For some reason it has taken until now for us to make our “hiring” page reflect this (instead of sticking to the more traditional listing of available positions).

At this time we’re looking for a few developers to join our team. Head on over and take a look. If you like what you see and think you’d be a good fit.

I’m very pleased that we have reached the point where we are hiring to work on internal product initiatives and to shore up our internal systems as well as to contribute to our WordPress consulting and custom development services.

Crowd Favorite is a little unique in that you have the opportunity to work on lots of diverse projects and cutting edge technology, but you don’t have the 60-80 hour work week that demanded by your typical startup.

If you care about building great things on the web – please be in touch.

Note that this is lightly tested and there is absolutely no information in the README yet. Please contribute via pull requests in GitHub to help write the README with the information you would find useful.

I’m excited about the move to using Social as the platform for Twitter Tools because it fixes the user experience issues that have plagued Twitter Tools since Twitter’s move to OAuth. Read more of my bitching about this here:

• Twitter Tools OAuth Update – June 10, 2010
• Twitter Tools and OAuth Continued – June 13, 2010
• Twitter Tools OAuth Update – August 13, 2010
• Twitter Tools 2.4 (OAuth Support) – August 15, 2010

Please open issues on GitHub for any bugs you find.

Social has a couple of high level features:

1. It enables broadcasting your WordPress content to social networks.
2. It brings back reactions from those social networks to your own site.
3. It lets people log in through social networks to comment – identity generally leads to better conversations.
4. It allows the sharing of comments on your site to social networks.
5. It does all of this without requiring you to register as a developer with the social networks and create your own apps.

This sort of integration is fraught with edge cases and little gotchas. For version 2.0 we looked at what we had with 1.x, looked at our road map for Social, bit down hard and decided to do a full rewrite for 2.0.

The downside of the rewrite was how long it took to get 2.0 released, but by doing it now we have a much more extensible platform on which to add connections to other services (Google+, for example) and we had less to refactor than we would have had we waited.

Along with the full rewrite, there are a bunch of new features in 2.0. Here are a few of them:

• Changed the way authentication works, to improve security.
• Added support for posting to Facebook Pages as well as profiles.
• When someone Likes one of your broadcasts on Facebook, that is pulled in to your site.
• New visual presentation of Retweets and Likes, so that the activity is visible but the discussion is less cluttered. We also have a smart algorithm for trying to match retweets that are not marked as such by Twitter’s API.
• If you respond to a comment imported from Twitter on your site and broadcasting that back to Twitter, the “in reply to” thread is correctly maintained.
• Where possible, comments on your WordPress site are threaded to match discussions that happened on social sites.
• A new queuing system for the checking of for social reactions, along with features that should reduce (hopefully eliminate) reactions from creating duplicate comments.
• Delayed broadcasting for future posts and comments that are held for moderation.
• The ability to enable broadcasting by default on new posts (please use this judiciously) to selected globally authenticated accounts as well as selected personal accounts.
• Convenience links in the admin bar and on the post list page to allow you to manually check for social reactions on a post.
• A ton of edge case handling for things like changing from bit.ly to wp.me URLs after publishing a post, respecting private tweets, etc.

I have a few good examples to demonstrate how Social brings in comments and displays them. Unfortunately some of these were pulled in before I started running the Social 2.0 codeline so not all of the retweets, etc. are displayed as cleanly as they will be in the future.

Big thanks to MailChimp for their support of Social. They are not only the primary benefactor of the plugin, but they also run the service that allows WordPress to connect to Twitter and Facebook without the pain and hassle of registering as a developer and creating apps for each platform.

Social’s source code is hosted on GitHub and built in the open in the best tradition of Open Source. Pull requests, enhancements and feedback are welcome.

Download from GitHub

We are hoping for a general release of version 2.0 on Monday, so please report any issues you find in the WordPress.org support forums. Thanks!

I’m certainly biased, but I think this is a pretty great position. You will get to:

• work with latest web standards
• work on high-profile websites
• conceptualize and create new user experiences and interfaces
• collaborate with other talented team members on design and front-end implementation approaches
• work with a great development team that won’t compromise design during implementation

We have a fast paced environment and you’ll be working on both internal and external (client) projects. You should have the following qualities:

• love for a good challenge
• love of creating usable features and championing the user’s experience
• experience with/interest in product design
• experience with/interest in website design
• experience with/interest in some logo/branding work
• experience with/interest in technical implementation using current front-end web standards

We’re looking for a demanding, detail-oriented, analytical thinker. A pixel off should keep you up at night (or at least from going home until it’s fixed). A well-designed feature should be inspected from all angles to make sure it will work exactly as desired. Things like inconsistencies in animation speeds between different features on the same page should be like nails on your chalkboard.

You’ll be working on a variety of projects and products, many relating to WordPress (prior experience with WordPress is not a requirement). Skills and talent are more important to us than experience, but relevant experience is definitely a plus.

If you want an opportunity to work where everyone around you cares deeply about the quality of their work; a place where you can utilize the latest and greatest solutions and best practices; a place where you can be proud of the work you’ve done; a place that will push you and challenge you – I want to hear from you.

A “Drafts” link is added to the admin bar.

Clicking this drops down a drawer with your drafts.

The new version also updates the styling, improves performance, and will make you younger, fitter and better looking. Enjoy!

Developers, we’re in the process of moving active development of our WordPress code into GitHub to encourage more community involvement. Please fork and contribute as appropriate.

Download

This thing is really cool, for a number of reasons. I’ll dive into those in a bit, but first head on over to the MailChimp blog to see the official release announcement. Over there you can see the plugin in action, pulling in Tweets and Facebook comments along with comments authenticated via Twitter and Facebook right there on the blog post.

This is the second opportunity my Crowd Favorite team and I have had to build a plugin with the great folks at MailChimp. They really care about putting out a stellar product for the WordPress community, and as a bonus we had the privilege of working directly with Aarron Walter (user experience guru at MailChimp) who designed the comment layout in Social.

Ok, so on to the juicy tech details. Social has a bunch of really awesome features that allow your WordPress site to interact with the social web more easily and completely than ever. After trying to write this up a few different ways, I’m going to try to tackle them in an O’Grady-style Q & A.

You mention a bunch of features, want to hit on a few to get this started?

Sure, in no particular order:

• Twitter and Facebook authentication for commentors
• Automatically pull in reactions on Facebook and Twitter as comments to your blog posts
• Optionally broadcast posts to Twitter and Facebook
• Per-user accounts for broadcasting
• Customizable broadcast format
• Easiest set-up of any Twitter/Facebook plugin for WordPress
• A base for other social integrations with WordPress

That is a bunch, how did this get started?

The MailChimp folks had some good ideas already when we first started talking about this, particularly around commenting. What you see today is very much what they had in mind, however they were also open to some of our suggestions, brought more of their own ideas along the way, and I think the result here is a great win for the WordPress community.

Let’s talk about the commenting bit, why is this a big deal? How does it work?

The state of blog comments has been constantly evolving with the social web. Conversations that used to happen exclusively in blog comment threads are now spread out across Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. In addition, comments have become targets for SPAM, trolls and other web undesirables.

Social addresses this in two ways:

1. Searching Twitter and Facebook for reactions to your post, and importing those as comments on the post. This helps keep the conversation available right at the source, even if it happens elsewhere.
2. By offering authentication through Twitter and Facebook, you can force commentors to attach an online identity to their words. Folks seem to be a bit more civil when they can’t be anonymous.

Aren’t there services that pull in social web reactions already?

Definitely, but Social is pretty smart about this. It searches for responses (and retweets) to your broadcasts, and also looks for mentions by URL on Twitter. It does it all on your own site, creating comments that you are in control of.

You mention that Social supports broadcasting, there are lots of plugins that do this already. How is this different?

There are a lot of plugins that do this, but Social does it in a really elegant way. I wrote Twitter Tools, one of the more popular plugins that broadcasts to Twitter. In talking with MailChimp about the feature set for Social, I outlined a bunch of enhancements that I wanted to make in the next version of Twitter Tools. Since Social needed to support broadcasting, we took all of the things I wanted to add to and improve on in Twitter Tools and instead put them right into Social.

Social has per-author broadcasting accounts. You can still authenticate sitewide Twitter and Facebook accounts that can be broadcast to by any author. And additionally each author can also authenticate their own accounts that only they can broadcast to.

A great example of this is the MailChimp blog. Social could be configured so that any author posting there can send tweets to the @mailchimp account, while Aarron can also connect his @aarron account as well. Then when he posts to the blog, he can send a tweet out to either or both accounts (on a per-post basis).

We also drastically improved the flexibility of what you send out in the broadcast. Twitter Tools had a hard-coded format:

New blog post: My Post Title http://example.com/my-post-title

Social allows you to set a default format using the title, content, etc. as desired, but also gives you the chance to customize what goes out on a per-service and per-post basis. It’s really slick. You publish a post, then you’re taken to a screen that has the broadcast items ready for you to send, and you can edit them and tell them where to go.

The biggest improvement over Twitter Tools isn’t the broadcasting though, it’s the ease of set-up.

Making things easy for users is always good, but how is Social different here?

When Twitter changed a year ago to require OAuth for authentication, I said it would be a Bad Thing for users of Open Source tools like Twitter Tools. The process of creating an app sucks, I’ve botched it myself. Facebook has the same requirements.

In discussing the features we wanted to create for Social, we kept coming back to the lousy user experience of creating apps, etc. on these sites. This is where MailChimp really stepped up to make Social a great tool for the WordPress community.

We told them what all of us WordPress developers had run into with the Open Source issues around OAuth secrets, and that the only real way to solve it would be to run an app as a service that could be used by Open Source tools like WordPress plugins. And when we were done explaining the situation, they said: let’s do it.

They have created and are hosting a secure service that connects to Twitter and Facebook on your behalf. They’ve created the app so that you don’t have to. No need to copy keys around, make sure you check the right boxes on your app set-up, etc. – all you have to do is install, add your accounts with the normal web pop-up authentication, and you’re good to go.

So MailChimp is hosting this app for all of us for free?

Yep, I think I already mentioned they are awesome… indeed they are.

How is Social, to use your words, a base for other social integrations with WordPress

Social is more than the features you see on the outside. On the inside, it is a set of libraries that can connect to the social web (via the MailChimp provided app). Other plugins can leverage this to make additional calls to these services. I previously mentioned that Social out-shines Twitter Tools for broadcasting, and it does. But Social doesn’t include the Tweet archiving, blog post from Tweet, or recent Tweets features of Twitter Tools.

We are putting the finishing touches on a new version of Twitter Tools that will piggy-back on Social. Social will handle the account authentication and broadcasting, Twitter Tools will do the Tweet archiving, recent Tweets, blog post from Tweets, etc. – it’s going to be a huge upgrade.

Anything else you’d like to add here?

We’ve already started on some new features for the next version, and we’d love to get more feedback from the community as they use the plugin. There are already some great suggestions in the comments on the MailChimp blog post that we’ll be integrating; and we’ll try to keep an eye on the WordPress support forums too.

I think we’ll see a few more services added in the near future as well. I’ve been lobbying for one that I want to build a little integration with myself.

Fellow WordPress developers, if you’d like to extend Social please stop by and say hi at WordCamp San Francisco this weekend. I look forward to hearing your ideas and seeing how we can work together to make great things for the WordPress community.

There were versions of WordPress prior to 3.1 that had a bug that caused pages and some custom post types to have non-unique GUID values. This was fixed in WordPress 3.1, but the data has never been cleaned up. This means that pages and/or custom post types on your site that were created back in the 3.0 days may have this problem, while other pages and/or custom post type content is just fine.

It’s a real problem for RAMP customers because RAMP relies on GUIDs being unique. RAMP uses GUIDs to properly associate content between WordPress instances (staging and production), and to maintain relationships between posts, pages, attachments, etc. If the GUIDs are not unique, then RAMP might update the wrong page when trying to push content from staging to production. We are adding a few additional safeguards around this issue within RAMP for the next release (it will prompt you to run the GUID-Fix if needed).

Our CF GUID-Fix plugin will clean up this data in your database. It’s a “run-once, then delete” type of plugin.

This fix is crucial for RAMP customers, but it’s a good idea for everyone. GUIDs are exposed in feeds, so if your WordPress site is generating feeds that include pages or custom post types that were created in WordPress 3.0, your feeds may be invalid due to non-unique (duplicate) GUIDs for items in the feed. And any other plugins or WordPress tools that (reasonably) expect GUIDs to be unique will be pleased as well.

Hopefully this will be addressed in a future WordPress release but as with anything in a project as big as WordPress, it’s never as easy as we’d all hope. You never want the cure to be worse than the disease, so moving judiciously is always the right thing to do.

1. If you are a RAMP customer, you should have received an email with this information and more yesterday afternoon. If you didn’t receive this, please let me know. [back]

At Crowd Favorite we are fortunate to have some really great clients. These clients are running some pretty big web properties on WordPress, and they need to stage their content, review it internally, revise it, etc. before they put it live. It’s a pretty universal need – we just did it on our own site as we were preparing the web page and documentation for RAMP on our own site. This has always been difficult with WordPress, and had often resulted in SQL export/import followed by update scripts and/or manual copy-paste steps. RAMP solves this problem elegantly. You simply:

1. Install the RAMP plugin on your staging and production servers, and enter the auth key and URL from production in the settings for your staging server.
2. Select the changes you’d like to send and save them as a batch.
3. RAMP the batch up to your production server.

RAMP doesn’t just support posts and pages either; it fully supports custom post types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, users, menus, links and more.

We’re really proud of the underlying architecture of RAMP. We spent a long time working out just the right way to implement this type of functionality for WordPress, and I’m really pleased with the solution. We utilize core WordPress functionality and APIs, the XMLRPC layer for transport between servers, and built everything on top of an wonderfully extensible system (which uses the core WordPress hook and filter system) to allow any WordPress content to participate in a RAMP batch. We’ve already done this to Carrington Build.

RAMP is a commercial product priced at $99 per staging/production server pair. This includes documentation and support in our customer forum.

I’ve got an idea…

I love it when I get a note like this from internet superhero Dave Pell. It normally means I’m going to get a chance to help build something I’m going to love.

Our latest project together is Delivereads. You may have read about it already on Daring Fireball, Gizmodo or the TypeKit blog. If you haven’t, here’s the 30 second overview:

• Some articles that are available online are too long to comfortably read in your browser, they’d be better to read on your Kindle.
• Dave wanted a way to send these articles to his own Kindle, and thought that others might be interested in them as well.¹

Yep, I certainly wanted to receive Dave’s selected articles on my Kindle. The system would be pretty straightforward to create… let’s do it!

The basic workflow is pretty straightforward:

1. Dave does the hard work finding the great content. When he does find something, he uses the Delivereads bookmarklet to add it to the system.

   

2. When adding the article, Dave can add commentary to it as well. This commentary will be included in the Kindle delivery.

   

3. Once a good selection of articles is ready, Dave creates a delivery and selects the articles he wants to be included. These can be re-ordered as desired (using drag and drop).

   

4. Once the articles are set, the commentary has been added and everything is ready to go, there are both preview and test-run features to make sure that everything is just right. The preview allows for a quick review on the web to find any obvious issues, then the test run sends the delivery to Dave so he can proof it before it’s sent out to everyone. As we all know, there is no “unsend” button for email, so being a little careful here is important.

   

5. Once everything is reviewed and ready, Dave hits the magic button and you get the deliveread on your Kindle.

   

The articles that you receive on your Kindle go through a few transformations before they are ready to send. The first step is to grab the article content. The articles are then arranged in the deliveread, along with the table of contents, commentary and various “back” links.

We went through a lot of revisions and tweaking to try to get the deliveread format right. What we have now is basically:

• Table of Contents
• Intro with article list and commentary (your Kindle opens to this page)
• Article 1
• Commentary on Article 2
• Article 2
• Commentary on Article 3
• Article 3
• Unsubscribe instructions

There is a link to the table of contents at the beginning and end of the article, and a link to original article on the web at the end of each article. We chose to intersperse the commentary on each article after the first article. We do this because these are long form articles and by the time you get to Article 2, you have likely forgotten the commentary from the introduction. However, the links from the introduction and the table of contents go directly to the article (skipping the interstitial commentary) since you likely have that context already. Dave and I are definitely open to feedback and suggestions that might improve the service or deliveread format, so if you have ideas please let us know.

The Delivereads service is built on our Oxygen web application platform. This provides a very robust set of web application features and best practices so that when we build a web application like Delivereads we are able to focus on building the bits that are of high value instead of spending time on user management, permissions, collision detection, item revision history, etc., etc. We’ve created a wide variety of apps, services and web APIs with Oxygen and it is proving to be an excellent platform.

Does building a service like Delivereads sound like fun? It is! Join our team, we’re hiring! (Previous blog posts: PHP Web Developer, Technical Project Manager)

1. Dave is a great curator of content. [back]