Slight preferences tweaks: birthday (year optional) and relationship status (datingfilter!) were just added. My profile shows what it might look like to logged-in users.
posted by mathowie on Apr 10, 2008 - 264 comments

The new Search is officially live. Full details to follow. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Jan 31, 2008 - 69 comments

New favorites page! [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Jan 29, 2008 - 95 comments

Announcing: mobile.metafilter.com
It's a new version of the sites designed for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Try it out on the device, songs from MeFi Music even play in the device (works best on wifi of course). A short video if it in action is inside. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Jan 24, 2008 - 92 comments

We've finally finished a several month long project today by reworking the back end of Metafilter to bring site security practices up to date. The new login system we were testing yesterday is now live for everyone. And you can even change your password now, after 8 years of everyone asking! [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Nov 29, 2007 - 76 comments

y'all are a sexy bunch of people. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Nov 14, 2007 - 218 comments

I added some quick hacky iCal support to the upcoming meetups sidebar here on MetaTalk. Hit the "iCal" link to get a properly formatted calendar file you can subscribe to and see all the upcoming meetups in your calendar of choice. Here's what it looks like in iCal.
posted by mathowie on Nov 12, 2007 - 18 comments

We just launched contacts activity (looks like this, also on the sidebar of the front page showing the most recent 10 things). More explanation inside. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Nov 2, 2007 - 171 comments

MeFi Mail is being rolled out, so pardon the dust for the next hour or so and once it's live, feel free to discuss it here.
posted by mathowie on Oct 19, 2007 - 437 comments

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posted by mathowie on May 31, 2007 - 117 comments

Minor feature add: you can set your flickr username in your account, and it will automatically grab your last six photos uploaded and add them to your userpage.
posted by mathowie on May 23, 2007 - 216 comments

There's a new user history interface, at http://www.metafilter.com/activity/(your user ID). It's linked on user pages now and provides a consistent view of your posts, comments, and things favorited by others (including a new most popular favorited list from your history). Three cheers for pb for building it, it should be much easier to use and more consistent than the previous way we did things.
posted by mathowie on May 16, 2007 - 141 comments

I added a new feature: Custom CSS for profile pages. You simply create a .css file on your own server, write whatever CSS you want, and it will load after all the mefi CSS when anyone views your user page. Here's mine (which loads this). Just plop in the URL of your custom CSS file on your server in your user prefs. Be sure to post here when you've got something cool to show. Let the ugliness/coolness begin!
posted by mathowie on Apr 14, 2007 - 188 comments

I finally fixed this, I gussied up the preferences page (more readable, easier to use), and I added inline magical youtube video streaming, which mostly works (enable it then click the icons you see on posts). Full explanation of the YouTube feature.
posted by mathowie on Mar 16, 2007 - 76 comments

Recent changes: 1) I finally updated the MetaTalk posting page to be more like the rest of the site, and added titles. RSS will soon have titles added. Also, no more "bugs" category as the generic catch-all, as I force you to pick one.
2) - For firefox 2.0 and IE7 users, you might notice being on a mefi site, the upper right search box is glowing or highlighted. If you click it, you can add a server-wide MeFi search (using the Google aggregated results from all *.metafilter.com sites) and search directly from your browser.
posted by mathowie on Feb 13, 2007 - 71 comments

Ask MeFi finally has category feeds.
posted by mathowie on Feb 5, 2007 - 48 comments

I'm deploying a new (backwards compatible) URL scheme for mefi [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Feb 1, 2007 - 136 comments

Projects just got the ajax treatment, and seems to be working great. Try it and see.
posted by mathowie on Jan 25, 2007 - 22 comments

I'm testing out ajax favorites on MeFi right now (only www.metafilter.com). If you open any thread you can add the post or any comment as a favorite without leaving the page. Lemme know if you hit any snags and please hold off on "but, but, can you also make it do x?" requests until we're sure it works in most all browsers.
posted by mathowie on Dec 29, 2006 - 42 comments

Google Custom Search came out today. Here's a test search across all sites. Apparently you can refine it by hand and I opened up the ability to do that to others. I don't know if this is any better than a regular google.com search with site:metafilter in the string, but I figured it's worth trying out to check.
posted by mathowie on Oct 24, 2006 - 7 comments

MeFi Music rev 2 feature blowout!!! Things added today:
- New Charts showing top favorites/playlists added in just the last three days (for new, awesome stuff you might have missed) and favorites/playlists from your contacts (what your friends like, you probably like too).
- playlists have podcast feeds, so you can just add it to iTunes and download the songs directly. When you add new songs to your playlist, iTunes can recheck and pull down those new ones as well.
- tag pages have podcast feeds and an embedded player. Want to hear everything tagged with hiphop in iTunes? Now you can.
- songs/comment history has been added to user pages, including a podcast feed for each and every user so if you want a copy of every song ever done by say, cortex, you can. Also added the embedded player to song history pages.
- more fixes coming later today, but I wanted to get the word out on the new features.
posted by mathowie on Jul 6, 2006 - 52 comments

Now in alpha beta gamma whatever: MeFi Music. Built in 12 hours with help from pb, it's still got some rough edges and features to come, but for now you can upload a song you've written and recorded (this isn't for file sharing), stream it from the front page or from its own page (where you can also leave comments). You can add things to playlists and stream those too. And the RSS feed is a podcast you can drag into iTunes to suck down every mp3 that gets posted. I'm sure there are bugs and the color scheme was slapped together in five minutes, but expect to see things ironed out in the next couple weeks and I'll add it to the global nav for all sites when it feels complete. If you have any comments or questions, drop them here.
posted by mathowie on Jun 30, 2006 - 351 comments

New features for favorites: favorited posts and comments from your contacts have been added to your usercontacts page and there's a page for all favorites from your contacts. This should be useful for finding stuff you may have missed, but that people you trust and enjoy reading deemed worth of saving.

People that marked something as a favorite are no longer shown below each post, but on their own page. On your own favorites page you can now see who else marked the same item as a favorite, and the recent popular favorites page now lists comments as well as posts. Whew.
posted by mathowie on Jun 8, 2006 - 38 comments

I'm working on favorites and releasing what I have today. Think of favorites as an internal bookmark system, a way to keep a list of the good questions, great comments, or interesting ideas you've found here.

Right now, you can mark a thread on mefi, metatalk, or ask mefi as a favorite, and view it at the link in the header above (is the header too wide for small monitors?). All your stuff marked as a favorite is public and anyone else can see the stuff you've marked (this comes in handy later on).

I'll be adding the ability to flag comments later today and very soon I'll be doing something akin to the fantastic posts page on Ask MeFi, where the most favorited things over the past few days is highlighted on a single page.
posted by mathowie on May 10, 2006 - 100 comments

Want to see something cool? Hit the . key on any mefi front page or comment page. Hit the , key to go up a post/comment. And don't worry, once you click into a textarea or input, it turns itself off (we couldn't ever lose the . could we?). Thanks to the hard work of delfuego for making this happen.
posted by mathowie on Apr 25, 2006 - 94 comments

I just launched the FAQ engine I wrote a few weeks ago. It's got just a few questions in it and it hasn't been organized yet, but if you're logged in, feel free to suggest new questions at the bottom of the page, which me and jessamyn will review, organize, and post later on. For now, it's just starting out, but I'm sure we can fill this out and organize it into something useful for everyone in just a few weeks.
posted by mathowie on Apr 20, 2006 - 58 comments

I just added a feedback mechanism to Projects. If you want to test it first, try it out here and let me know if you find any bugs. You can leave one bit of feedback on any Project, and only the author will see them.
posted by mathowie on Apr 19, 2006 - 21 comments

I added more descriptive titles to metafilter and ask mefi comment pages. Refresh your CSS to see them as they intended to look.
posted by mathowie on Feb 9, 2006 - 34 comments

New feature: RSS feeds for tags on both mefi and ask mefi (example). Tag pages have links to feeds, or just add /rss to the URL to get the feed.
posted by mathowie on Feb 1, 2006 - 26 comments

I'm testing out a jabber server on MetaFilter. Use any jabber client (iChat, adium, trillian, gAIM, etc) to connect to metafilter.com. Enter your username as your_mefi_username@metafilter.com and your password is your existing website password here. Once logged in, you can IM other members that are online (my current status: ). Oh, this jabber server supports SSL for encrypted chat by default and also lets you talk to jabber users on other servers, including Google Talk (just add them to your buddy list). If this works out, I'll be experimenting with more features like chatrooms and perhaps allowing chat with Yahoo and MSN users as well. Let me know how it works for you, everyone that is a member here already has a login to the jabber server, automatically.
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2006 - 175 comments

I did a bunch of tweaks to the site today and just wanted to give a heads up in case some bugs are found in these pages: Projects history added to user pages. Pagination added to tags pages (MeFi/AskMeFi). Fixed post/comment page pagination issues by completely rewriting the link/comment history pages (all). Removed "posted by" spoofing "hack" (all).
posted by mathowie on Jan 17, 2006 - 102 comments

I updated the userpage location stuff. If you haven't noticed, you can now add your latitude/longitude anywhere on earth (not just the US), though I started by converting everyone over from zip codes. I also figured out sorting nearby users by zipcode, and now I'm showing the closest 50 people, along with a google map.

It works great in most cities. Seattle and Boston have a nice layout. SF and NYC are less than perfect because everyone in the same zip code got the same exact location, so points stack up. LA is the worst in that regard. The zoom level of the google map depends on how many people are near you, NYC gets zoomed in, while people in the sticks get zoomed out.
posted by mathowie on Dec 22, 2005 - 109 comments

The My Comments page is up and ready for testing. It scours the comment databases to find all the comments you've left in the past 7 days, then shows you the thread you left them in, along with the comments that followed yours, up to the last ten comments. I've been using it for the past hour or so and it's great for keeping up on threads I left comments in days ago.

I'll clean up the layout and look eventually, but for now, it's the companion to the My Posts page, and I'm open to feedback or any problems you find. The URL will stay there, so feel free to bookmark both.
posted by mathowie on Aug 18, 2005 - 71 comments

Testing a new feature: Recent Comments on my Posts page [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Aug 16, 2005 - 52 comments

So I think I have international language support working finally. Please test in the comments here.

اذان ظهر: ۱۳‎/۱۱ • اذان مغرب: ۲۰‎/۳۲ فردا: • اذان صبح: ۴‎/۲۹ • طلوع

Pictographs and Icons:✈ ☎ ☼ ✮
posted by mathowie on Jul 28, 2005 - 185 comments

I'm trying out live comment preview, graciously programmed by kokogiak. It should work in major browsers and fall back to the old preview pages for browsers without js support. Let me know if you find any bugs, or have any comments about it.
posted by mathowie on Jul 20, 2005 - 242 comments

I changed the way tags are done on mefi. You can now delete your tags and make new ones on your posts. If this works out, I'll extend it to let you tag your mutal contacts as well (and I'll copy the functionality to ask mefi as well). Let me know if you run into any problems. Also, me and jessamyn can add and delete tags on any post and will use this to help keep things organized.
posted by mathowie on Jul 12, 2005 - 44 comments

I worked up a custom google maps view showing every user (screenshot inside). Once I get it working more smoothly, I'll post the URL for folks to play with it.
posted by mathowie on Jun 30, 2005 - 86 comments

After seeing this simple del.ico.us feature, I was wondering... would a [save to del.ico.us] link for threads in MeFi and Ask MeFi be a useful addition?
posted by mathowie on May 17, 2005 - 40 comments

I just updated the server to CFMX 7. If you see any obvious weird errors, toss them in here.
posted by mathowie on Feb 7, 2005 - 39 comments

MeFi contacts stuff is back online and here's what it looks like in action. It is displaying the last 10 contributions in the last month from your contacts in all three sections of the site, as well as a list of their URLs if you want to read their blogs. I'll be adding recent comments from contacts as well, but I thought this was at the point where it was cool enough to share.
posted by mathowie on Jun 16, 2004 - 122 comments

Thanks to the hard work of timeistight, we've now got some XFN features in place to do some of that social networking you've read so much about. As of right now, you can add folks as contacts, and describe the relationship optionally. Soon I'll have a page showing contributions to the site from your contacts, so if you have a favorite writer here, add them as a contact and hit that special page later when it's online. Imagine, ssoon you'll be able to say "show me all the questions asked by my friends to Ask MetaFilter" and get a page back showing just that, among other things.

I will definitely be working on the display of this info on user pages, as it currently looks like ass. Sky's the limit once we have this in place with some data. Oh, and I have no idea what a muse is either, anyone know?
posted by mathowie on Jun 15, 2004 - 120 comments

FYI: Trackback has been disabled from the site until I get some time next week to put some fixes in to block certain people from tweaking with it.
posted by mathowie on Mar 17, 2004 - 8 comments

The MetaFilter Music channel. I've got another server setup with loads of bandwidth, so I was thinking of this as a new project/feature at MetaFilter: A place to download and stream music created by MetaFilter members. Would anyone be interested in taking part? Do that many MetaFilter members create music?
posted by mathowie on Apr 10, 2003 - 128 comments

I just added CFDev's ActiveSpeller to MetaFilter's comment pages. I'll eventually add them to every textarea form on the site. Let me know if you run into any bugs.
posted by mathowie on May 22, 2002 - 22 comments

New feature for Mac users. The sidebar feature works for me in IE 5.12 under OS X. I think the page holder feature has been around a while, but I had no idea. Anyway, for those using Mac IE browsers, you now have a sidebar version of metafilter (don't ask me about Opera versions, they're not possible as far as I know).

Coding new features actually makes painful time spent in airports fly by.
posted by mathowie on Mar 9, 2002 - 18 comments

check this out, it's a real-time chat app done in XML and DHTML that floats "over" a site. It's kinda buggy and took me a few loads for it to work. Apparently, it's not private just to this site, and the other users are on other sites, but it's interesting.
posted by mathowie on Sep 20, 2001 - 15 comments

I added a simple addition to user profiles, for a blurb about ourselves, and I hope everyone uses it. I threw together a question about usernames and getting started on the internet.

I find usernames (especially unusual ones) often have an odd story behind them, and people's first experiences with the internet are sometimes funny, sometimes interesting.

I spilled my guts, now you go spill yours.
posted by mathowie on Jan 27, 2001 - 44 comments

Thanks to SQL whiz Eric, there is now a feature to grab the most recent comments, on 20 threads, sorted by the most recent comments. This will allow things to "bubble up" again when someone comments on an old thread. I think it's a useful, good feature, but could be abused later on, but for now it's better than nothing. It's available for both members and non-members, if you find any bugs, let me know here. It requires javascript to work.
posted by mathowie on Jan 25, 2001 - 25 comments

I changed the posting pages to use a new javascript fix, to prevent double posts. If it doesn't let you post comments or new threads, let me know here. I tested it on IE 5.01, NN 4.75, and NN 6.0 on win2k, and it worked fine.
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2001 - 22 comments