MetaTalk posts tagged with features

Mobile computer word-up!

parmanparman — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:30:38 -0800

My home computer is my Blackberry. Thank you so much for the "Mark resolved" link. It saves so much work!

Metatags?

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:05:32 -0800

Metatalk has thread tagging now? Neato. [----------->]

List of Mefites on different social networks

desjardins — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:02:34 -0800

I thought there was a page that listed Mefites on different social networks, i.e. Mefites on Flickr, Twitter, et al, with their associated usernames on said sites. I'm not thinking of the aggregated twitter/flickr pages. Or am I? Did I dream this?

A couple minor feature requests fulfilled

mathowie — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:57:13 -0800

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.

My Ask MeFi

pb — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:05:54 -0800

New Feature: My Ask MeFi A few weeks ago, we discussed a "Questions You Might be Interested In" feature to help filter the front page of Ask Metafilter by interest. After playing around with a recommendation system, we decided to let you filter the site to your interests by choosing your favorite tags and categories. You can get started by setting your preferences and then reading the new tab on the Ask front page: My Ask. The new page includes a sidebar with recommended questions from the past three days based on your Ask Metafilter answering/favoriting history. Questions only show up in the sidebar if they aren't already on the main page, so it's simply an extra way to find posts you might have missed. There are bound to be bugs in this new system, so post 'em if you've got 'em.

where the heck is metamail?

jimmyjimjim — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:20:23 -0800

Let's establish first of all that I'm a complete moron. Ok, with that out of the way, every great once in a while I've managed to find where to go to do metafilter mail. I'm never sure how I did it, and I can never seem to repeat it. I've just clicked about every link I could on my profile and contacts list and elsewhere, and can't access it. Now, since I'm, again, a moron, I'd never suggest that you place a clearer link to this feature. But can someone deign to give me a URL, a clue....something? Many thanks!

Who the flickr is that?

nomisxid — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:47:40 -0800

search by flickr name? Assuming they have filled in the profile-bit for flickr-ness, can one search for the corresponding mefi-profile, from a given flickr-name?

Metafilter Quoting Bookmarklet

Jeff Howard — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:17:02 -0800

Here's a little quoting bookmarklet for Metafilter threads that I thought folks might find useful. Highlight a text snippit you'd like to quote and click the bookmarklet. It'll format the snippit as a quote and paste it into the comment box for you. Just drag the bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar in Safari or Firefox. I had cobbled together something like this for another forum that required usenet-style quoting and I thought it'd be fairly easy to adapt to Metafilter. I haven't tried greasemonkey or any of the other quoting solutions, so this might be similar. It quotes text with italics, the username (no @ symbol) and a link to the original comment. The username/link are omitted for short threads or in cases where authorship is unclear to the script.

User Activity Search

pb — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:50:38 -0800

User activity search is available on profile pages. In the upper-right corner of profile pages, MeFi members will see a new option to search that user's activity. Throw in a search term, click the button, and you'll find matching posts and comments with that term from that particular user. Happy searching! As with full site search and favorites search, this doesn't handle exact phrases very well. So if you're searching for an exact sentence rather than keywords, a Google search with the added phrase "posted by [username]" might still be your best bet.

Search me!

mathowie — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:36:20 -0800

The new Search is officially live. Full details to follow. We've been testing out search for the past few weeks and after rolling out searching of favorites we figured it was time to roll it out as a site-wide and site-specific feature. The nav in the header and footer should have a link to the search engine and it works for only logged in members. The search boxes you will see in the header and footer for those in the normal site template (plain text version doesn't have them) are already wired up to search just the site you are viewing. So, in other words, you can search all mefi sites for a phrase like "Peru" or if you type "Peru" in the search box on Ask MeFi, it will automatically show results just for Ask MeFi. There's a handy drop down to change to other sites, or search across all sites. The footer of the search results shows you all the pages of results, allowing you to easily jump to the oldest result (I already found out I was the first person to use the word "Bush" on mefi). There's also a link to google and yahoo results on the site for that phrase. We will eventually add more features to an advanced page, letting do things like filter results for stuff from just one user, stuff with certain tags, stuff with favorites, etc. For now, enjoy, it's pretty good and blazing fast in our testing, so feel free to try using it to dig up that Ask MeFi post you've been looking for and let us know if you find any problems or have suggestions to improve it.

New Favorites page!

mathowie — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:18:45 -0800

New favorites page! We redid the favorites page (here's mine). Here are the following improvements: - Separated Posts from Comments on new tabs, easier to read/parse on the full page width, now shows you the poster's name, number of comments, etc - Filter by Site lets you dive into showing just favorites from a single sub-site. - Search oh my god did you say Search why yes I did I said Search. You can now SEARCH! your favorites by words or exact phrases and a stub of a url like searching for cnn.com should pull up favorites that contained that. You can also sort search results by relevancy or date in the upper right hand corner of results. You can also search other people's favorites from their page, but you have to be logged in to see the search options.

mobile.MeFi.com

mathowie — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:35:59 -0800

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.

Metafilter Infodump: more stats than you can shake a stick at.

cortex — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:58:21 -0800

Nerds, start your engines: it's the new Metafilter Infodump. There's been a lot of requests over the years for crunchy metafilter data (and another spike of requests lately). This is an attempt to make some of that available in a standard form in a reliable, officially sanctioned location. This is a compromise between the fantasy (a full db dump, or a live API for db requests) and the previous reality (nothing!); it has the advantage of actually existing, which I think is a big step up. Hopefully, this will save enterprising number crunchers some scraping, and lower the bar for entry some for those folks who would like to play with data but don't want to scrape. All of the files are plain text. Some are quite large. I've listed approximate file sizes for each file. They're not updated automatically at this point, but I can regenerate them as needed, and will if nothing else run the scripts once a month or so. If there's something specific you'd like to see added to or tweaked on the Infodump, let me know, here or via mail. If you do something cool with the data (or have done cool things with mefi data in the past), also let me know; I'd love to put together a permanent collection of mefi analyses. Have fun!

Music Changes

pb — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:32:15 -0800

Some new stuff at Music: play counts, flash player update, and pop-outs! Today we started tracking the number of times a track is played over at Music. (You can read the original request here: Blind Musicians.) You'll find the play count under the title, next to the date on a track detail page, like this: "- played x time(s)". If there's no count for a track, a play hasn't been recorded yet. A play is counted when someone listens for at least 60 seconds, and the play is stopped in a way that we can track. For example, listening to a single track all the way through, or tracking forward on a playlist will do the trick. Closing your browser window or clicking pause will not do the trick. So it's not perfect, but it should give some indication folks are listening. As part of this process we moved to the new version of the Flash player (JW Media Player 3.13), so the little Flash widget will look a bit different. Hopefully this will fix the tab/focus issues people have been having with the player. If the player update doesn't fix the tab issue, you can now use the "pop-out" link under players to open that playlist in a new browser window. We were thinking about adding this as a fix for the tab/focus problems, but realized even with the new player this would be a handy feature. Please report any problems with the updates here, thanks!

look at you people!

jessamyn — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 03:25:37 -0800

We've added a widget for checking out Meetup photos without having to leave placeholder comments in meetup threads. Check the MeTa sidebar. It works like this: threads posted to the MeFi gatherings category have a little sidebar box in them (example). You can put URLs in them for meetup photo pages. Right now they post with a link to the name of the person who added the URL and that may need tweaking. Then there is a week's worth of past meetups on the mai MeTa sidebar. Threads with photos have the little pictures icon. This will also show up on the big past meetups page.

Video buttons. Are. Awesome. Are they new?

NikitaNikita — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:33:47 -0800

Video buttons. Are. Awesome. Are they new? OMG NO ACCDENTL VID PLYNG!!11! OK, am I seeing things, or are these video buttons new? Have they always been there and I somehow missed them, or this is just the awesomeness I think it is?! (as noticed in the Gar-discussion link.)

New login system, finally!

mathowie — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:26:41 -0800

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! Here are the highlights: * All logins via SSL here: https://login.metafilter.com/ * More secure cookies set on login * New password change form * Forgotten password reset (for folks with verified emails on file) You're also now required to give your password when changing sensitive data, like altering your email address or closing your account. And both of those happen over SSL as well, so your password is never sent in the clear. You can change your password by clicking the "change password" link at the top of your site preferences. Behind the scenes, passwords are stored as unique hashes so your password is a secret between you and various hashing mechanisms. There are bound to be a few bugs with an major overhaul like this (yesterday's testing solved most of it), so please report any problems here or via email. Overall, login/cookie stuff is now way, way more secure. If anyone were to ever (worst-case scenario) snoop your transmissions over the wire or steal your cookie details, they'd never be able to change your password or email (so they can't "steal" your account) or close your account. That wasn't the case previously.

Nice!

WCityMike — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:23:47 -0800

Cool, when did the "remove from activity" thing get implemented?

Nice pics!

mathowie — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:44:57 -0800

y'all are a sexy bunch of people. (updated nightly, a dump of everyone's uploaded profile photo)

iCal support for Meetups

mathowie — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:09:27 -0800

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.

Mefi Mail status feature request

Item — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:05:07 -0800

Mefi Mail request: Any chance we could get a couple of minor features regarding the status of our sent and received messages? One of the only features I like with mail on social networking sites like Myspace is the ability to tell if you've read and/or replied to messages received and the ability to tell if messages sent to other users have been read and/or replied to. I ask because there have been a couple of instances where a user hasn't been active as of late, has no other contact info listed, and I'd like to know if my message wasn't read or if I'm just being ignored. I don't think this'll be too big of an issue with potential 'stalker' situations, since users have to option to block and unblock other members at will.

Updates from Contacts

mathowie — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:11:37 -0800

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. I've been thinking of ways to make the contacts feature actually do something. We had the page of your contacts along with posts from your contacts (scroll down), but that wasn't very interesting or useful. Facebook obviously did this very well and we tailored a similar approach with this new feature. You add people as contacts that you like to read. Then you get notified when they post a question, job, main page post, etc, you get notified when they get a best answer, when any comment or post gets more than a dozen favorites, and when they add other people (that you probably also know and like). Bonus feature: click the icons on the full page and it will filter the page to show just those similar items. Anyway, in the few days of testing it, I'm finding all sorts of interesting stuff. Posts from friends, funny comments I missed, etc. Me and Jessamyn talked about the feature today in a podcast that I'm uploading hopefully this weekend, but add a few contacts and try it out if you're curious.

MeFi Mail is here

mathowie — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:26:11 -0800

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.

random!

delmoi — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:31:15 -0800

RANDOM!

Turn and face the strain

pb — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:26:28 -0800

There have been a few tweaks to tagging, flagging, and posting. [more inside]