Serving Up Stacks: Facebook Connect, Authoring, Hovercards and More

We’ve been working really hard on some new functionality for SoulPancake. We’re rolling out a slew of great stuff in this release, including new Facebook integration, a new internal messaging system, new twitter authentication, and much, much more. Let’s take a moment to go over some of our latest goodies.

Facebook and SoulPancake

You’ll notice new Facebook Connect buttons around SoulPancake. Now you can seamlessly publish your SP activity (questions submitted to the Question Collective, favorites, responses) to your Facebook wall. Additionally, new users can join SoulPancake simply by clicking the “Facebook Connect” buttons around SoulPancake and using their existing Facebook credentials. We’ve also added the ability to import your Facebook friends into SoulPancake.

Of note, you can disable and resynch your Facebook Connect account whenever you want. You can only connect your Facebook account to one SoulPancake account.

Twitter OAuth and Hovercards

In April twitter announced that they were going to turn off basic authorization on their API by June 30, 2010. Developers would have to switch over to OAuth by that time. There’s a nifty countdown here. We worked with the twitter team in getting our twitter integration credentials exchanged for more secure OAuth tokens. These tokens are then sent to twitter instead of your username and password. Thanks to Brian from the twitter API team for helping make the entire transition smooth, and responding so quickly. Connecting twitter to SoulPancake is now a two click process. Navigate to your twitter settings page in SoulPancake, click “Connect with twitter” and authorize the SoulPancake application. The rest is done automagically.

You can disable and reconnect your twitter account whenever you want.

Hovercards are another new addition to SoulPancake profiles. Under every member’s profile photo you’ll see their twitter username (if a twitter username has been input). Hover over this @username and take a look at some nifty new hovercards. This provides some powerful functionality with people following each other and easily learning more about each other on one page. You can activate your twitter hovercard even if you haven’t integrated twitter with SoulPancake. Simply navigate to your twitter settings, input your twitter username and click the Save Settings button.

Internal and Site-wide Messaging

SoulPancake 3.2 also brings with it a new messaging system for our team of moderators and administrators. From time to time, you’ll see a new message at the very top of SoulPancake, or above your Friend Activity stream in your homebase. This is a quick way for our team to blast out messages to the entire community at once. With these messages, we’ll be introducing new features and generally keeping you in the know about everything percolating behind the scenes.

SP Exclusives in Social Streams

This is one of the more exciting pieces of functionality that we’ve been working on. From now on, SP Exclusives will be shared through social activity streams. We’re introducing new authoring modules which live at the bottom of every individual article. With the author’s bio you can learn a bit about each author while reading their posts and start following them from the article page itself. We think this is going to be incredibly useful for our users in getting to know our talented team of authors and content contributors. Additionally, you’ll notice a new SP Exclusives tab on every team-member’s profile, from which you can browse through all of that person’s articles.

Team Badges and Avatar Overlays

All around SoulPancake you’ll notice a green stroke around our team-member’s avatars. In comments and on people pages, hover over their pictures and you’ll see a nice SP team overlay. Also, a nifty little “TEAM” badge has been added to our team’s profile pages.

Site-wide Button Styles

You’ll notice that all of the default buttons around SoulPancake are now pretty. We’ve developed a really nice way to implement pretty default buttons, quickly, easily and most important of all, uniformly across all browsers. You’ll notice them in small, medium and large sizes.

A round up of what’s new in SoulPancake 3.2

• Facebook Connect Integration
• twitter OAuth Integration
• twitter Hovercards
• Internal (admin) messaging systems
• Optimized article load times
• SP Exclusives in social streams
• Individual authoring modules
• Following authors from articles
• Individual authors in article streams
• SP Team profile badges
• SP Team avatar overlays
• Increased stability while editing questions
• Various bug fixes and enhancements

Flagging and Reporting Questionable Content

We recently released some new community moderation tools for SoulPancake. This new functionality is aimed at keeping our community safe and free from malicious users and spammy content. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with how the system works.

Next to each response and underneath each Question Submission, you’ll see a little Flag icon. By clicking the flag icon you are reporting the item to our SoulPancake moderators. The moderators will keep track of critical and recently flagged items.

Be sure to make use of these tools. If you see any questionable content, spammy submissions or just generally bad form, let our team know. We’re here to help.

New RSS Feeds

We’ve added some great new RSS feeds. Subscribe Away!

Here are some links and feed examples to get you started
• All SP Exclusives: http://www.soulpancake.com/post/rss
Subscribe to all SP Exclusive posts written by our team.

• Entire Question Collective: http://www.soulpancake.com/question/rss
Subscribe to all Questions submitted by SP members.

• Individual Question (NEW): http://www.soulpancake.com/question/rss/25026
Subscribe to the ongoing discussion of a single question submission. To subscribe to an individual question, simply click the blue RSS icon in the rop right corner of that page.

• Individual SP Exclusive (NEW): http://www.soulpancake.com/post/rss/710
Subscribe to the ongoing discussion of an individual SP Exclusive. To subscribe to an individual SP Exclusive, simply click the blue RSS icon in the rop right corner of that page.

• Individual Member’s Activity (NEW): http://www.soulpancake.com/people/Aviv/rss
Subscribe to an individual SP member’s activity. To subscribe to an individual member’s activity, simply click the activity feed link in the sidebar of their profile.

Of note, if you’re using Google Chrome, there’s no RSS feed reader support quite yet. They’ve outlined their plans for feeds here.

The Purpose of Learning Is Growth

“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.” –Terry Tempest Williams

Our Community

Since launching SoulPancake in April 2009, our team has learned quite a lot. Alongside all of the natural growing pains a startup faces, we’ve dealt with tremendous growth, and a tightly hindering and rigid infrastructure. Along the way we’ve continuously done our very best to meet our community’s needs and foster a safe environment for our members. We think things have been going pretty well, but not as good as we’d like them to. Over the last few months we’ve been tirelessly working behind the scenes to change that. We are investing in the core of our community and our technology, and properly lining ourselves up for the future. After months of development, we are proud to unveil a brand new, and much improved SoulPancake.com. There are a lot of new and exciting areas to cover, and we couldn’t be happier to finally unveil the fruits of our labor.

We’ve overhauled our design and layout, added exciting new features and critical enhancements, re-rewritten our entire apps platform and restructured our core infrastructure. Everything has been upgraded, refined, and in some cases completely rewritten from the ground up. In other words, SoulPancake is officially ready for prime-time. If you’re already a member, login and take a look around, if you’re new to SoulPancake, joining takes about 12 seconds. Here are some of the core additions that we’re thrilled to finally unveil.
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SoulPancake Number Four in WIRED’s “What’s Wired This Month” January Playlist

SoulPancake is number four in WIRED’s “What’s WIRED This Month” playlist in the January 2010 issue. Rainn graces the mag with a little shot of his near perfect Michelangelo-esque physique, and we get a nice blurb as well! It’s on page 48 in the magazine.

37signals Product Blog Highlights Our Use of BaseCamp

It’s really no secret that we love 37signals. Recently, the 37s team highlighted our usage of their products. SoulPancake was mentioned on the 37signals Product Blog, and we were definitely excited!

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ABC/Nightline Profiles SoulPancake

In September, the entire SoulPancake founding team got together at Rainn’s house to spend some quality time together… Nightline was there to film most of it. Visit this page to watch the entire segment

Since our entire team is spread out across Portland, OR – Los Angeles and Nashville, we don’t get to see each other too often. That means that when we are together, we enjoy our time with each other that much more.

Rainn on Leno, Great SoulPancake Plug

Below is a video with the almighty Rainn Wilson visiting Jay Leno. I trimmed the video down to the start and end point for when SoulPancake is talked about.

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Introducing the SoulPancake Weekly SPoonful

Say hello to the all new SoulPancake Weekly SPoonful. A weekly email containing some community highlights and fresh content from around the site.

What’s Included

In each email you’ll see two of our favorite recent entries from around the site, and a few submissions from the Question Collective. You get all the information you need packaged neatly within one email. For each submission we showcase the user’s name, link straight to their profile, link straight to the discussion of each submission, number of responses and so on. For each featured entry from the site, we also display its category, and a short excerpt from the piece. You can preview what one of these emails looks like here.

Subscriptions

If you’re a member of SoulPancake, you’ll automatically be subscribed to get the emails. Of course, we know some of you already have enough email to deal with, so turning them off is incredibly easy as well. Simply login to SoulPancake, navigate to Settings then to My Account and un-check the Subscribe to SoulPancake Weekly Highlights checkbox. Or you can just click the unsubscribe links at the bottom of the email. Then you’ll never receive these emails again.

We hope you enjoy the Weekly SPoonfuls!

Sometimes Cookies Are Good Too

We’ve added a new checkbox next to both login areas on SoulPancake. By checking the box titled Remember Me the next time you login, SoulPancake will remember you even when you close your browser.

How It Works

When you click “Remember Me” we use a persistent cookie that lets your browser remember who you are. The cookie remains in tact until you logout of SoulPancake or the cookie expires. Adversely, if you don’t click “Remember Me” we use sessions that keep you logged in until you close the browser.

As with any other web-based service like Gmail, Facebook or Twitter, if you’re using a public computer, it’s always best to logout when you’re finished browsing, and make sure not to click “Remember Me” when first logging in.

Security

Since the persistent cookie lets you stay logged in to SoulPancake, it’s very important to protect each member’s critical account information at all times. We’ve added a new confirmation field to your Settings under the My Account tab. Before you can edit or update your email address or password, you must first verify yourself to the system, by confirming your current password.

This way, even if you login to SoulPancake in a public place, and happen to forget to logout, you can still take control of your account at any time. Of course, as a precautionary measure, be sure to never give your password out to anyone you don’t trust.

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