Features For Our Twitter Friends!

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We at ToastedRav.com love Twitter!  What is Twitter?  Its a free service that allows people to post little messages to one another and what they are up, it sounds silly, but its crazy addictive!  [Here's a link to ToastedRav's Twitter page here.]

One of the reasons we love Twitter so much is that its a great way to ask for feedback on how we are doing from all of our friends on there.  In fact, the other day, I did just that by asking:

...and I got some really great responses!  So, in the spirit of the season and all, I have spent the last couple of days working on implementing all of these great suggestions.  Now, I could have just said "Hey everyone! Check out these cool new features I just thought of and made for ToastedRav.com!" but that wouldn't be cool.  They weren't my ideas, so I should give credit where credit is due and address each of the suggestions one by one! (Note: Some of the suggestions were sent in my multiple people, so I'm just posting the person that said it first.)

First up is this suggestion from RobynsWorld on Twitter:

ToastedRav is a great source for St. Louis to find out cool stuff, talk amongst yourselves and even share your thoughts, but I agree, we could do better on trying to find those little pockets of awesome that form every day in St. Louis.

The solution?  Our awesome writers for the entertainment section of ToastedRav (currently on the front page) are taking on the extra task to write what we are calling "RavBytes".  In fact, you may have already seen some of them the last few days.  These short little posts will always be 100% focused on St. Louis and will just be little snippets of great happenings in and around or about St. Louis.

I hope you enjoy these and think they add a decidedly more local flavor to that section of the site.  Here's the 'bytes we have so far.

Next is this one from STLShirtGuy on Twitter:

First off, what is Gravatar?  Gravatar is a cool, free service that allows you to upload a photo to them and then when you comment on posts around the web that support Gravatar your picture shows up without having to do anything more than input your email address when you comment.  Its very cool and allows you to update the photo on your comments all at once when you upload a new photo, which is pretty cool.

ToastedRav.com's comment sections (this means site wide: WIL92.com, 1065thearch.com, Shout!) all now support Gravatar!  So if you aren't logged in, just enter your email address in the comment form and if you have a Gravatar account, we will pull your current image for you and display it next to your comment.  This does not however apply to the other places your image shows up on ToastedRav.com (your profile, home screen...).  If you want that personalized (and we hope that you do) you will need to upload or supply a link to that yourself by going here.

Finally, this double whammy from SkipForeplay:

Skip is really asking for 3 things here: He wants to be able to... 1. jazz up his comments with bold, italicized and underlined fonts. 2. edit his comments. and 3. edit his Shouts!

Damn he's greedy.

Here are my answers:

1. Starting now, you can spice up your comments by using BBCode! If you want to make something bold, simply type: "I want the next word to be bold: [b]Apple[/b]" It looks funny, but when you submit, it will show up bold.  It works the same way for italics [i]word[/i], underline [u]word[/u], strikethrough [s]word[/s].  There's also a little treat for those you that enjoy putting smiley faces in your comments, try: :) or ;) or :p and even :(   (Oh, and don't worry if you forget these, its at the bottom of the comment box for you.)

2. As of this time, editable comments aren't going to happen.  The issue is that we currently allow annonymous comments, so anyone just wandering off the the Internet Superhighway can come in and comment.  If we decide to stop allowing them in the future, I could see us adding that functionality, but for right now, if you make a mistake, just comment your correction right after.

3. I know #2 was a bummer, but this should help: You can now edit your submitted Shouts!!  This is by far the #1 requested feature since we added Shout a few weeks ago and it has arrived...with one little condition: You only have an hour to do so.  Once you post your Shout, you will have 1 hour from that moment to edit the Shout in any way you see fit.  After that, its locked.  This should allow those of you that mistyped the link or forgot a photo and just need to make a quick change, but not allow people to just keep editing a Shout over and over again making the comments below make no sense or even changing it to the point where everyone that voted on it would want to take back their vote!

Hopefully this solution will work out for everyone, but I've been playing with it for the last 24 hours and it seems to work great, so enjoy!

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Thanks to you three for your help in making ToastedRav.com the best (and fanciest) site for St. Louis!

Oh, and if you have a suggestion you would like to see on the site, you don't have to get on Twitter to get heard (it doesn't hurt though!).  If you have a great idea I would love for you to drop it right here in the comments!