The ITOG Blog

Introducing Tog Fight!

rfeldman — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:00:17 +0000

Our latest feature pits the best of the best (and the worst of the worst!) togs from all across the site against one another and lets you decide the winner. Bugs Bunny or the Joker? Family Guy or The Princess Bride? Jurassic Park or Jessica Alba? You be the judge!

Tog Fight: Shawshank Redemption vs. Twister

We’ve also added a Top Tog Fighters section to Best of ITOG, and a section under the Opinions tab of your friends’ profiles (and your own, naturally) where you can see which togs they picked in tog fights.

Enjoy!

Just in time for Halloween: Candy!

rfeldman — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:20:21 +0000

At ITOG, we have two new additions planned for Halloween. The first is available today: Halloween Candy. (Yes, technically the category includes non-Halloween candy as well, but it’s no coincidence that we added it in October.)

Rate Candy

Toggers can now rate and recommend trick-or-treat classics like M&M’s, 3 Musketeers, and Airheads, and discover some wacky new ones to try like Kinder Happy Hippo, Rowntree’s Fruit Gums, and Bertie Beetle. We added about 800 of them, so there’s plenty to choose from!

Stay tuned for our second Halloween announcement, plus something much, much bigger…

A Recommendation on Every Page

rfeldman — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 19:45:47 +0000

Yesterday we added a new box under your profile bar for recommendations. The “Spotlight” box on the homepage has always been popular–in fact, we’d seen some people sit on the homepage and just refresh it over and over to get more recommendations!–so we decided to put little bite-sized recommendations on every page. They look like this:

The Recommendation Box

To help keep the recommendation fresh, we update them whenever you visit any page on ITOG.com or give a rating. That means if you get a recommendation for something familiar, you can rate it and it will instantly turn into something else.

As usual, recommendations come with links to the tog’s profile, where you can read reviews, browse pictures, join in discussions, and all the other goodies.

Enjoy!

Ranks and the new Profile Bar

rfeldman — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:06:49 +0000

We just updated our profile bar. It now looks like this:

The new ITOG profile bar

You can now see a few statistics about your time on ITOG.com along with links to get to various aspects of your account. The bar no longer has an explicit link to get directly to your ratings or reviews, but you can still get to them via your profile, by clicking on your name or on your picture.

The rank meter is something new. We had been hearing that being ranked on Best of ITOG is fun, but not always the most convenient. To help with this, we now display your rank right there on your profile bar, and include a progress meter which shows how many ratings you need to give to move up a rank (the number on the right), as well as how many ratings the togger below you needs to give to catch up with you (the number on the left).

In my profile, I need to give 56 more ratings to move from rank 25 to rank 24, and the togger below me only needs to give one more rating to catch up with me. Yikes! (I’ll work on that as soon as I finish this post.)

This new format for the profile bar also saves a lot of space on the right sidebar, which will be important for our next update…but more on that later!

Ratings and reviews for Websites!

rfeldman — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:03:30 +0000

Last night ITOG.com launched support for websites. This means a selection of websites is now available to rate, review, and discuss. As soon as we build up enough ratings, they’ll start popping up on your recommendations page as well.

Some websites you can now rate on ITOG.com

We’ve got about 2,000 of the most popular sites up, including Facebook, MySpace, Google, and so on, but there’s definitely room to expand. As ever, if we’re missing a site you like, the Suggestion Center is the pace to add it!

Share reviews (and more) with ShareThis

rfeldman — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:43:15 +0000

Tomorrow we’ll be launching support for ShareThis, a handy little green button that makes it easy to share things you like on ITOG through other sites like Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, LiveJournal, and about 40 others.

The screenshots below show the ShareThis button in action.

A discussion with the ShareThis button

Just click the button, and…

After clicking ShareThis

…presto!

Pick the site of your choice, and you’ll instantly be on your way to sharing the discussion, review, or whatever else, with your friends.

As of tomorrow, ShareThis support will be enabled for the following ITOG features:

We’re currently discussing other features that might usefully include ShareThis, including recommendations for togs and pictures (which would be a sort of Recommend It! for external sites).

If you have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to post them here or in the Suggestion Box!

ITOG 1.0

rfeldman — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:43:34 +0000

Greetings, folks!

ITOG founder Richard Feldman here. Now that version 1.0 of the site is up, we’re ready to start making improvements. The ITOG Blog will be the place to watch for updates on anything from planned updates to discussions on what we ought to do.

There are lots of exciting new features in the pipeline–not to mention improvements to existing features that will make it easier than ever to get your daily dose of ITOG-flavored reviews and recommendations–and we want to let you to know about them first!

We plan to host the blog on WordPress for a good long while, as our development time will be better-spent improving ITOG.com rather than creating blogging features that would let you post to this blog using your ITOG account. We may well migrate it over someday, but for now, I’d suggest signing up for a WordPress account if you want to respond to any of these posts.

Enjoy!