Introducing Shouts: We're Giving You Power Over Our Home Page

During his Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs told the graduates to stay hungry and stay foolish — these are words I try to live by everyday.  It’s those words that make me strive to be a better person and continue to improve myself and my business.  As you can imagine, I’m really excited by what we are building here at BestTechie, I think we have something really special going on and it’s only about to get better, much better.

In an effort to stay hungry, we are always looking for ways to improve the site and make it even more awesome.  This is why I’m really excited to tell you that over the past few weeks we have been hard at work developing a new feature for BestTechie that you will not find on any other tech blog.  It’s a feature that some tech blogs probably wouldn’t even dream of doing.  It’s a feature that gives you, the reader, control over the site.

Today, I’m excited to announce the introduction of Shouts on BestTechie.

What are Shouts?

I’m glad you asked.  You can think of Shouts like upvotes on Reddit, essentially a Shout is a way to vote up a story on BestTechie.  Just as you would upvote an article or image on Reddit to make it more popular, you can use Shouts on BestTechie to increase the popularity of that particular article.  In the most simple terms, the articles with the most Shouts move up on the home page, however, it’s worth noting that we also take into account the age of the article in the calculations when ranking them.

How do you use the Shouts feature?

An even better question!  The Shouts feature is found on the left hand side of every article, right next to the “Share This Post” text (see screenshot below) — it looks like a little blue megaphone with a circle around it and a number underneath it.

When you click the little blue megaphone, you will be prompted to login in with Facebook to vote.  You will need a Facebook account to be able to vote on articles.  Don’t fret though, we only ask for the bare minimum amount of access to your profile and we will never sell or misuse any of that data.  I promise.  Once you have logged in with Facebook you can go ahead and click on the megaphone icon again and your vote for that article will be counted (you will know it was counted because the number will increase).  You can only vote once on each article.

You will also notice the other arrow pointing to the dark grey box with the megaphone above the post title, that number also is the number of Shouts an article has, the hotter an article is, that dark grey box will turn different shades of red.  On the home page of the site, you will be able to tell how many Shouts an article has by looking at that box with the megaphone in it.

The Shouts feature is only available on articles that have been posted within the past  7 days, so if you don’t see it on an article, it’s likely because the post is more than a week old.

What if I find a bug with Shouts?

If you find a bug, please let us know as soon as possible!  The best way is to contact us via the contact page.

Now go test it out!

I’m so excited about this new feature.  I think it’s really awesome and will be a great addition to the site.  And again, Shouts really puts the power back into your hands in terms of deciding what articles appear on the home page and the order in which they appear and that’s something I think is so cool.

Go on and try it out, it’s super cool!