outbrain

Right-click rating on *any* link or page

Today we released an upgrade to the Firefox extension (v.1.1.1.3) that adds a cool little feature:

We've added the outbrain rating functionality into the right-click contextual menu. From now on when you right-click on a link or web page, you will have the option of rating directly from that menu.

 

The feature has 2 modes:

1. When you right-click on a hyperlink, the menu item will say "Rate this link". In this mode you'll be rating the link on which you right-clicked.
2. When right-clicking on any other area of a web page, the menu item will say "Rate this page". In this mode you'll be rating the page on which your browser is currently on.

A good example for when this is useful is when reading posts on the index page of a blog. That page includes multiple posts you might want to rate... by using this new feature, you can right-click on any permalink on the page and rate each post separately.

To update to the new version, either check for updates within Firefox, or click on this link. 

Feedback? Drop us a note: support [at] outbrain [dot] com

Google Reader now supported!

The most frequent request we've been getting lately has been to add support in the outbrain Firefox extension for Google Reader. Today we released v1.1 of the extension that finally supports rating of posts within Google Reader:

Please note - we currently support the rating in the expanded view only:

For most users, the update to v1.1 should be detected automatically by Firefox when checking for updates. To do this, go to the Tools>Add-ons menu (Tools>Extensions in pre-2.0 Firefox browsers), and hit the 'Find Updates' button. After you install and restart FF, the outbrain rating stars should appear under each post in Google Reader:

For a minority of you the auto-update functionality will not work due to a bug in a previous version of the extension.  If this did not work for you, please click here to update the extension manually.

If you are not yet an outbrain user, it's a great time to start now. You can register and get our Firefox extension here. 

Outbrain & Firefox 2.0+

A few of our users have recently complained that when upgrading to Firefox 2.0, the outbrain extension stopped working. Looks like we had a small glitch with the updating of the extension which affected some of our users, and it is now fixed.

To upgrade to the fixed version, go to Tools > Add-ons > Extensions, and click the 'Find Updates' button, Firefox should now find the most up-to-date outbrain extension which is fully compatible with Firefox 2.0+

If this doesn't work for you, simply click on the following link (in Firefox...), and you'll be prompted to upgrade to the latest & greatest:
http://dsf.outbrain.com/getoutbrain/dist/outbrainvote.xpi

For those who bumped into this - apologies for the inconvenience...

Version 0.86.5 released

A new version (0.86.5) of the outbrain firefox extension has just been released. We HIGHLY recommend upgrading to this, as it solves many of the items requested by outbrain users and a bunch of bugs.

The biggest change is that you can now vote on any article / blog post that you read (no more N/A dead ends, as we described here...). We're keeping a quick confirmation filter on pages that do not conform to the permalink URL structure, with the hope that this keeps voting noise down to a minimum. Please tell us what you think.

The other visible change is that "Flashing stars" bug is now fixed - Many of you noted that the voter in the status bar sometimes got stuck in progress bar mode infinitely, making the stars blink like it was 1997 all over again... This is now fixed.

To install the extension - go to Tools > Extensions in firefox, and hit the 'Look for updates' button. Next to outbrain you should now see an 'Install' button. Hit that, and then restart firefox.

If you don't have the extension installed, you can get it here:
www.getoutbrain.com

If you have any trouble, shoot us an email at support (at) outbrain (dot) com.

What's up with the N/A ?

One of the more frequent questions about our firefox extension is the N/A status in the outbrain voter at the bottom of the browser:

So here's the story:
outbrain is intended for sorting through the massive amounts of blog posts and news articles hitting your RSS readers daily.

The problem is - how do we enable voting on all those blog posts and articles without adding a whole lot of noise into the system from other URL's? That kind of noise can quickly degrade the quality of recommendations going out to outbrain users... not something we want to happen...

So we decided to start off by enabling the outbrain voter selectively on pages that can easily be identified as being blog posts. We do that by looking for the permalink structure in the URL. Unfortunately, many blogs do not comply with the permalink structure, and so the N/A status appears on way more pages than we'd want it to.

We know this is somewhat annoying (especially for posts that were recommended in the personalized outbrain feed... what's up with that?!...), and are working to resolve this in a way that allows voting on any item you see fit, while keeping the noise level down to a minimum.

Stay tuned!

Bug with SessionSaver

We've got a couple of reports about a conflict that the outbrain extension has with the SessionSaver extension. This conflict causes Firefox to constantly refresh open pages.

We're working on this, and will release an update shortly. Until then, feel free to uninstall one of the extensions temporarily.

[UPDATE] - This bug has been fixed with the new version. Details here.