outbrain

Help us get on WordPress.com!

Outbrain has been a long supporter of the WordPress platform. If you use the WordPress software to power your blog (aka WordPress.org), you can easily install outbrain WP plugin here.

But if you use the hosted version (aka WordPress.com), you cannot enjoy the benefits of outbrain ratings and recommendations on your blog... That's because WordPress does not allow 3rd party widgets on blogs they host (other than a lucky few). That sucks, but you can help us change that!

We've posted a page, sort of a petition actually, on our support forum. If enough bloggers ask to have outbrain enabled on WordPress.com, we believe they'll eventually listen.

It's super-easy to help. Simply go to this page, scroll all the way down to the "Reply to Rotem's discussion" box, and write a note asking to enable outbrain on Wordpress.com. If you're comfortable including your blog URL that would be fantastic.

Thanks! - With your help, we'll make this happen!

Switching from Amazon S3 to a CDN

Scaling our service and ensuring that our widgets are served quickly and reliably has been a top priority for us. We're bloggers too, and we know how annoying it is when a blog hangs due to a widget that fails to serve quickly... urgh!!

To ensure that our servers never hang your blog, we've been using Amazon's S3 service to serve all of the static files in our widget - images, JavaScripts and the CSS files. We've also designed our widget to degrade gracefully if there's any service glitch after the scripts are served from Amazon so that your blog readers would never notice and degradation in the user experience.

Every service goes down occasionally, but it's been paramount to us to make sure we don't break (or slow down) your blog if ours does.

In the past couple of weeks, we've been experiencing very poor performance from the Amazon S3 service (especially outside of the US), which has caused some bloggers to see unacceptable load times of our widget. Amazon has not been communicating much about this, and so we don't know if this was a temporary issue caused by last week's DoS attacks on them, or whether this is a more permanent issue related to scaling.

As we scale our network, it's important for us to make sure that bloggers are absolutely comfortable with our ability to serve our widgets quickly and reliably. Therefore we've moved our widgets off of Amazon, and over to Panther - a proper CDN which we hope should significantly improve the speed in which our widgets show up around the world.

If you still encounter any issues relating to the widget's serving performance, please do let us know asap on our support forum.

Live in 4 new languages

We've just released the outbrain ratings & recommendations widget in 4 new languages:

• Swedish
• Estonian
• Czech
• Malay

You can get the widget for your blog here. It's free, and it could get you more traffic and page views.

We now support 24 languages, including: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, Farsi / Persian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukranian.

As usual, we did this with the help of a handful of great bloggers who used our translation wiki and offered their suggested translations. We'd like to thank these folks: Elina, Farid Iqbal Ibrahim (blankqo), and several others who contributed.

Thanks (or - Terima Kasih, Díky, Tänan, Tack )  - we love you!!

We couldn't have said it better...

Duncan Riley over at Inquisitr gets it. From a post titled "The Outbrain Challenge: How Social Are You?":

"...here’s my challenge: if you are using Outbrain use the social features.

The reasons: it’s a value add to your readers, but more importantly if you are on the Outbrain network you’re getting links from sites who are being social. You’re taking from others and not giving back….and that’s in part greedy, in part just not very cool."

We couldn't have said it better. While we do allow bloggers to decide whether network recommendations are enabled or disabled, we strongly encourage you to leave network recommendations on. Not only are you being more social by doing that, but you'd also be providing your readers with a much better service.

The notion of 'keeping my users on my site' is fairly false (unless you are Yahoo). Readers are going to be clicking away shortly after they visit your site. Might as well use that opportunity to delight them with personalized, recommended links.

Want the rating/recommendation widget on your blog? Get it here.

Proper support for IE6 in the outbrain widget

Just as we were considering joining the SaveTheDevelopers.org effort to help eradicate the awful Internet Explorer 6 from the world, our engineers released an excellent workaround which makes our widget fully functional and compatible with IE6 browsers. The widget now properly blends to your blog's background color on all of the most common browsers out there.

We step on the shoulders of others... thanks to gedankenkonstrukt for pointing out the IEPNGFix solution.

Blog rating widget - Principal #3: Graceful Degradation

As Yaron mentioned before, we view ourselves as guests in your blog. And as the old saying goes - "In Rome behave as Roman" - we do our best to not interfere with the experience you decided to give your readers.

So…: Principal #3 - Graceful Degradation
Imagine that you have a blocked plumbing problem at home, and you need a plumber. Usually there are 2 types of plumbers:

• Type #1 - schedules with you at 8am, arrives at 11am, investigates your plumbing deeply, messes the whole house, smokes in your toilet and leaves the leftovers there. After 3 hours he says… "it’s a hell of a block - I don't have the tools for releasing it, I'll be back tomorrow at 8am (yeah, right!) with the tools. Ohh, and BTW: I spent here 3 hours which is… $400"
• Type #2 - schedules at 8am, arrives at 8am, looks at your plumbing for 10 minutes and says: "it’s a hell of a block – I don't have the tools for releasing it, I'll be back tomorrow at 8am." He cleans up after himself and says, "I really did nothing, no need to pay me" and leaves. 9am you are back at the office.

In both cases you are left with the blocked plumbing, but who will you call on the next problem you have?

Now what does all that have to do with our rating widget?

We are guests on your blog. We are there to give your readers a service and we do our best to have the right tools 24/7. But as with any internet service, there are bound to be cases where the service is unavailable.

We built a redundant scalable back-end system and use all the procedures we can to avoid any expected unexpected case to fail us.

But, as Joel said here:

"...there's a sweet spot, where all the expected unexpecteds have been taken care of. A single hard drive failure, which is expected, doesn't take you down. A single DNS server failure, which is expected, doesn't take you down. But the unexpected unexpecteds might. That's really the best we can hope for."

So, we acknowledge the fact that in every technical system there might be some unexpected unexpecteds where we cannot supply the service. We know shit happens sometimes (we are plumbers, remember?... ;-). But that should not affect the blog content from showing up or being slow, or be otherwise messed up.

Here's what we did to make sure our service degrades as gracefully as possible without affecting your blog:

• Our rating widget code and all other mission-critical files, are served from Amazon S3 which is highly available framework
• We designed the code and all of its resources to be highly cache optimized.
• If we don't have the tools – we are not messing things up. If our data center is not accessible, we don't do anything on your blog.
• If we break – we clean up. If there is some kind of back-end error or exception, your blog will stay as we were not even installed.
  We do have work to do – but we try to delay you to the minimum. We are adding functionality to your blog and that demand some time and effort, but we are trying to do that in parallel to your blog page loading and as soon as the relevant content (your posts) is right there on the page.

These rules and guidelines are highly important for us. If we did not catch some behavior that is not along these guidelines and you did. Please let us know ASAP and it will get the highest priority.

More blogger love

More great feedback on the outbrain rating widget is coming in from bloggers:

Jerome Eteve at his new blog reviewing blog widgets says:

"Outbrain focuses on the only important thing for us bloggers: rate your posts, install in one click.

If you don't count the blogger platform confirmation click, this is actually true and this is amazing. No template editing...

...It's easy, it's fast, it does one thing but it does it well."

Sizlopedia says:

"Unlike other ratings widgets, this plugin does not show any logo and does not use any kind of link marketing strategy. It is free to use and very easy to install."

And for our French readers, Yves from Exutoire says:

• Le système est simple à mettre en place (au moins sur Wordpress) et ce sans marketing (logo Outbrain ou pub).
• Le plugIn s’adapte en fonction de votre feuille de style.
• Outbrain fournit une page de statistiques.
• Vous bénéficiez d’une idée de ce que votre lectorat aime.
• Si vous utilisez feedburner pour votre flux rss et que vous avez activé le service FeedFlare, vous pouvez ajouter ce système à votre Flux. Les lecteurs du flux voient ainsi ce que les autres ont voté!
• Il est traduit en français

Cool!

More "We're happy when bloggers are happy"

Antonio over at Woork posted about outbrain yesterday:

I found a very simple way to rate Blogger post with a useful script deployed from Outbrain.

The post has been Dugg... if you like it, you can Digg it here.

One addition to Antonio's post: for most of the common blogging platforms (Blogger included) we offer simple 1-click installs that don't require any messing with the code on your blog. Go here to get the widget.

Thanks Antonio!

Rating widget now in 14 more languages

We've recently made our rating widget available in 14 new languages:

• Arabic
• Catalan
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Dutch
• Farsi / Persian
• Greek
• Hindi
• Italian
• Malayalam
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Turkish
• Ukranian

Here's in example of our widget in Russian:

This is in addition to the other languages we already support: English, French, German, Hebrew, Polish & Spanish.

To get the widget in any of those languages, go to our super-simple installation page and select your preferred widget language. We do the rest for you.

As I mentioned before, these translations have been done by the outbrain community of bloggers using the wiki we setup for our internationalization effort. If you want to see the outbrain widget available in your language, feel free to take a stab at translating it here.

We're extremely grateful for all the bloggers that have helped us translate these versions: Mohammad (Arabic), Toni Barrera Arboix (Catalan), Kevin Tsai (Chinese), Dirk Caboor (Dutch), Ravishankar Shrivastava (Hindi), Snapshot83 & GorGeouS (Italian), Apostolos P. Tsompanopoulos & George Pavlidis (Greek), Simy Nazareth (Malayalam), Mohammad (again!) & TakPesar (Farsi), Bogdan Tabarcea (Romanian), Roma & Petro Nek (Russian and Ukranian), Pinkhas Nisanov (Russian), Sertac Guler & reklamgör & Cihan Ozdemir (Turkish), and Planeta.Srbija (Serbian). Thanks - we love you all!!

MoveableType testers needed

We're starting to test our widget on the MoveableType platform. If you publish your blog on MT and want to be among the first to try the outbrain widgets on your blog, please drop Ori (our CTO) a note to: olahav [at] outbrain [dot] com

If you give us a hand, we promise you our eternal gratitude as well as some link love... ;-)