Scrible

Modern research platform for school and work

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scrible adds support for Google sign in and more

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If you’ve signed in recently, you might’ve noticed even more additions to our sign in options. We have rolled out support for the OpenID standard, which means you can now use your existing Google or Yahoo account, or any OpenID provider of your choosing. This includes all of Google’s offerings, such as Google+, Gmail, Google Apps, and Google Education accounts. Using any of these services to sign in to scrible means you no longer have to juggle yet another set of account credentials. The same goes for using a Yahoo account, or any generic OpenID provider. To start the process, just click the button of your favorite service and you’ll be taken to that site to sign and and authorize scrible.

The scrible service requires an email, first name, and last name. If we can’t get these from the service you’re signing in through, you’ll have to fill them in.

Selection_004 This is a one time step and you’ll never be prompted for this information again after sign up.

If you’ve already created a scrible account using your Google or Yahoo email, you can still use the new sign in feature. When you choose what other service to sign in with, if we already have an account registered to that email, we will ask you once to verify that you are the owner of that account.

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You will have to enter your scrible password for the account as a one time (and last time) authentication step. After that, all you’ll have to do is click on the service of your choice and you’ll be signed in to scrible automatically (as long as you’re already signed in on that service, anyway).

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Edit pages straight from the library

Keeping the library feature ball rolling, we’ve also added the ability to edit page information right from your library. If you look between the checkbox and owner column for each entry, you’ll find a happy little triangle icon (delta, for the mathematicians out there) just like the one we use for editing labels.

Clicking this icon allows you to open a dialog to change the title and description of any entry straight from your library. Each of the pages above has just a title, so let’s say I want to change the description for the top page, the wiki entry for “Combat Shield.” I’d click the triangle icon for that row and be greeted with the following dialog:

I can then add whatever description I want to add, in this case I’ve left a note to myself as to why I found this article useful. After hitting submit, the dialog will close and the update will be represented in your library in realtime. So once that dialog closes, you’ll see the change you just made like so:

The process is the same if I had wanted to change the title instead, I would’ve just edited the title field. Hopefully this streamlines the process quite a bit, as before you had to load the page in order to edit these fields. This is another enhancement that came about from user requests, so please don’t be afraid to leave us feedback.

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Kayak-style multi-tag filtering

Image representing KAYAK as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

We’ve rolled out an improvement to our tag system that allows you to filter your scrible Library by multiple tags at once.  If you’ve ever used Kayak to search for flights, you know what we’re talking about.  With our new change, if you look at your Library, you’ll see that each tag now has a checkbox to the left of it.

Clicking a tag will now toggle that checkbox to let you know it’s “on.” This is where the old system stopped. Now, you can toggle additional tag filters by clicking them as well. If I wanted to show only pages that I have tagged “funny” and “news,” it would look like this:

You’ll only be shown pages you’ve saved that have both the tag “funny” and the tag “news.” If you want to get back to viewing all pages, you can either uncheck the labels you’ve checked, or click the “All Pages” filter and it will clear the currently selected labels.  This new approach offers a simple and powerful way to quickly find a needle in your Library haystack.  Let us know how you like it via our Feedback page

or emailing us at contact@scrible.com!

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Introducing our refer-a-friend system

We are happy to announce that we are rolling out a shiny, new referral bonus program! There’s a new, big, red button at the top of your library labeled “Earn More Storage.”

This button will launch our invitation dialog so that you can tell your friends about scrible. In this dialog you’ll find a few ways to spread the word about scrible.

First, you’ll notice button to post to Twitter and Facebook. These buttons will launch a window to allow you to post to your social network of choice. In these posts will be a personalized URL as well as a default message. Feel free to change the message, but you’ll need to keep the URL intact in order to gain credit for these referrals. We also provide your personalized URL below these buttons which means you can use it anywhere on the internet you want.

Next is the option to import your address book from other services. We support import from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, and AOL. Choosing any of these options will prompt you for your credentials to these services (which we throw away as soon as we’re done) and allow you to pick contacts from your address book on that service to invite to scrible.

Last is the option to manually enter email addresses. As you can probably piece together, this option provides you with a dialog to enter your own email addresses. After entering the desired emails, you’ll be able to fill out a custom subject and message to accompany the invitation email we’ll send them.

So what’s the point to all of this? Using any of these methods, if a user follows your link and signs up, we’ll keep track of it. If that user then continues to use the service and interacts (for now saving or sharing) with 3 pages and you’ve both verified your accounts, you both get a 25 MB boost in storage. You can earn this 25 MB boost up to ten times, bringing your total storage up to 375 MB for absolutely no cost to you or those you invite.

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scrible takes out the trash

Ever been on a page you’ve saved and decided you didn’t need it any more? Before, you had to navigate back to your library and find the page. Starting today, you can move it to the trash straight from the page. If you view a page from your library, you’ll now find a trash button in the toolbar in case you want to get rid of it.

 

This new button only appears on pages you have some kind of ownership of (either a page you’ve saved or have a shortcut to) so there won’t be any confusion as to who can or can’t delete something. So if someone sends you a link to a page saved on scrible, there won’t be a trash can in your toolbar since the page isn’t yours to manage.

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New Sign In Window

If you’ve already signed into scrible through the Toolbar today, you may have noticed we’ve changed the process a little bit. Instead of popping up a login dialog inside your current browser window, we’ve switched to opening up a new browser window with the Sign In form loaded in it. This method provides a more consistent, reliable and secure login process given the recent trends in browser security. So now when you hit the Sign In Button on the toolbar, you’ll see something like this:

The experience is exactly the same as the old.  So, aside from an extra address bar atop the Window, nothing has changed. You can still sign in via your scrible, Twitter or Facebook account and you will still be signed into the Toolbar without having to reload the page or any other extra work. As an added bonus, you can now see that the Sign In Window is being served to you over HTTPS straight from the scrible servers. This functionally the same as before, but now you have visual confirmation that the connection is from scrible and is secure.

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This title is longer than our URLs

The Bard tells us brevity is the soul of wit, so scrible just got a bit wittier. We have rolled out our own URL shortening service that gets used behind the scenes to deliver you shorter URLs than ever before. We noticed our links were getting a little bloated and wanted to slim them down to keep up with today’s scribler on the go.

Here’s an example Tweet using a new shortened URL:

The shortened URLs take the form of http://scrible.com.com/s/(super secret code goes here) but function in exactly the same manner as the old links we generated. And don’t worry, all the links you’ve generated in the past are still valid as well.

The best part about all of this is that you don’t have to do a thing to take advantage of it. We do all of the shortening, serving, and redirecting behind the scenes without any extra work on your part. So just keep on sharing those pages, and we’ll keep serving out shorter and sleeker URLs.

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scrible gets social

We have been hard at work the past couple weeks in order to bring some shiny, new social integrations to scrible. Starting off, we have added the ability to sign in using either Facebook or Twitter.

You can either use these services to create a new account, or streamline the sign in process for your existing account. If you’re adding one of these methods to your existing account, you’ll need to verify that you own the account by entering your password. This is a one time step, after completing it you’ll be a single click away from your scrible account from here on out.

Once you’re logged in, we’ve added three ways for you to share your scrible content. You can post single pages to Facebook and Twitter from your library, using the new “post” button.

This will post a permalink and some information about your page to the service of your choice.

Or, if you’re already on the page, you can post two different ways. From the toolbar, you can post the whole page to Facebook and Twitter like you can from the library using the corresponding buttons.

If you want to post one of your annotations, you can do that too. Just open up the context menu for that annotation, go to the post button, and choose where you want to post it.

We’ll put as much of that annotation as we can fit into the post, as well as a link to the page. There you have it, scrible social integrations. What are you still reading this for? Go tweet to your heart out!

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Copy cat

Once we added the ability to send one shared web page e-mail to multiple people, we realized it would make sense to include yourself on that conversation. So we’ve added an option to the Share Window to send yourself a copy of the Share Email as well. This way, if anyone does a Reply All to the  Share Email, you’ll get included in the action as well.

 

All you have to do is check the box that reads “Send a copy to myself” and you’ll be included in the recipients of the Share Email. This way, you can continue the discussion about the web page beyond the initial Share Message you provided.

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Sharing via group emails

Credit: RRZE via Wikimedia Commons

We recently changed the way email sharing works based on our own internal experience using scrible for article sharing.  We got frustrated that we couldn’t have group email threads based on articles we were sharing with each other.  The way things were working, if you shared an article with multiple people, each recipient would receive their own Share Email.  Then, if one of the recipients wanted to reply to that email and include all of the other recipients, they’d have to somehow magically know who those recipients were and manually add those people to his (or her) reply.  Ugh.  We didn’t like that. After grumbling about it to each other for a while, we remembered that we write the code and fixed it!  Now, all of the email addresses you enter into the Recipients field in the Share Window will all be sent one group email so that every person will see all of the other folks included in the Share Email.  So now, to carry on a group email conversation about the article, all you have to do is hit “Reply All” and everyone’s in the loop!  Much better!

We’re always looking for ways to improve sharing.  If you have suggestions on how to make scrible more collaborative, please let us know through our feedback page.

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