Scrible

Modern research platform for school and work

  • FEATURES
  • EDU
    • For Students
    • For Educators
    • For Administrators
  • GOOGLE
  • ABOUT
  • TESTIMONIALS
    • Students
    • Educators
    • Administrators
  • PLANS
  • BLOG
  • TOOLS
  • SIGN IN

February 18, 2012 By Scrible

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.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

February 15, 2012 By Scrible

Turbo Button

Now were iz dat turbo button?

Ok… Who remembers the Turbo Button on the old computers that would magically change the speed of your computer on the fly?  It was great.  You’d notice your computer was running really slowly and you’re sure it should be faster… and wha-laa you’d discover that somehow the turbo button had gotten turned off.  Change it back and you got an instant speed boost.

We’d been noticing lately that our site wasn’t performing the way we felt it should.  While investigating this, we reviewed the settings on our database and found a few configuration values which defaulted to something more appropriate for computers of the x486 era (the ones that had turbo buttons).  After adjusting these to values appropriate for a modern server, we’ve seen around a 5x increase in site performance.  Always nice to get a speed boost for free.

We’re always keeping our eyes out for more ways to improve your experience.  Please let us know if you have any suggestions!

Filed Under: Enhancements, Product

January 23, 2012 By Scrible

scrible shares better

You’ve probably noticed that scrible’s had some major changes lately.  We’ve been hard at work implementing improvements based on your feedback.  Here’s a list of the changes, followed by the details:

  • Publicly sharable URLs
  • Permalinks
  • Share multiple pages
  • Shortcuts

Publicly sharable URLs:  One big thing we heard from you was that you wanted to share your saved pages more freely (via blogs, Facebook and Twitter).  Previously, if you copied the URL of a saved page from your Library into a Tweet or Facebook or blog post, no one else could view it because they weren’t logged in as you.  The URL of the saved page was private and limited to you.  Now, such URLs are open and accessible so they’re more easily sharable.  Dont’ worry; they’re not discoverable.  So, unless you explicitly provide the URL of the saved page, no one should be able to find it.

Permalinks:  We’ve added a permalink option so you can easily generate and copy a permalink to the page.  Just look for the following Permalink Button in the scrible Toolbar:

When you click it, the system’ll work for a moment and then display the following Permalink Window with a permalink you can copy and paste into a blog or Facebook post or Tweet:

Share multiple pages:  You can now share multiple pages at once from your Library.  Just select the pages you want to share and then click the Share Button atop the Library.

Shortcuts:  Encounter an interesting scribled page you’d like to keep tabs on?  Add a shortcut to it in your Library by selecting the Create Shortcut option under the Save Menu.

You can assign your own Page Name, Comments, and Tags for this page and you’ll be able to find it in searches of your Library just like any page you’ve saved.  When someone shares a page with via scrible, a Shortcut to that page will automatically be added to your Library.  Shortcuts don’t use any of your storage quota.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

January 21, 2012 By Scrible

scrible gets context

Hello scrible users! If you’ve done some annotating lately, you’ve likely come across a new feature – the Context Menu. Before, if you hovered over an annotation, a red X would show up at the top left corner of the annotation so that you could delete that annotation.

Now, there will be an icon representing the current annotation instead of the red X. So for a yellow highlight, it will look like this:

Clicking this icon will reveal our new feature, the Context Menu. This Menu is where you’ll now find the delete option, as well as other useful features. For instance, you can now change the color of a highlight, note, or text-color annotation from this menu. Or, if you want to add some additional info, you can anchor a new note to the annotation.

As we continue to add features to scrible, this Menu will give you a quick and convenient way to interact with your annotations and get the most out of your curated content. If you haven’t checked this feature out yet, go give it a whirl! If you’ve already played with it, we would love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve way the world interacts with the web.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

December 17, 2011 By Scrible

Smarter searching

English: It's a simple picture of a magnifying...
Photo credit: Wikipedia

We’ve enhanced our search capabilities to help you find what you’re looking for quicker than ever. Here’s a breakdown of all the advanced features you can take advantage of:

  • ?  –  Single character wild card
    Using a question mark will match any single character at that position. For example, searching with “te?t” would match the words text, test and tent in any pages you’ve saved.
  • *  –  Multiple character wild card
    Using an asterisk will match 0 or more characters at that position. For example, “test*” would match the words test, tests, testing and testers.
  • “word1  word2″~#  –  Proximity search
    Ending a two term quoted phrase with a tilde and a number will find those two words within the given distance of each other. If you were looking for pages about Amazon’s Kindle, you could use “amazon kindle”~5 to find pages where amazon and kindle are within 5 words of one another. This way you would find an article with Amazon’s tablet, the Kindle, but not an article with how to kindle a fire in the great jungle known as the Amazon.
  • ^#  –  Raising term priority
    Using the caret character followed by a number will give a word a higher priority in the search. If you want to bring up all your saved pages about books, but want to focus on the sci-fi ones, you could use a search like “books sci-fi^5” to give 5 times greater weight to sci-fi. The default weight is 1.  So, anything above that will add weight to the importance of a word.
  • AND  –  Including both terms
    Use “AND” when you want to ensure search results have both terms you’ve used. For instance, searching for “hotel AND 5-star” would only bring back pages that have the words hotel and 5-star in them; one or the other isn’t good enough.
  • OR  –  Including either term
    Use OR to broaden a search between terms. If you were looking at pets, a search for ” “corgi OR husky” puppy” would bring back results that mention corgi puppy or husky puppy, or both corgi puppy and husky puppy.
  • +  –  Requiring a term
    Begin a word with a plus to make it required in the results. All the results for a search of “tesla +roadster” would mention roadster, but not necessarily tesla. This would exclude any articles about Nikola Tesla (unless he happened to drive a roadster) while returning pages about roadsters, particularly the Tesla Roadster.
  • ( )  –  Grouping terms
    If your queries are getting complicated, you can group terms together with parentheses to make it clear which terms are getting paired. Revisiting the earlier pet example from above, the search could have also been written as “(corgi OR husky) puppy” and it would have returned the same results.
  •   –  Escaping characters
    What if you want to look for your favorite Atari game, Q*bert? Earlier, we said the asterisk character acts as a multi-character wildcard.  So, searching with “Q*bert” would potentially match all kinds of crazy words. You’ll need to do what’s called “escaping” the asterisk with a backslash. If you want an asterisk to just be an asterisk, put a backslash in front of it. So, to search for Q*bert, you would enter “Q*bert” into the search box. The same goes for the question mark (?), tilde (~), caret (^), parentheses((, )), or plus sign (+) when you don’t want to activate any special search behavior.

That’s the quick overview of the search syntax.  If you want a technical explanation of what’s going on behind the scenes you can check out the documentation for our search engine here.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Next Page »
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube

Copyright © 2025 Scrible | Home | Help | FAQ | Terms | Privacy | Contact

Supported by the National Science Foundation National Science Foundation.