tech seed blog

I’d like to welcome all our new publishers to tech seed. Thanks for the content, and I hope the site benefits you as we intended it to. However, with all these new sites signing up, quite a few different issues have come to light, including the back cataloguing not working quite correctly, thumbnails still not being spidered correctly and a few others. These will be worked on over the next week, and we hope to have everything fixed shortly.

We also have new features in the works, including round-ups of reviews at the end of the day, allowing you to post a round-up of all the reviews posted on tech seed each day, a comment section for posted articles and review ratings.

As always any comments or feedback on the site, please contact us at admin[at]techseed.co.uk.

While it isn’t the most exciting feature around, a new one has been added. Those of you who tend to forget your passwords can now have them reset simply using the “Forgot login” link just under the login form, on the - you guessed it - login page.

Any comments or problems with the system send them over to the usual place, admin[at]techseed[dot]co.uk.

The oft-requested feature of fully automated posting of articles is now fully functional. All you need to do is have a working RSS feed, and make sure the required fields are present and everytime you post a review on your site, within a maximum of 10 minutes, it will be posted automatically on tech seed.

To do this, simply login to tech seed, navigate to the RSS section of your account page, and input your RSS feed into the form.

For automatic posting to work correctly, you need to make sure that your feed has the <category></category> field present in your RSS. To make things easier, the category names are the same as the display names found on this page:

http://techseed.co.uk/category.html

If you have any issues using this new feature, please email us and we would be more than happy to help you set it up on a personal basis.

Dear ts Publishers,

Everything is going well with tech seed. We are just ironing out some minor issues with the RSS feeds, but for most it seems to be working well, please email any comments to admin[at]techseed.co.uk.

What we need now, are more publishers. With more publishers comes more traffic, and more traffic means more click throughs to your sites. So if you know any review site owners that havn’t signed up yet, persuade them to do so. If you manage to get anyone signed up, have them email us with your name and we’ll make sure to reward you in some way. This could be something simple like a trust boost (which will be used more in the future), but we’ll find something good.

A little later than planned, the tech seed RSS syndication is now complete. To use this feature, go to your account page, and select “RSS Articles.” Then after inputting your RSS feed, it should show up all the reviews that you have available to post. Simply clicking on one of these reviews will automatically fill out most of the submission form for you.

There has also been a few fixes as of late. The thumnail submitter was allowing those without a thumbnail to be present in the top most spots of the homepage, this is no longer so. There is now also a defaul “select category” category, which means you must change it to the correct one before submitting. No more GPU reviews in the competition section.

The feed reader is almost working, though not quite. Currently it will automatically fill out the submission form for you, but it won’t be able to actually post the article. This should be fixed shortly.

The RSS feed syndication feature is nearly finished, and will soon allow you to have your own feed automatically fill in your tech seed submission form. This will be implemented over the next couple of days. We are also currently toying with the idea of a “seed this” button. We’ve got a few ideas, but we havn’t decided on anything concrete yet. What would you find it usefull for? Please send all ideas to admin[at]tech seed.co.uk, or comment here.

Well, only a day after launch (and 2 after the pre-release mail out to authors) we’ve had a great surge in activity, and I’d like to welcome all the new publisher’s to the tech seed folds. In regards to the questions raised over the RSS feed submission, this feature is still being tested but will become active within the next week if all goes well. We also have a “seed this” button in the works but are debating on it’s functionality. If you have something specific you’d like it to do, then let us know and we’ll do our best to implement it.

I told you to watch this space didn’t I? tech seed is officially launched as of this morning. I know there are still a few bugs to iron out so bare with us on those, but please do comment here with any feedback, or email it to admin[at]techseed.co.uk. The email feature as previously stated, seems to be working fine, so any categories you want extra news in, be sure to sign up. You can do this in the “Change Syndication Settings” part of your account page.

Recently techseed’s ownership has changed, and although the original developer will be on hand occasionally if needed, the site is now being run by a different team. While this is a shame in some senses, it also bodes well for the site, as it means we have now drawn very close to the eventual official launch of techseed, some 9 months or so after it’s original conception. Watch this space is all I’m saying.

In other news, the email feature should be just about finished now. If you look in your account profile you should be able to select certain categories of interest to you. When a post is made into one of those categories, it will automatically email you a cookie cutter version of what was posted online in a simple, easy to read format. This is designed to make news collecting much simpler. Any feedback you have on this new feature can be sent to admin[at]techseed.co.uk.