tech seed blog

Hey all, I’m sure most of you have noticed that there are now twin banners on every techseed page that are currently advertising a competition on XSReviews. The plan is to use them for paid adverts but until we get a good enough offer, I have no problem promoting some of your content should you wish.

Anyone interested in taking me up on this offer for a bit of free exposure, simply let me know and send me a banner and I’ll see what I can do. This will be on a first come first served basis, so if you want it get in fast.

Dear Publishers,

tech seed recently added a links page and we’d love to trade links with you. Please let us know what text you’d like alongside your name, and we’ll add the link ASAP. If you could reciprocate and place a link to techseed on your affiliate list, it would be most appreciated.

Your link will be placed here: http://www.techseed.co.uk/links.html

Hey folks, long time no speak. I’ve been keeping an eye on things, but working on other projects for the last month or so, apologies for my abscence. You may be pleased to hear that techseed is now officially on Twitter, so please follow us if you have an account, as increased exposure for the site, means more people will see your reviews.

You can find our titting page here: https://twitter.com/techseed

Reviews should get posted every half hour automatically, as long as it all works right.

More updates coming in the near future.

I’d like to welcome everyone to the new version of tech seed. It’s been in the making for well over 2 months now, and has been the biggest overhaul of any XSR Group site to date. However, all is now well and it’s my pleasure to introduce you to a plethora of new features.

For Publishers:

• Easier RSS integration with example feed
• Automatic image grabbing from RSS
• Simpler Admin Panel setup
• Category sorting on homepage
• Multi-lingual review submission

However, one of the biggest feature introductions was adding a secondary account system for you readers out there. We felt that it was time you made your voices heard on what reviews you like, and don’t like. So the commenter account system was born. Anyone can sign up for these accounts just by hitting the “Sign up” button at the top of the site and selecting the commenter account.

Readers/Commenters will also be pleased to hear we have improved searching facilities, as well as easier to navigate categories and archive systems, making it easier to locate the reviews you want to read. With more than 30 publishers now signed up, we hope to make tech seed the number one place to come to find the reviews you’re interested in.

As usual, any comments, feedback or problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us at admin[at]techseed.co.uk.

The tech seed team would like to apologise to those sites, who have been sending in their news via the automated RSS system. For the past few days the system hasn’t been working, and the news was not posted. This was due to the final touches being put to tech seed v2 which unfortunately caused the RSS syndication to cease working. That has now however, been fixed and the backlog has been posted automatically.

The facelift for TS will be going live very soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

Techseed is continuing to grow with more publishers signing up ever few days, may I be the first to welcome you all the fold.

New features are still being worked on, and we’re drawing up ideas for a facelift for the homepage to give more interaction possibilities for end users reading visiting. We’re also in the process of drawing a “How-To-Automate” guide for those of you still looking to link directly in to tech seed via RSS. In the meantime, contact us if you need help.

All changes currently being worked on should be implemented in the next month or so. Keep your eyes peeled for some big updates going in to 09.

As always, any comments, questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact us at admin[at]techseed[dot]co.uk.

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.