Posts filed under 'tips'
Use the Yahoo! Sign In to join – it’s easy as pie
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve added the ability to sign up and log into Menuism with your Yahoo! account. And we’re happy to say that since we implemented it on Oct 20th, we’ve had almost 70% of new users use the Yahoo Sign In approach. I hope that means people are finding it easy and useful.
Why?
- We think we’ve got a pretty cool service, but if people don’t signup then how can they get the full experience? The Yahoo! authentication lets people signup without having to create another username/password to remember and also ensures that it’s a person with a valid Yahoo account that’s signing up.
- Yahoo has more than 250 million users (from what I last saw) which means there’s quite a few people who are eligible to signup.
How do I use it to sign up?
- Click on the big Yahoo! Sign In icon that my wonderful cousin Julia designed for us. Clicking on it will take you to Yahoo to sign in.
- Sign into your Yahoo! account.
- Click “Yes” to the agreement. After this, it will take you back to Menuism to finish the signup process.
- Pick a screenname. Yahoo doesn’t send us your screenname, so you need to pick some kind of identification for the site.
- Enter a valid email. Just in case we need to send you important account information. If you’re email is invalid and the signup email you send you bounces, we’ll invalidate your account (so use your real email).
- Agree to the Terms of Use.
- Done! Now everytime you want to sign into Menuism, just click on the Yahoo button and sign into your yahoo account when prompted (you’ll have to accept that agreement everytime) and you’ll automatically get signed into Menuism!
If you’ve signed up with the Yahoo Sign In and you don’t want to use it everytime, you can still set a password by going to “Edit Settings” on your home page. Now you can use your screenname and password to sign into Menuism which is a tad bit faster.
Questions
- Is this secure? Yes.
- Does Yahoo send any of my account information to Menuism? No. Yahoo doesn’t send us anything about you. All Yahoo tells us is “A user with a Yahoo account has successfully signed in and here’s a unique number you can use to identify him/her”.
- Do you send any information to Yahoo? No.
More Details For the Truly Curious
How did you do this? We used a cool new service that Yahoo made available called Yahoo BBAuth (Browser Based Authentication). We also leveraged a Ruby on Rails plugin that made the implementation rather smooth (Thanks Cameron!).
If you’ve got any more questions or have any problems, just send us some feedback or just leave a comment here.
-Justin
46 comments October 31, 2006
Tag, you’re it!
It’s been a really exciting week at the Menuism office (aka the garage). All the fantastic praise and feedback we’ve received keeps us hungry to make Menuism your best way to discover great food in your area, so thanks, and keep it up! We’ve had well over 100 new reviews in the past week, and lots of fantastic new users such as xuster, opilicious, shihnong and phatcat1688 contributing their wisdom and opinions to the community.
We want Menuism to be the best for YOU, so we added lots of ways to customize and shape the site to your benefit. One of the most powerful ways to do so is by tagging restaurants to make them easier for you and others to find later. We’ve already tagged a lot of them, but it’s your tags that really help make the site your own. Don’t know what to tag? Try tagging restaurants that are romantic or vegan, offer happy hour, or are Diner’s Club affiliated. Every tag helps! How useful is tagging? As an example, my former employer offers a discount card known as the Prime Card. Certain local restaurants offer good discounts to Prime Card holders, but it’s always hard to remember which ones. I took the liberty of tagging all the local participating restaurants with the tag “MS Prime”. So now Microsofties looking for a cheap meal can just search for “MS Prime” in the area and take their pick! You can check this out to see the results.
There are plenty of restaurants on the site that are waiting for your tags, so get to it!
-John
Add comment October 6, 2006
Top Users List & Quick Tip Reminder
So here’s a fun little feature that we whipped up over the weekend – browsable top users list. Now you can see the highest tip givers and receivers.
Some Tip Reminders:
- Tips are what count, not points. So if you’ve been accumulating tons of points, find some good reviews to tip!
- You’ll get rewarded even more if you tip a good review rather than a bad one. How? When other people tip the same review you tipped, you get a fractional bonus (for your tips given total) – this can add up very fast for a good review. It’s sorta like buying into a hot stock really early.
- If you haven’t grasped the tip concept yet. Just think about tipping at a restaurant – you tip for good service. There are big tippers and big tip earners (those who provide great service). Everyone loves both kind of people, so we highlight them!
Here’s the link to check out the users list:
You can also browse by city (there’s a link under “Top Users” for every city page):
http://www.menuism.com/cities/Seattle/WA/users
Now you can see all the cool gravatar images people have been putting up! If you don’t have a pic yet, go to http://www.gravatar.com and create and acount with the same email address you used on menuism.com.
If you post any comments on the blog, use the same email address and your pic will also show up here (same goes for any other blog that is Gravatar-enabled).
Question: Is the tips concept confusing? Any suggestions for clarifying it?
Enjoy!
- Justin
Add comment August 14, 2006
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