December 2010
1 post
The Steepster State of the Union
Lots has been happening for Disrupto (our company), so we wanted to let everyone know what’s been going on and how that affects Steepster.
First off, I want to apologize for the lack of communication recently. A nasty combination of complications and general work “busyness” kept me from letting everyone know what was happening. I hope this hasn’t affected anyone or their...
February 2010
2 posts
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
We know you love tea, that’s for sure. And we know your tea has to come from a…place, right? That’s why we’re announcing the all new Steepster Places! Similar to how you rate and review teas, you can now rate and review the many tea rooms, tea cafes, tea shops and restaurants where you enjoy a nice cuppa! Let everyone know exactly how you felt about your experience and...
A little reminder...
We know that life can get pretty busy. What with all those mundane responsibilities like jobs, going to classes, paying bills and feeding the kids (what’s up with the eating 3 times a day thing?!?!), your favorite ritual of relaxing with a nice warm cuppa and sharing your thoughts on Steepster can sometimes be lost in the noise. We wanted to make things a little easier for you.
That’s...
January 2010
2 posts
2 tags
A non-private message about private messaging…
Here it is, the moment you’ve been waiting for… private messaging!
You’ll notice a new tab in the top navigation bar labeled “Inbox”. Click that to access your very own Steepster Inbox where you can send, read, and respond to messages from your friends on Steepster.
You can also send messages to multiple friends at the same time, to help you coordinate three-way… tea swaps. Keep in mind...
4 tags
First Update of the New Year
Happy 2010 everybody! We hope you have “drink more tea” on your list of New Year’s resolutions like we do. In fact, we’re going to come out right now and deem 2010 the Year of Tea. And with that, we’re happy to bring you some quick updates to the site.
Discussion Categories and Search
Everyone has been so great about contributing to the discussions that we had to...
December 2009
3 posts
Steepster's Ultimate Holiday Tea Contest Winner...
After several hundred Twitter messages and several hundred discussion posts, coming in at a grand total of just under 1000 entrants, we’ve randomly selected a winner for our Ultimate Holiday Tea Contest. And the winner is (drumroll please)…
Matthew Bischoff! You can follow Matthew on Steepster here. Matthew is the lucky winner of over $825 of free tea swag from 12 different companies...
4 tags
How about some site updates to go with that fancy...
First off, in case you haven’t seen the green banner on the site, the discussion topic or all of our tweets and facebook updates :), we’re running a contest! We’re giving away the ultimate holiday tea bundle, worth over $825 and featuring the beautifully-designed Sorapot by our friend Joey Roth. Head on over to the contest page to see all the prizes and details. We’ll...
Dashboard Revamp!
With the past few updates, we’ve added several features that generate a lot of activity. While we love that people are using the new features with such enthusiasm, we recognize this has created an overwhelming amount of activity on the dashboard, so for this latest update, we broke it down into logical tabs:
“Tasting Notes” Tab:
At the end of the day, it’s still all...
November 2009
3 posts
Introducing the Cupboard, Explore Page,...
We’ve seen a lot of great community interactions stemming from comments and such and we love that - we want more of that. So this time around we focused on adding features that would help develop those relationships even further.
Talk It Out
Yes! We added Steepster Discussions — they’re like forums or discussion boards except way cooler because they’re all about tea!...
Brewing a Better Rating System: The 2nd Steep
A couple weeks ago we launched our new slider rating system and we’ve received tons of great feedback. But as people play with the slider and rate each of their teas, they’ve also come up with some questions. Mainly: How exactly are the average ratings determined?
As you may have noticed, a single user rating of 87 does not mean the overall tea rating will be the same. Now you might...
Our First Newsletter...oops!
Hey everyone, today we launched our first email newsletter! Unfortunately, there was also a bug in it :( The bug caused the email to send multiple times. We deeply apologize for this error and take this situation very seriously. We have identified the issue and will do everything within our power to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.
A breakdown of what happened:
Our...
October 2009
1 post
4 tags
Brewing a Better Rating System
Hey there tea drinkers, we just rolled out some updates to Steepster! For one, you can now specify things like steep times and temperatures in your tasting notes. Another highly requested change is a finer rating system, something we’ve been trying to figure out for a while. We think we’ve come up with a pretty neat solution and wanted to walk through some of the decisions we made.
The Old...
September 2009
2 posts
New Arrival: Your shipment of Steepster!
As you can see, we’ve been in the trenches the past few months cooking up some tasty new features for the greatest tea place online. Here are some things you’d be sorry to not explore…
Awesome new design/layout: The whole site got a “facelift” (as one user put it) including the dashboard. You now get the latest and greatest tasting notes from your friends along with...
Steepster featured in Adagio's TeaMuse Newsletter!
Check out our most recent interview from the people behind Adagio’s TeamMuse Monthly Newsletter:
http://www.teamuse.com/article_090901.html
The article looks awesome, Christine from Adagio did a great job. Tell your friends to read up on us and join in on the fun! Tea drinkers, unite!
August 2009
2 posts
Heard it through the grapevine...
Steepster was recently reviewed on some popular blogs. We appreciate the praise and the awesome new users. If you haven’t had a chance to read the reviews, links are below.
From Downloadsquad:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/08/03/steepster-enables-tea-drinking-2-0/
From Lifehacker:
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/08/steepster-is-a-virtual-tea-house-for-tea-aficionados/
...
Interesting facts from the Steepster Survey...
The numbers…
Over 60% of respondents drink 2-5 cups of tea each day, with 15% drinking 6 or more everyday!
Almost 90% of respondents understand the basics of tea and have purchased loose leaf or consider themselves experts and are approached by friends for tea-related advice.
Just over 11% of users have their own personal tea blog.
Many people, almost 40%, don’t track the teas they...
July 2009
2 posts
And the winners are...
Drumroll please :)
divabat : http://divabat.steepster.com/
matthias : http://matthias.steepster.com/
scubed : http://scubed.steepster.com/
linzarella : http://linzarella.steepster.com/
ingrouille : http://ingrouille.steepster.com/
dessiree : http://dessiree.steepster.com/
rockingtherepublic : http://rockingtherepublic.steepster.com/
Of the hundreds of...
Steepster is now on Facebook!
Visit our Steepster fan page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/steepster
Invite your friends to become fans, get lost in discussions with other passionate tea drinkers, and review the site by telling us what you like and what you could live without.
And once you’re a fan, don’t forget to join the real fun:
http://www.steepster.com
- Jason
June 2009
9 posts
Digging Deeper...continued (Part 6 & Conclusion)
Profile Info:
Don’t forget to update your profile info in the account setting! You can add your location, a link to your website, and a blurb about you and your tea experience, knowledge, and preferences.
Conclusion…
That will do it for us folks! This should give you a good idea of how to use each of these new features to your advantage. We hope you enjoy everything Steepster has...
Digging Deeper...continued (Part 5)
“Sort By” (on the Browse Teas page):
You can also sort the teas using a couple different methods, Tea Name (alphabetical), Newly Added (newest teas entered on Steepster), and Most Popular. The first two are fairly standard, but let’s dive into some details about the Most Popular.
The Most Popular teas are the ones with the greatest number of tasting notes. The more tasting...
Digging Deeper...continued (Part 4)
Browse Teas:
We were finally able to improve the Browse Teas area (yea!!). Browse by brand and/or tea type by clicking on the filters toward the top. You can filter by one thing at a time (all oolongs or all tea from Rishi Tea) or combine filters (all oolongs from Rishi Tea) by selecting both the tea brand and type.
Up next, Sorting teas…
- Jason
Digging Deeper...continued (Part 2)
Shopping List:
A number of people have asked for a way to bookmark teas they want to try in the future. Enter, the Shopping List. On each tea page you can click the “Add to shopping list” link to save it for later. Just click the “Shopping List” tab to see everything you’ve bookmarked.
Up next, Live Search…
- Jason
Digging Deeper…continued (Part1)
“Recent Activity” (feed):
The “Recent Activity” feed gives you real time updates from your “Friends” (people you are following) and “Everyone” (the entire Steepster community). The following actions are posted in the Recent Activity feed:
Someone logs a tea by clicking the “I drank this” button
Someone writes a tasting note
Someone gives a thumbs up/thumbs down rating
Someone starts following...
Digging Deeper: Details on some of Steepster's new...
Steepster is chalk full of features (with more coming!) that help you track your teas and connect with similar users. So I’d like to dig a little deeper and talk about how you can use them to their fullest. Let’s see what we’ve got…
Up first, Recent Activity feed…
- Jason
What's Steepster all about?
There are two basic philosophies behind Steepster… 1) People want to keep track of the teas they’re drinking.
Using our tealog format, people can easily make a tea-blog without the fuss of an actual standalone blog. This detailed journaling helps you and Steepster generate tea recommendations that fit your tastes.
2) People want to discover new teas from people they know and trust.
...
Welcome to Steepster, The Blog!
What you’ll get here:
Cheers and welcome to the Steepster blog! We’re excited to see the site continue to grow and we thought this would be an awesome place to talk about Steepster going-ons. We’ll use this forum to discuss everything Steepster as well as share some info about us and our many tea related musings. Check here for more detailed information about the reasons for...
