Steepster Blog

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 including the amazing Sorapot by Joey Roth.

We’d like to thank our sponsors who donated great products with free shipping:

Maeda-en, TeaFrog, Golden Moon Tea, Adagio Teas, Art of Tea, Pearl Fine Teas, 52Teas, Teas Etc, Earth Bound Tea, Tavalon Teas, and Andrews and Dunham Damn Fine Tea.

Without the support of these amazing companies, our holiday contest wouldn’t have been possible.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who entered the contest. We know you all love tea and that’s why we do what we do at Steepster. For those who didn’t win, check back soon for even more opportunities to win some of your favorite teas from the best premium tea companies around.

Have a Happy Holidays and an awesome New Year!

- Jason

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 pick one lucky winner shortly after the contest ends on 8PM this Friday, December 18.

Our second gift to you: site updates! Along with the usual bug fixes, we’ve added the following, based on some of our most common requests:

Comment Moderation
Now you can delete comments from your own tasting notes (via the individual note’s page), or delete your own comments from other peoples’ tasting notes.

If you need to edit a comment, just write a revised comment and delete the old one :)

Shopping List and Cupboard Sorting
Exactly what it sounds like. Just click the dropdown to sort by Most Drank, Company Name, Tea Name, Highest Rating or Date Added. This should make it a bit easier to sort through those long lists and vast cupboards:

In fact, I just used this to coordinate my first order from Upton Tea Imports, thanks to your recommendations.

Bold and Italics
You can give pretty much anything you write on the site extra emphasis by wrapping words in asterisks to make them *bold*, or underscores to make them _italic_. Give it a try (but not here, they’re not enabled for the blog :)

More Control over Email Notifications

The “Email me…” section on your Account page now has a few extra checkboxes to let you specify which things you want to get emailed about.

We disabled some of the less-important ones by default since we ourselves are overloaded with messages already, but if you want ‘em, you got ‘em!

Your feedback is appreciated, and your Steepster Overlords wish you a safe, warm and happy holidays!

Jack

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 about the teas. That’s why with this tab, you can get an uncluttered view of your friends’ tasting notes. We also included the comments right below the tasting note they’re attached to so you can quickly see and participate in the discussion around that tasting note.

“Recent Activity” Tab:

This holds most of the other Steepster activity including when your friends:

• Add teas to their shopping list or cupboard
• Drink a tea without adding a tasting note
• Comment on a Steepster Select item

“Notices” Tab:

This tab is all about you.  We were going to call it “Activity on Your Stuff That You Might Be Interested In” but that didn’t quite fit, so it’s “Notices” instead. Here you can see all the new activity for content you’ve posted or interacted with. This means the tab will include activity for when anyone:

• Starts following your updates
• Comments on your tasting note
• Likes your tasting note
• Comments on something (tasting note, Steepster Select) you’ve also commented on
• Replies to a discussion you created, or are subscribed to
• Replies to your reply in a discussion

Plus, you’ll be able to see exactly how much has happened since you last checked your “Notices” with the nifty counter built right into the tab. If the count seems lower than you’d like, find some more people to follow!

As you can see, we’re really tracking a bunch of different activities to keep you up to speed with all the goings-ons. But no matter how we organize these, there are always going to be times when people simply do a lot on Steepster (because they are generally being awesome). That’s why we’re also grouping certain similar actions (assuming they happen within a relatively close time period):

We know there’s a bit more going on now and we hope this helps make sense of it all. Let us know what you think about the new dashboard (or Steepster in general), we welcome the suggestions.

- Jason