Steepster Blog

The Steepster State of the Union

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:42:55 -0500

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 use of Steepster.

To give a little background, we started Steepster as our personal passion project and the first official Disrupto LLC product over a year and a half ago. In that time it has grown to a vibrant and diverse community of thousands of tea drinkers (yay!) and we couldn’t be more proud.

At the same time, as Steepster grew and evolved, we worked on other projects under the Disrupto brand. Everyone wore several hats to manage multiple projects, but Mike’s and Jack’s expertise has forced them to focus on other areas while I (Jason) took over the management of Steepster. But now, even though I’ve had a great time interacting with everyone on Steepster, our other business activities demand the majority of my attention.

What does this mean for Steepster? Moving forward, Steepster will remain up and running as usual. We hope everyone will continue drinking and logging teas and sharing their passion with others (and as always, invite your friends). However, I will only be able to manage and interact on the site in a reduced role and I’ll have a limited capacity to respond to questions and requests. We will also be unable to address bugs and errors as quickly as before, but will do so whenever possible.

We’ve brought back Steepster Select for the next couple weeks, but after that we’ll be ending Select until we have more time to run it. In the mean time, we hope you enjoy some great teas, big discounts and stock up on holiday presents.

In other news…we hired Ricky! The lovable rascal worked his way into our hearts and is now a (happy) member of the Disrupto family. If you see him on Steepster, feel free to congratulate him and tell him to get back to work.

So, if you have questions, comments or just need to bring something to an admin’s attention, continue to email me (jason@disrupto.com) and I will do my best to get back to you.

Thanks to everyone for continuing to make this a fun and rewarding tea-related journey.

- Jason

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:26:00 -0500

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 pass along some friendly tips.

To view the closest tea places, hop on over to the “Places” tab and you’ll automatically see nearby locations (based on your IP address).

You can browse the list, scan the map, and search for tea places by location (city, state, or zip code) and/or name using the search form above the map. Throw in a few of the many filters to customize your search and find exactly what you want.

Once you find the place you’re looking for, check it out to get more details like ratings, reviews, business hours, contact info, maps, types of tea and food available, pics…the list goes on and on.

Don’t see the place you’re looking for? You can easily add it by clicking the “Add a Place” button.

If you’ve added a rating and/or review, the place will be listed under your Place Ratings, right alongside your Tealog.

Now you can easily collect and share your thoughts on your favorite (and not so favorite) tea joints around the World - all of your tea drinking activities connected to your Steepster tea-universe.

We’ve tried our best to make sure most of the tea places you go to are already listed on Steepster (there’s over 2000, mostly US-based), but that’s only part of it. We’re asking for your help to fill in the rest of the picture! That’s why everyone can edit places (just like how you can edit teas) and add any relevant information we may have missed.

We’ve also changed around the main navigation to organize the larger features on Steepster and group the personalized ones. Poke around a little to see what’s what.

We hope you have fun discussing your favorite tea places, adding info to new ones and playing around with another way to make tea and Steepster a regular part of your day. As always, feel free to send us any thoughts about the new features; we’d love to hear what you think! And remember…

“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your [tea] mountain is waiting. So…get on your way!”

- Jason

A little reminder...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:58:49 -0500

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 why just last week we launched these new features to help you stay up-to-date with all the Steepster goings-ons:

Daily Reminder Email - A short note, sent to your email, reminding you to update your tealog if you haven’t in the past 24 hours. Along with the note is a brief list of some of the amazing teas your friends have been drinking while missing you.

Steepster Select Newsletter - Having a little trouble making your way to Steepster Select everyday? No worries, we’ll bring it to you!

Sign up for the Select Newsletter and you’ll get the daily feature delivered to your email…well…daily. You can even signup for the newsletter if you’re not a member of Steepster (even though you should be)! Just visit the Steepster Select page and subscribe in the top right.

New Account Page - You’ve got a redesigned Account Page to manage all of these emails. Just click the “Email Settings” tab and easily mark the checkboxes of your choice; it’s that simple!

Have fun with these most recent updates. We hope they keep you on top of everything happening in the Steepster-verse. Enjoy!

- Jason

A non-private message about private messaging…

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:56:26 -0500

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 that you can only send messages to people who are following you (similar to Twitter’s Direct Messages). This way, people you don’t know won’t be able to send you unwanted messages. But it also means that if you’re looking to message another member, make sure you’re following each other :)

We hope everyone has fun with this shiny new feature: Use it to give custom tea recommendations, arrange tea swaps or just shoot the breeze with the greatest group of tea drinkers on the Web. Enjoy!

- Jason

First Update of the New Year

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:23:53 -0500

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 add a little more organization! You can now search through the thousands of topics and replies using the handy-dandy search box on the right side of the page. Also, when you create a new topic you can label it with a category (General Tea Discussion, Steepster Talk, Teaware, etc.) that best fits your discussion.

It also means when you can filter topics to see all the discussions happening in that specific category.

Homepage Redesign and Learn More Page

One of the great things about Steepster is that as it grows and more people take part, there are more opportunities for everyone to discover new teas and share their thoughts and stories. That’s why we revamped the homepage to give a better idea of the different kinds of activity happening on Steepster (you have to be logged out to view it).

We’ve also designed a “Learn More” page so aspiring Steepsterites can quickly see what makes Steepster interesting (I guess “kick-ass tea site” isn’t descriptive enough…) The next time someone asks ”what’s so great about Steepster” you can just tell them to check it out.

We hope you enjoy the updates and have fun drinking tea! And as always, let us know what you think.

- Jason

Steepster's Ultimate Holiday Tea Contest Winner Announced!

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:59:00 -0500

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

How about some site updates to go with that fancy new contest?

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:08:23 -0500

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

Dashboard Revamp!

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:32:00 -0500

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

Introducing the Cupboard, Explore Page, and...Discussions!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:17:05 -0500

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! Have a question or need some tea advice? Just add a new discussion topic. Want to rant about the greatness of Steepster and how it’s probably the best website since that website for sliced bread? You’re not alone, just join the discussion. Even if you aren’t asking all the questions, the Discuss tab is the prefect place for you to share your wisdom, help out a friend, or just take in some always interesting tea-related information.

What’s in your Cupboard?

You can now add teas to your “Cupboard” to indicate which ones you currently own (a highly requested feature). Not only will this help you keep track of your own supply, but other members can browse your mighty collection and suggest a tea swap if they see something interesting (stay tuned for more features to help facilitate those tea swaps!). I can’t wait to see all the stuff you guys have stashed away :)

To give you an idea, here’s my cupboard.

Right Now on Steepster

We also added a new hot-spot to see all the latest activity from the entire Steepster community. Check out the new Explore tab to see a live-updating stream of the most recent tasting notes, comments, friend connections, featured members, discussions…everything!

Bring Along Friends

Before you could only see which of your friends were already using Steepster. But now we have an Invite section that lets you send a personal invitation to your friends on Facebook, Twitter, your Gmail contacts, or even just using a plain old email. Check it out and invite all your tea-loving friends to see what they’re drinking.

We hope you enjoy the new features. Post a reply to the discussion topic or shoot me an email to let us know what you think and what you’d like to see next on your favorite tea website. Cheers!

- Jason

Brewing a Better Rating System: The 2nd Steep

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:02:24 -0500

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 be thinking, “I rate my Darjeeling a 72 and the overall ratings comes out as a 77? What crazy, experimental tea are those Steepster guys drinking?” Although we’ve had some questionable ideas after a few late night cups of yerba mate, there actually is a method to our madness.

A Bayesian Brew

Before the switch to the new slider rating system we used a regular average. This created situations where a single, outstanding rating caused the tea’s overall rating to be higher or lower than a different tea with many more “normal” ratings. Sure, one person may think their custom blend of Assam, lime and dirt is the greatest tea ever to exist and give it a single rating of 100, but we don’t think that should mean it’s overall rating is higher than a Golden Yunnan 50 people rate at 95.

We wanted to accommodate the multiple factors that play into the popularity/rating of a tea; so after studing the thousands of ratings on Steepster we went with an approach know as a Bayesian Average. Basically, this allows us to include related factors in the calculation so small numbers of extreme ratings don’t skew the overall tea rating. These are the factors we think affect a tea’s rating:

Average rating across all teas on Steepster

Average number of times each tea has been rated

Number of ratings for the tea you’re looking at

Average rating for that specific tea

We took all of those variables and smashed them into an equation that made sense. Now, ratings are more relevant and outliers won’t have as significant an affect on a tea’s overall rating. The more people that rate a tea, the more valid and supported the overall rating becomes.

We’re pretty happy with what came out but that doesn’t mean we’re above improvements and suggestions. We’re also working to make it more visually obvious that you’re looking at a weighed average and not just a straight-up average. So, if you have any brilliant ideas or even just a thought about how to make our system the tiniest bit better, we’d love to hear it.

- Mike

Our First Newsletter...oops!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:49:00 -0500

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 newsletter was scheduled to go out (only once!) at 6:00 AM EST, to be enjoyed with a fresh morning cuppa.

At approximately 6:04 AM, our email server ran into a problematic email address that caused it to fail.

Instead of handling the error appropropriately and moving on to the next email address, the program restarted, causing the process to start over from the beginning.

From 6:04 AM until 8:38 AM, the program continued to run without our knowledge (we weren’t aware of the situation because no one at Steepster HQ had received any emails).

We shut the program down at 8:38 AM when the problem came to our attention and no more emails were sent.

In the end, we did a few things wrong. At the root of the issue was the fact that we weren’t monitoring the situation closely enough. This will be the first change. In addition to fixing the bug, we’ll be adding additional process checks to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.

For now, we will be holding off on sending emails until we can implement these changes and guarantee that duplicates will not be sent. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to email me at jason@steepster.com and I’ll be sure to send a response (only one, I promise :).

- Jason

Brewing a Better Rating System

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:51:00 -0400

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 System

When we first launched Steepster, we weren’t totally sure how people were going to use it. We knew how we wanted to use it, but it’s the little details like…

“How long would the typical post be?”
“Would they be more or less review-oriented?
“Longer and blog-like? Shorter and twitter-like?”

We wanted to wait until we got a better sense of the direction the site before committing to anything too specific. That’s why we erred on the side of quicker, simpler interactions — thumbs up if you liked the tea, thumbs down if you didn’t — thinking that it’d be easier to go narrow as time went on (versus the other way around).

This worked okay for a while, but when we ran the numbers, we saw that ninety-some percent of the teas were getting positive ratings. Now we all know that tea in general is pretty darn good ;) but we still needed to separate the really good from the sorta, kinda good. So we looked at some other options:

5-Star Ratings

They’re easy to understand and they’re everywhere. You get what they are immediately and they’re good for comparing good things to bad things. However, a 5-point scale starts to break down when you’re rating a lot of similar products that are all pretty decent.

It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. To us, this says that we need to dive deeper — zoom in to a level where it’s clear what the difference is between a really great tea and the best tea you’ve ever had.

100-Point Ratings

I bet there are quite a few out there who can rank every tea they’ve tasted in order of preference the way Rob Gordon knows his record collection in High Fidelity. We noticed that some of you already use such scales on your own websites and blogs. At the same time, 100-point scales can feel daunting to those that are just getting to know tea. Steepster’s about connecting both tea fanatics and new tea drinkers, so we didn’t want to alienate the beginners. We were all newbies at some point :)

Alternative Rating Systems

One idea we had early on was to use smiley faces instead of stars. This way, it was clearer what each rating meant:

We really liked this approach, but realized it was still just a four-point rating system and didn’t quite have the range needed.

Letting it Slide

In the end, we tried to capture the benefits of all the different systems: the granularity of the 100-point scale, the ease of the star rating system, and the built-in meaning of the smilies. Here’s what we came up with:

Who doesn’t like sliders? Behind that slider is a full 100-point scale. Still one problem though: when you write a tasting note for a new tea, you don’t want to have to go back and look up what you rated your other teas. That’s why we added something else:

See those tick marks? We’re taking a few of your most recently rated teas and using them as markers on the slider, giving you a frame of reference for the new tea. They show up when you drag the slider over them or when you hover over the tick marks with your mouse cursor:

We hope this will not only answer the question just how good? but also the question compared to what?

Here’s the full, updated form that pops up when you go to write a new tasting note:

Transitioning Old Ratings

You’ll also see a new ‘Teas’ tab on your tealog page where you can quickly update all the teas you’ve rated to the new scale. Click on a rating and you get a compact version of the slider:

We’ve converted the old thumbs down ratings to 25s and thumbs up ratings to 75s to help you get started, so please go in and update the ratings for teas you’ve logged. It’ll help us keep the overall ratings accurate. Thanks!

As always, there’s still a ton of room for improvement, but we feel like this is pretty big step forward. So what do you think? Thumbs up or down?

New Arrival: Your shipment of Steepster!

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:45:00 -0400

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 their other activity on the site.
Comments: Pretty straightforward but never so much fun. Get the lowdown on each tasting note by leaving a friendly comment.
Likes: Proudly display your interest in someone’s tasting note by clicking the heart icon, which also helps others find great content.
Login with Twitter/Facebook/Google: First login to your original account and go to http://steepster.com/account. There, link your outside profiles to Steepster. Now you can login using these services with just one click!
Community Page: Find friends from your existing networks and search for users already on Steepster. You can check out the freshest Steepster noobs too (be nice).
Steepster - Now with more tea: We’re now close to 5000 teas on Steepster and gaining more each day, making us the largest database of teas (that we’re aware of) in all the Internets.
Steepster Select: Get your daily fix of tea and tea-related products through Steepster Select’s exclusive offers. More on this to come…

As always, send your thoughts to feedback@steepster.com. We hope you enjoy.

- Jason

Steepster featured in Adagio's TeaMuse Newsletter!

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:20:00 -0400

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!

Heard it through the grapevine...

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:12:00 -0400

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/

Here’s a review from one of the winner’s of the Steepster Survey. She wrote about the prize pack she won courtesy of the Art of Tea.

http://www.rockingtherepublic.com/tea-review/i-won-a-steepster-prizepack/

Interesting facts from the Steepster Survey...

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:06:25 -0400

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 drink.
More than 75% of respondents would be either a little upset or moderately upset if Steepster disappeared tomorrow (I thought 100% would be extremely upset…where’s the love?)

Top things people like about Steepster…

Seeing what their friends have to say about different teas
Discovering new teas
Connecting to a community of passionate tea drinkers
Awesome design and UI
Twitter!

Top features people could live without…

Nothing! You love all the features and we appreciate that :)

The most popular features to add…

Mobile access to Steepster (communicate through iPhone app or SMS or Twitter)
More community interaction (commenting, forums/discussion boards, tea swaps, communicate with followers, better way to connect with new users)
Systematic tea recommendations (based on drinking history, users with similar tastes, featured teas, etc.)

You’d use Steepster more if…

You drank more tea. What can we do to make you drink more tea? ;)
You remembered to use Steepster. What would be the best way to remind you about Steepster?

Thanks again to the hundreds of people who took the Steepster Survey. Your answers are on the radar and we’ll be looking to incorporate your feedback into the site as soon as possible. Send any additional/related thoughts to survey@steepster.com and don’t forget to log your teas everyday!

- Jason

And the winners are...

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:22:00 -0400

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 people who participated, these 7 lucky people were randomly selected as the winners of the tea prize packs. Keep an eye out for their thoughts on the teas they’ve won.

A special thanks goes out to Art of Tea (http://www.artoftea.com), Adagio Teas (http://www.adagio.com), and Rishi Tea (http://www.rishi-tea.com) for providing the awesome prize packs.

Thanks to all who completed the Steepster Survey. Your answers are going to help make Steepster even better than it is today.

- Jason

Steepster is now on Facebook!

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:33:00 -0400

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

Digging Deeper...continued (Part 6 & Conclusion)

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:04:00 -0400

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 to offer. Send new feature ideas along to blog@steespter.com. Cheers!

- Jason

Digging Deeper...continued (Part 5)

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:03:00 -0400

“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 notes, the bigger the circle to the right of the tea listing. Fewer tasting notes means a smaller circle; and no tasting notes means a tiny dot.

The circles can also be different colors: green, gray, or red. Green indicates a greater percentage of thumbs up, gray is a somewhat equal percentage of thumbs up vs. thumbs down, and red is a greater percentage of thumbs down.

These new indicators give you a quick sense of how other people feel about a tea and whether they’ve been writing about it.

Up next, more profile info…

- Jason