Friday, October 31, 2008

welcome, erik - manager of community, slayer of trolls

Erik doesn't have an alien avatar yet, but he's the newest member of team reddit and the first whose sole job it is to please you, redditors. That's right, he's our new community manager, who'll be responsible for helping reddit-creators promote and grow their sites -- no matter how much bacon it takes.

He'll also be keeping abreast of noteworthy developments within communities (like sending wrecking bars to CERN, more on that next week) because as reddit has grown, it's much harder for the five of us to keep track of everything while still getting some work done.

As with all of our hires, he's a long-time redditor, who we first worked with on the YourWeek TV show. As an active member of ImprovEverywhere, you've no doubt seen his work before: the Best Buy project, need I say more?

You can find him posting as hueypriest, but send your reddit-domination plans to him at erik@reddit.com and we'll look into getting the sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

Free Flip camera to document this historic U.S. election

We've just learned that our friends at WETA have a pair of Flip video cameras they'll give to redditors who want to document their election day. The best video collected nationwide will air on "The NewsHour" and other PBS election day coverage.

So, in < 50 words, email Erik why we should send you a Flip video camera to record your friends, family, neighbors, favorite alien, or whomever about why this election is important. For more info, go here: http://www.weta.org/videoyourvote

Thursday, October 23, 2008

reddit and The Independent

Today we're announcing a partnership with The Independent. They've taken advantage of our custom CSS and built a reddit for their readers.

We're particular excited because it means a new community -- one that speaks English much better than we do -- will be using reddit to determine the news that matters to them. All the reddit functionality is there, just with a new face and content chosen by their readership.

We hope this is the first of many partnerships. But the Independent has been a pleasure to work with. They've also promised us a case of Branston Pickle, which definitely helped.*

As the DNS changes propagate, you'll eventually see the Independent reddit showing up as now find it at http://reddit.independent.co.uk

And in the coming weeks, you'll also find voting buttons at the bottom of every Independent article.



That said, this new Independent reddit isn't limited to just Independent.co.uk articles -- their readership can submit interesting links from anywhere.

It's this kind of open mentality that really excited us about working with them. And the promise of Pickle.




*We're still entrenched in bitter negotiations about the exact quantity of HP sauce they're sending us.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

widgets get an upgrade and a firefox extension that will rock your world

We've benefited quite a bit from open-sourcing reddit back in June.

It's also given us a chance to give away a number of open-source shirts (not for sale) to developers who've significantly contributed to the project.

(dinosaur for scale)

One such redditor is chromakode, who developed an impressive Firefox extension called Socialite. Today, we're proudly announcing that we're hosting it at http://wwww.reddit.com/socialite

If you run Firefox and haven't used it yet, install it now and then return to this post.



With it, you'll have all the reddit functionality you crave right on the toolbar (submitting, voting, saving, and hiding) as well as see the clever headline, easily jump to the comments, and even try your luck with a random reddit link (turn that on in the preferences). Serendipity is "in" this autumn. Basically, this extension makes our bookmarklets and reddit toolbar (read: frame) look like a PDP-8 to its 64MB Quad core. Thanks, chromakode.

Our widget also now has in-place voting as an option. A nice epilogue for last week's major widget update. Get your vote on.

And at the risk of sounding like Ahab with his gold doubloon... a reddit bobblehead to the first person who emails me with a link to a site (spamblogs excluded) using this hot new button:

submit to reddit

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

New buttons and widgets

We have created a new set of buttons and widgets to make it easier for web publishers to get their content seen on reddit, and help their users find their best content on their own site.

We have added some new features to our old buttons to make it easier for publishers to make them fit better into their sites. For example, you can now set the colors on the buttons, and we have added a new text only button that you can fully style on your own if you want. We also added a bunch of new badges.

Also in this update are new widgets with a lot of additional configuration options. Again, we added the ability to do colors, as well as an unstyled version.

We also added the ability to get a list of articles from a particular domain, which should make it really easy for website publishers to put a list of their hottest articles on their own web pages, like this:



Enjoy!

Thursday, October 09, 2008

and now for something completely different - celeb gossip reddit

Today we wanted to trumpet a very different kind of reddit.


This is the first of what will hopefully be many radical transformations of the reddit platform. For those of you who believe the reddit front page just doesn't have enough Brangelina news, now there's WeHeartGossip. The site was designed by Callie Peck, who rocks CSS like it's a custom ESP KH-2 M-II.

You'll find all the familiar reddit functionality, but with hearts and skulls instead of up and down arrows. And a lot more pink.


The reddit alien never looked so Hollywood-chic.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

reddit goes shooting, presents a "congrats on the Series C" gift to digg

Steve and I, along with Justin and Emmett +1 of Justin.TV, went down to a local gun range here in San Francisco (yes, SF apparently has gun owners).

After shredding a few orange silhouettes on paper targets, we decided to try a new target. We just turned over the sheets and doodled some new ones -- the reddit alien was the first up. Beside it is the Justin.TV gorilla, although it ended up looking more like Homer Simpson.

We had an old pal, a Wired-turned-Digger, stop by our office today and we sent her away with a few gifts to celebrate the $28.7M in funding. Alternatively, they're also welcome to use the bobbleheads as targets on their next office retreat to the range.


Hopefully she appreciated our wall art here in the reddit terrarium.

Monday, October 06, 2008

the bacon has been shipped

I'm finishing up the designs for our winning reddits, but in the meantime, 2 pounds of bacon are being shipped to our winner.

Now this is a beautiful sight:
---

Your Order Number - #### was shipped on 10/6/2008
Shipped To - ##### #####
Product - Nueske Thick Sliced Applewood Smoked Bacon, Regular: 2 pounds
Quantity - 1
Shipped Via - FEDEX
We've also been trying to reach out to our other reddit creators (both from the contest and before) because we'd like to help these sites expand further. If you're interested, email feedback with the subject line "Wrestling with penguins."

We've got big plans to grow in a number of verticals...