ClickComments on Bo-blog

Bo-blog is one of the big blog platform in China. If you are on Bo-blog, you now can have ClickComments on your blog with a convenient plugin. This plugin is created by Mesak Chuan.

You can downlaod the plugin here on his cool blog.

Servers are back up!

Servers are all back up and running! Thanks for your patience.
-Krates



Servers are down now (hardware problem)
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Our servers arecurrently down due to a hardware failure. We are actively working hard on fixing the problem right now. We will have them back up as soon as possible.

We apologize for all the inconvenience.

ClickComments on FC2, Livedoor, and SaaSee

We are excited to announce that ClickComments now supports FC2, Livedoor, and SaaSee. These are three of the major blog platforms in Japan. We have receieved a lot of requests on supporting these 3 major Japanese blog platforms.

We hope that you would enjoy ClickComments :-)

ClickComments Logo Optional & New 3D icons

After getting lots of blogger feedback we decided to make the ClickComments logo optional. Even though it is designed to draw more attention and increase reader interaction, some bloggers would rather not have the logo on there. Other bloggers really like the design. So we decided to make the choice up to you.

To spice things up a bit we have also introduced some stylish 3D icons. We hope you like them. You can log in and change your settings to play around with what they look like on your blog.

Please tell us what you think.

The ClickComments logo

Some of you have been asking why there is a ClickComments logo on the ClickComments widget. Some thought that it was a branding exercise. This is not what our motivations are. The goals for the new version of ClickComments is to increase reader participation further. There has been academic research that shows that images of faces draw human attention. Our usage of a face in the logo was to draw attention to the ClickComments widget so that readers will interact with the widget.

If you think the logo contrasts too much with your template, then please choose the grey theme. That is more neutral and should blend in with more template. We chose the default green theme because our postreach logo is green and our website is green.

PostReach GuestPost service discontinued

For those of you that have used our GuestPost service, we would like to thank you for using PostReach GuestPosts. However, today we discontinued the GuestPosts service. We decided to focus our resources on improving PostReach ClickComments to have a greater impact on the blogging experience.

ClickComments makes the blogging experience more engaging for both bloggers and readers. Its recommendation feature tells readers about your other posts that might interest them. This should keep them on your blog longer.

We encourage you to use ClickComment. Please try it out http://www.postreach.com/

Keep blogging,
The PostReach team

Introducing ClickComments2.0!

We are excited to introduce you the new ClickComments. In the last two months, we have been listening, talking, observing and analysing what both bloggers and readers want. We think we have made a major improvement in the service.

What's new?

Post Recommendations: which tells readers about other posts in the same blog that might interest them. This should keep them on your blog longer.

Customization: We have reduced the number of icons based on reader feedback. We have introduced optional negative icons. Users can also customize the color of the ClickComments box.

Please check out our new website for more detail: http://www.postreach.com/

Comment artwork

A few days ago I came across this cartoon of a blogger finding no comments on their blog.

It is by PinoyBlogero.

Gnomedex 2007

I made it to Gnomedex. Everyone I talked to said that each year Gnomedex is getting better and better. The presentations were inspiring, someone even asked if I had icon stickers to give out. Next year I will bring 'inspiring' icon stickers. I met some fun and creative people throughout the event. I did a quick podcast interview over on Capture the Conversation. Adam Metz over at LaunchSquad introduced me to my interviewer, Kris Smith. I stayed around to listen in on a few other interviews.

ClickComments on Expression Engine

We are happy to announce that we now support Expression Engine. We will continue to add support for more platforms. Thanks for your patience.

Daniel in Sweden with an 'insightful' tshirt

Daniel Lampinen
Originally uploaded by postreach

Our second photo just came in from Daniel in Sweden. Insightful seems to be a popular icon.

ClickComments on DotClear

We are excited to announce support for DotClear! Big thanks to Olivier GIRAULT who helped us on making this happen!

We will continue to work hard on supporting other platforms. Thanks for your patience!

Brano in Stupava

Brano in Stupava
Originally uploaded by postreach

Brano is the first blogger to send us a photo of himself in one of our tshirts. He is in the center of Stupava, Slovakia in front of a beautiful church.

We are happy to see that the sizing is correct. Many of our bloggers had to look up the sizing conversion for US sizing.

Clickcomment in Latvian!

Big thanks to Inga who translated ClickComments to Latvian. She has a very cool english blog other than her Latvian one, which we understand and enjoy :-)

ClickComments in Thai

Big thanks to ìNice who translated ClickComments into Thai! We are excited and thinking that we may need a business trip to Thailand?! :-)

ClickComments on Drupal blogs

We have just added support to the Drupal! Big thanks to Alexei V. Lazhanev who actually built the Durpal modulefor us!!

We will continue to work hard on supporting other platforms. Thanks for your patience!

The first Tshirt photos coming in

Brano is the first one to receive his tshirt. We are waiting for further photos of him at a local landmark.

ClickComments on MovableType,b2evolution and Tattertools

We have just added support to the following platforms:

MovableType (big thanks for the help from afterhourspub)

b2evolution (big thanks for the help from absolutelytrue)

TatterTools (big thanks to Hina who actually built the plugin for us!!)

We will continue to work hard on supporting other platforms. Thanks for your patience!

finally, TSHIRTS!

We finally finished custom making the tshirt for all of the great bloggers that helped us translate our widget and create new plug-ins. It was quite fun choosing the design and figuring out how to custom make each one. Time flies when you are having fun. And we had tons of fon. Here is a picture of the first one we made in Portuguese for Lucas.

We would also like to thank:
Pablo
Brano
Saso
Pigazine
Simos
Nikos
Andrei
Emmanuel
Maurits Burgers
VioryDaniel
Alessandro
Mert
Dan
Lucifr
SideKick
Nasiruddin
Frank
Cain

It is amazing to see the different address formats from around the world and realize that it all works out just like the languages.

New production infrastructure is LIVE!

Our new production infrastructure is LIVE! Yay, all new servers and a much more scalable environment. We are excited!

What does it mean to you? It means the ClickComments load time and response time will be much faster!! Also, this new environment will allow us to react on increasing capacity much faster in the future to support the high leverl service.

Do you see the difference on your blogs? :-)

Upgrading our whole infrastructure

Due to the increasing number of users, our old servers simple can't take it anymore. We are dumping the old servers and moving onto the new infrastructure. The new servers are here! Yay! We are taking down the whole site to migrate to the new servers.

The process will take a few hours. We apologize for any inconvenience.

ClickComments will start showing up on your blogs as soon as you are done!

ClickComments widget in Russian/Cyrillic

Thanks to Dan we have one of the most popular languages in the world: Russian. Dan covers the development of credit cards in Russia. It is always interesting to see how credit is used in different countries.

Dan, send us your mailing address.

ClickComments building?

It seems that this building liked ClickComments so much that they decided to put icons on their building. I'm just joking. But this is what our office could look like one day:


Thanks to Maurits Burgers for the find in the Hague, Holland.

Upgrade servers one more time

Due to increase of users, we have just upgraded our servers one more time last night. We are very happy with the result. Based on the pingdom tools, we have successfully reduced the average loading time of ClickComments to under 0.3 seconds.

ClickComments widget in Hindi

Hindi (Devnagari) was a little bit more complex than other languages we have dealt with, but with the help of Nasiruddin we were able to make ClickComments work in Hindi. Check out his blog, he seems to be a shutterbug with great photos of rainstorm scenes.

Nasiruddin, we still need your mailing address. A tshirt photo in the rain would be great.

ClickComments widget in Italian

Yes, We are announcing another language: Italian! Alessandro was kind enough to help us out with our Italian translation. Check out his blog, he covers technology and politics.

Allessandro, please post up a picture to Flickr of you in the PostReach tshirt when you get it in Montebelluna, Italy.

Optimization completed.

Our team has done some good work on optimizing our servers' performance. We are very happy with today's obvious improvement, we are planning ahead on how to handle this continueously increasing load.

Thank you for your patience and support!

Performance of ClickComments and Upgrades

We have noticed that the performance of our service has slowed down today. We were in the process of upgrading our hardware, but it seems that we will need more. We are working on it right now. We strive to maintain our reputation of responsiveness to your needs.

We will also make sure that services issues like this will not happen in the future.

Regards,
the PostReach team

Slovenian Widget support

We are excited to announce that ClickComments is now in Slovenian too. Big thanks to Saso who help us on the translation.

Slovenian blogger, come check it out!

Swedish Widget support

We are excited to announce that ClickComments is now in Swedish too. Big thanks to Daniel who help us on the translation. Swedish blogger, come check it out!

Hardware Upgrade (Server was down for 5mins)

Due to the recent increase of users, we are upgrading our hardware to ensure our users' experience on both our site and the widgets on your blogs. Our server was down for about 5mins. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Romanian Widget Support

Andrei has not only helped us on the xhtml compliant issue. He has also helped us translate the ClickComments into Romanian.

Big thanks to Andrei one more time!

Clickcomment is now xhtml1.1 compliant

We have done a great deal of testing to make sure the ClickComments work well and will not do unexpected things on users' blogs. As long as it is working well, we are happy.

However, we have never paid too much attention on making sure that it is not completely xhtml1.1 compliant. One of your user Andrei (an expert in the field) has stepped up and help us put it xhtml1.1 compliant. He is good and very efficient. In no time, he's done and it's working well now.

Big thanks to Andrei!

Chinese Widget Support

We are very fortunate that we got a lot of great help. Two of our Chinese bloggers, Pig and Lucifer, have stepped up and translated our ClickComments in to both simplified and trandition Chinese. I personally can read/write chinese, but I don't know how to type Chinese into the company. But I tell you, they did a great job on the translation. They came up with phrases much better than those dry ones that I was thinking about.

Big Thanks to Pig and Lucifer!! 非常感谢！

Dutch widget support

We had the great luck of launching ClickComments when one of our GuestPost users read a Dutch post about 'lurkers'. Maurits Burgers (pronounced mow-ritz) has struck up a conversation on his blog and other blogs and has given us great feedback. Today Maurits and Viory helped us translate the widget to Dutch. Check out the videos produced by Maurits (250,000 views!) and the photography from Viory.

Thanks for all the support. T-shirts for both of you....and a pack of M&Ms because you call our icons M&Ms.

German widget support

We now have German support on our ClickComments widget. Thanks to Emmanuel at MailTune a French music blog. Emmanuel offered to help with both our French and German translation.

Emmanuel, please take a picture of yourself with the tshirt in Paris, France. Pick some place obscure and we will see if anyone can guess it.

French widget support

A special shout out to my friend Jean Marc Loingtier of Kalat for helping me with the French translation. Merci beaucoup!

greek widget support

Two of our Greek bloggers have helped us out with Greek. Thanks to Nikos of metablogging and Simos of e-go.gr and Gelame.gr. I am going to flip a coin to decide who gets the black tshirt and who gets the white tshirt. Flickr a photo of yourselves in your cities when you get them in the mail. Thanks!

Slovak...a lesson in geography

Branislav Rac was kind enough to help us with translation to Slovak. At the same time another user requested Slovenian text. Well it turns out that Slovak and Slovenian are two different languages of two different countries. We screwed up and mis-mapped them. And in our misguided excitement decided to recategorize some of the blogs into it. Well we got that all sorted out today and have properly assigned Slovak and will soon be deploying Slovenian. Pleaese accept our apologies for the mistake.

Brano, tshirt for you. Please upload a Flickr photo of you with the tshirt in Stupava, Slovak Republic. Or you can really confuse us and take a train over to Slovenia and take a picture there.

Spanish widget text

All our services have great uptake in the global Spanish markets. We launched our Spanish text with help from Pablo Pérez of Pablogeo.

PS. Please post a photo on Flickr of you in the t-shirt in Valencia Spain.

Portuguese widget text!

The first new language support we deployed is Portuguese. We would like to give a shout out to Lucas on his Chaos Blog. We will be sending Lucas a postreach t-shirt with his favorite postreach icon (serial number 1). Thanks Lucas!

P.S. Please post up a picture of you on Flickr in the t-shirt by some landmark in Rio de Janeiro. Our goal is to get a postreach t-shirt in EVERY continent, then every country.

Showcase launced and mention on TechCrunch

On Tuesday we officially launched the PostReach showcase. The showcase displays blog posts from across all blogs that use PostReach services. It is different from other content sites in that you can find content based upon the type of content you are in the mood for. Moreover, you can also find content you would not easily have found before because we also bring you great content from smaller blogs.

The last few days we have been fixing a few small bugs and adding in new language support. We really appreciate all the feedback and help we have received. We will be listing out the new language support in a separate post.

We would also like to thank TechCrunch for mentioning PostReach in an accurate and compelling manner. Thanks Duncan and Mike! We also appreciate the international coverage. We've been dropping by to comment on your blogs (different staff cover different languages on our team)

Yet another upgrade on the ClickComment icons.

As requested, we have made our icons smaller. They now take less real estate of your blog while creating the same great values. I think they actually look cooler at this smaller size. Again, thanks for the great feedback.

new color scheme for ClickComments

We have just launched the new color scheme with the ClickComments.

Thanks for all the great feedback from our users. The number one problem we heard was that the colors were too bright. Second was that it was not obviously which clickcomments were "clicked".

We were able to quickly improve the icons. Big thanks to users, such as Maruits Burgers, who helped reviewing the new color scheme to give us the confidence that this new launch addresses those problems.

Please let us know what you think?

Launching ClickComments

We have been listening to what bloggers want. In addition to traffic, you want more comments and engagement with your audience of readers. After coming across some interesting research about blog audience behavior we decided to create ClickComments. ClickComments engages your audience by making it easier to comment. On average 94.9% of your audience doesn’t comment. We decided to fix that by making it easier to comment on your blog.


We created a video to explain it to you and you can try out our ClickComments demo blog.

Tell us which new categories you want

We have been getting a few requests for additional categories to reflect the diversity of bloggers out there. We usually add them in the same day. Feel free to submit category suggestions via comments on this blog or via our feedback from.

Feature announcement: Postgroup

Today we are launching something called postgroups. We believe that this feature largely enhances the values we provide for bloggers. We have worked very hard to push this out, we are excited!

A postgroup is an invite-only group of blogs that cross-post with each other. Any postreach user can create a postgroup and invite bloggers that they know. This gives the user complete control of whose posts will appear on your blog. A blog can be a member of multiple postgroups.

You can set up a postgroup to invite specific bloggers onto your blog. Or you can set one up about a specific topic and recruit blogs that you like in the topic area.

Got a blog alliance or network?

postreach is a great too for getting more value out of your alliance/network. Blogrolls and banners are nice, but they require that your audience clicks on them. Historically, only about 1% of people click on banners. With postreach your audience can read the your blog post as an inline post without clicking 100% of the time.

Join postreach like usual, but to keep your posts within the alliance/network all you have to do is tag your post with your alliance's name. To kill two birds with one stone your entire alliance/network should use technorati tags for your alliance name to spread the name of your alliance/network.

postreach distribution math

It seems that we have received a few reviews and mentions over the last few days. We are translating the non-English ones and will respond accordingly.

For the English reviews and mentions we noticed that the analogy used by some is a bit inaccurate in describing postreach as a banner exchange. postreach is about distribution, not promotion. By focusing on the distribution of your blog post to the right audience we eliminate an inefficient step traditionally known as promotion. Below is a comparison of the two approaches:

By eliminating the promotion stage we help you use your space much more efficiently. The following table compares the different approaches out there:

postreach is focused on getting your blog posts to the right audience. Enticing users to become regular readers of your blog is the work of your blog posts themselves.

improved and simplified our signup process.

Based on the feedback we've got, we have re-design our signup process. The change is mainly to simplify it in order to improve the user experience and minimize the work and inconvenience for the users.

With the new signup process, user will not need to verify their blog. In order words, users will not need to create a "test post". All you need to is to fill out the signup form and paste the one-line code to your templates, then you are all done!

We are excited to make this improvement just in time to welcome the new year!

Happy New year!