Every day, we receive hundreds of submissions of links you'd like to share with the Boing Boing universe. We're deeply thankful that you take the time to turn us on to the anomalies, curiosities, and eyebrow-raisers that you find in your online travels! But the sheer volume means that even the best often go unposted. So to make the submission process easier and an order-of-magnitude more fun, we've created the Submitterator! Think of it as a public submissions form: every link you submit is shared with everyone else to check out instead of vanishing into the dark night of the BB inbox. Of course, we'll be keeping a constant vigil on the Submitterator for possible front page posts. Meanwhile, you can also comment on everyone else's submissions, vote them up or down, and soon reTweet and Facebook Share them.
To use the Submitterator just hit "Submit a link" and have at it. (You'll need to log in using your regular Boing Boing username.) Keep your text and any excerpt short and snappy. If you include a URL, your submission headline will link to it. The best headlines are descriptive rather than punny. If you like what someone else submitted, click +. If you don't, click -.
(Of course, for submissions you'd like to keep private you can still use the traditional form.)
We hope that the Submitterator will become a place for all of us to take a wider view of wonderful things and share our individual excitement with the Boing Boing community.
We've wanted to build the Submitterator for several years. We're thankful to our launch sponsor, Zync from American Express, for helping us finally make it happen. And it wouldn't have been possible without the tremendous talent of our unstoppable developer Dean "Dino" Putney (pictured) and unbreakable managing editor Rob Beschizza. Of course, thanks also to super sysadmin Ken Snider for keeping the wires untangled.
Now, please join us and submit to the Submitterator!
Spotted a bug? Please send email to Dean at boing boing dot net, and be sure to tell him what browser and platform you're on.
41 Comments • Add a comment
Cray supercomputer trivia. Back in the day every Cray computer was shipped with a case of a local Chippewa Falls beer called "Leinenkugels". Delightful low hop beverage with a geeky pedigree.
Not working for me, alas. I'm on a Mac using Firefox 4.0b1. Text entry gets hung up after about 75 characters. It's happened four times now.
Is the same Cray that rendered The Last Starfighter? 'Cause that would be sweet.
Cray also had splendid employee gifts, which often turn up on Ebay.
This is awesome. Will be sure to use, rock on.
Bug: Trying to type 'k' in the form scrolled up to the top of the page. I had to paste it in. (firefox 3.6.8, win XP pro 5.1)
Try again. We had a bug previously that got added back in right before launch. It's removed now.
For any other bugs, please email me directly at dean@boingboing.net
Submissions a la reddit? Interesting.
A new American Express card, you say?
Personally impressed that the submitterator is powered by a Cray.
Wait, Amex launched a credit card called Zync?
I don't know if I should be annoyed that they can't spell or humored because zinc is one of the cheapest metals that you can buy.
What's next, Visa Lead? MastardCard Aluminum?
are you just running reddit under the hood of this ?
Bear in mind that it's a "public sub queue" with a utilitarian purpose. It's not intended as a Reddity thing. Though obviously the MT plugin we're using has some fancy voting stuff and y'all are welcome to use it as you please.
We were holding out for Diner's Club International Titnum.
great could it have it's own rss feed?
At first I thought this was called The Sublimator. Which would be really cool, and in practice probably about as accurate.
It looks more like a Submitron to me.
Wait, so you made reddit? I thought that's where most BoingBoing posts came from anyway...
Feed!
http://boing.scoundrel.ca/dbb.php?http://boingboing.net/submit/atom.xml
No wonder Cray is out of business.
Leinenkugels indeed, one beer was enough to last a lifetime. If you lived to tell about it.
Was just coming here to request a feed - thanks, Rob! :-)
Now, it needs a link/icon/fix the rel=alternate value in the header of the submiterator page.
Another idea - how about a Twitter bot (based on the feed, perhaps)? I'd love it if I could add the bot to my Twitter lists for use in Flipboard on my iPad.
It's at least as good as Pabst and I've drank gallons of that stuff.
So when do we get a toolbar button so we can "click and submit" right from the source?
Um, so now Boing boing is attempting to be... reddit? Isn't that where a bunch of their material comes from?
It's a public tip sheet, telling us what you want to see blogged. It has voting features, but if that doesnt help us they will probably go away. Treating it like a social network will lead to disappointment.
why not call it digdig
Seems like an awesome way to self-promote a web project without the messy necessity of getting one of you A#1 blogging editors to vet it. Awesome!
Because it Isn'tIsn't. Submitterator is a public submission form. The voting is more of a fun experiment that we decided to try out in case the submissions become so numerous (yay!) that we can't read through them all without your help. We like DIGG and Reddit just the way they are, and this isn't us trying to be them.
This looks interesting.
I find the date a little awkward. Since the order seems based on "score" the time stamp might read better as "X hours ago"...
Nice design also.
Additionally, this doesn't strike me as similar to digg or reddit, etc, because Boing Boing has a core group of writers and editors. Those few people are the reason I read Boing Boing, daily.
I think they have just opened up the editorial process to their readership. It's really quite interesting.
It's not Boingboing, it's Fark!
Hey, you seen the number of wires in a Cray? ;)
This is reminiscent of the "sub-queue" at Plastic.com, which is amazingly still around nine years after it was launched as an offshoot of the dear, departed Suck.com (and which brought me to BB via a side link). Good stuff.
great idea, thank you!
I think this would be most interesting if Boing Boing added some sort of "editor's choice" feature for the Submitterator. The !voting will work fine, but I think the real plus of this "public submission form" will be for the editorial team to point to more good things, while hopefully focusing more on the magazine features you all have been turning out more often, and which have been uniformly excellent. In other words, anything that lets the talented writers here focus more on writing and less on the sort of linking and finding that's the bread and butter of Boing-ish blogs.
Of course, if the blog stays exactly the same, and this is just an added bonus, that's cool too. Nice idea.
I keep getting
"You don't have permission to post."
I'm on a mac with firefox and chrome
Will someone start a blog highlighting the dregs of the submitterator: ones that weren't judged good enough to get boinged, but still worth checking out? Or could we get a search for everything on the submitterator in the last X time range that received N votes?
Not that I necessarily disagree with the choices of BB's eds, but come on, crowdsourcing is doubleplusgood.
You really want a site devoted to nursing home and car repair spam?
Any chance of a feature allowing you to search whether a given link has already been submitted by someone else? In those cases, a new submission wouldn't be necessary (unless you're convinced that you can do a much awesomer job of it).
@dw_funk, That's a really nice comment. Thank you. I think the submissions we end up posting on the front page are basically the "editors' choices" you're suggesting. But of course you're right, there will always be a lot of great stuff on Submitterator that doesn't end up on the front page as well simply due to volume, time constraints, etc. It's only been one day and we're all really enjoying just reading Submitterator as if it's a massive group blog too. And I appreciate the kind words about the features. Rob has done an amazing job with the design of those (and assigning, editing, etc.), and I think that adds a lot to the experience.
@Kabur Naj, Yes, I want that too! It's on the list. Hopefully sometime soon!
And thanks all for the great feedback. We are really jazzed about Submitterator and are thrilled that you all are too. Thank you.
Yeah, one man's "dregs" is another man's "freedom fighters". The whole idea of submitterator seems to be that there are good things slipping through the cracks already that might be helpfully identified by commenters or "likers". I'm just saying there are bound to be things slipping through these cracks still that other people would appreciate. The long tail of what's worth looking at and what's not.
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