Headup v1.10 – The Beta: New widgets, Topic Pages & Usage Analytics

March 24th, 2010, By talk

During my time here at Headup I’ve come to realize one of the things that characterizes our progress as a startup company, is that it isn’t linear.

In other words, similar spans of time don’t necessarily manifest comparable progress.

Whereas for certain periods the work we invest is manifested in minor evolutions, other times our toil manifests itself as a major revolution.

Today marks the fruition of such a period, & what a revolution it is…

Headup – The News

I’m happy to announce the release of Headup v 1.10 which marks the launch of our official Beta & introduces the following improvements & features:

  1. Headup Snippet – The new slim Headup widget.
  2. Headup Topic Pages – Topic Pages you can customize to display your content & match your design.
  3. Analytics –  Now you can follow exactly how your widget is performing & what are the most popular topics on your site.

Please note this is a Beta, which means we’re still tweaking and testing these features. We’d love for you to try them out, and would appreciate any, and every feedback you have for us. If you run across something you feel is broken or silly, please let us know, so we can fix it.

Thanks!

Headup Snippet – A New Widget is Born

The new Headup “Snippet” is a lightweight widget that displays a short summary & related articles from your site for the topics it identifies in your content. It’s the default widget on this blog & it looks like this:

Headup Snippets - Introducing the Diet Widget

Headup Snippets - Introducing the Diet Widget

To activate Snippet widgets instead of your default Tabbed widget enter your dashboard & select “Snippet” from “Widget Mode” options in the new “General Settings” box:

Want Snippets? Choose your widget type

Want Snippets? Set your Widget Mode to "Snippet"

Snippet widgets are linked to Headup Topic Pages via the “View Topic” button

Headup Topic Pages – All the Freshest Content about your Topics in 1 place

Headup Topics Pages show in-depth dynamic coverage for your topics & offer related activities & topic-to-topic browsing. They can be accessed via Snippet widgets or directly by setting your “Widget Mode” to “Link”.

All the Freshest Content about your Topics in 1 place

All the Freshest Content about your Topics in 1 place

Topic & Usage Analytics

By popular demand we’ve added a brand new “Analytics” tab to the publisher dashboard. Use it to learn how many times your visitors use Headup, for how long, & which topics are the most popular on your site.

Topic & Usage Analytics

Topic & Usage Analytics

A Word of Thanks

As you can see over these past few months we’ve been working intensively on improving Headup & developing exciting new features for your enjoyment, however hadn’t it not been for a wonderful & select group of supportive bloggers, some of which you’ve met here in our weekly blogger interviews, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to check these new features &test their value.

Before I sign off I’d like to take the opportunity to say a heartfelt “Thank You” to Dave, David & Ruhani for all their support. Thanks guys! We couldn’t have pulled this one off & launched our Beta without you…

5 reasons why your Headup experience just improved

January 13th, 2010, By talk

2009 becomes 2010: Happy New Year!

A new Year – A new Headup

If you’ve been using our widget for a while, or if you frequent our website regularly, you may have noticed that recently we’ve been making quite a few changes.

These first two weeks of 2010 mark the culmination of a series of developments we’ve been working on under wraps for quite some time in response to the feedback we got from you. Thankfully these developments have finally reached a level of maturity we feel comfortable with and we’re making  more and more of them accessible to you almost daily.

Before I proceed to tell y’all what’s new I’d first like to take the opportunity and say THANK YOU to all the great people* who’ve been supportive of our efforts all this time and gave us the feedback we needed in order to improve.

5 reasons why your Headup experience just improved:

  1. The quality of our markings has improved significantly due a massive overhaul the system underwent. I’ll be writing more about our new marking system in the days ahead so if you’re into Semantic Web, NLP and all that jazz stay tuned…
  2. We’ve added new types of content to the mix of complementary content we provide and the quality of the existing ones has been improved.
  3. Widgets now display a feedback button that enables users to report whether the widget is useful in their opinion. The feedback gathered this way helps us improve the quality of our markings.
  4. Access to the publisher dashboard allows registered users to customize and tweak their widgets’ performance.
  5. Support for all major platforms is now available. Regardless of what platform you’re using you can now add Headup to your site easily and quickly.

*  Thanks great people for all your support:
AreYouScreening.com
JeffPulver.com
Jewlicious.com
InsideGossip.co.uk
RuhaniRabin.com
OfficialTwitters.com
OffTrackPlanet.com
EarthyReport.com
FamilyInsights.net
HeyUGuys.co.uk
J-Entonline.com

Image credit: Optical illusion