Knit Bat'leth Scarf

I'd like to add a bit about voting. I don't think enough people are bothering to vote, cause I've rarely seen the meter go north of 9 and you predicted the magic number would be 15. It's a dandy, VideoSift-ey widget that is quite overlooked by many, IMO. And that alien is so darn cute!

hi, it's been really fun reading neatorama over the last year or so, but i have a few comments i'd like to make about the upcoming queue.

1) is it normal that on rss feed, the images of the queue do not show? or am i the only having the problem?

2) i think it's a great idea to get people to contribute, but i have mostly skipped over whatever is in the queue for the much better quality of posts by neatorama writers. it's a personal opinion, just my two-cents worth and you will, of course, continue to do what you deem fit for the blog.

congratulations btw, keep up the good work!

I'm happy for you Alex that your crazy scientist experiment is turning out good. The only critic would be the 'new' search engine : checking for double post does not bring up quality results.
Example, looking up "giraffe" for this post did not bring the original post : http://www.neatorama.com/2009/01/30/fighting-giraffes/#comments

I second that. If you want people to search before posting, they should have a front page search engine that works.

The word "win" makes redundant the word "free" in the final paragraph unless of course you have in the past or intend in the future to offer prizes that will require payment by the winner.

Thanks for the feedback, guys - I do agree that the search can be better. I'm going to talk to the guys at Lijit to see if we can improve the performance of the search engine.

@tringo - can you elaborate or send me a screenshot of the missing pictures in your RSS feed? This was a problem early on that was fixed.

Re: quality of the Upcoming Queue post - well, you have to keep in mind that these posts are raw and unfiltered. The good ones - those that garnered the most votes by Neatorama readers just like yourselves - are promoted to the blog's front page. Basically, if you just visit the blog, you will only see the best of the Upcoming Queue submissions.

@Alex: It's great to see you take the feedback about the search engine constructively and are going to do something about it! (Or at least look into it.)

If you're collecting "wish list" items for future upgrades to the application, here are mine:
- a way to flag for duplicate content (so that everyone reading the queue can see it's duplicate and won't waste their time voting for it)
- a way for the author to edit or delete their submission (after they've hit submit)

As an aside, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who blogs about the 80/20 rule!
http://leesdoodles.blogspot.com/2008/09/8020-rule.html

I tried creating a post the other day, but got bogged down in the "Select Image Thumb" step. I filled out the first two steps correctly (or at least thought I did), but when I got to the image part, all I get is "No thumbnail images were found at the link address you specified".
The FAQ had no wise words to assist me, maybe you do?

I can also confirm that as of late, images do not load for neatorama in my reader. I'm using Akregator in Linux, and none of my other feeds do this. And yes it looks like it's specifically Upcoming Queue articles only that are affected.

@BadCat - if the server couldn't find images in the post you select, then it'll return that message. You can still submit the post, though it probably won't do as well in the Queue because of the missing thumbnail.

When the server is bogged down or if the link has a lot of pictures, this step can be slow. It's something that we'll have to improve in the future.

@vom - this is a known bug, which should be fixed as of now. Thank you!