Manteresting : Blog

Halloween is right around the corner, and before it gets too close, we wanted to have a little fun and possibly inspire you along the way. Over the next two weeks, we are asking our community to nail the most epic halloween costumes they can find to MANteresting.

What’s in it for you, you ask?

Well, we teamed up with our good friends over at Dollar Shave Club and they agreed to be official sponsors of the MANteresting 2012 Halloween Costume Contest. What’s that? You don’t know who Dollar Shave Club is? Well watch this hilarious/brilliant Viral Video they made and get filled in:

Here’s the play-by-play on how the contest works:

1. If you haven’t already received an invite to the official “MANteresting Halloween Costume Contest” community bench, shoot us an email at NAILEDit@manteresting.com to request access. Be sure to include your username in the email so we know where to send the invite. (you can also tweet to us @manteresting or reach out on our FB page).
2. After you’ve requested access, check your profile page and you should see a new bench invite request (allow up to 12 hours for invite to be sent). Hit accept on the invite button. The ”MANteresting Halloween Costume Contest” bench now shows up in your list of workbenches.
3. Nail awesome costumes (pictures or videos). Make sure they are safe for work obviously, but the cooler the costume, the better chances you’ll have at winning one of our 35 prizes. Each nail is an entry. There is no limit to the number of nails you can submit, but make sure they are part of the official workbench. Halloween costumes you nail to your own personal benches WILL NOT be counted as part of the contest.
4. Promote your entries! Nail bump count will weigh heavily on our decision, though Dollar Shave Club has final say on winning entries.
5. Wait. The day after Halloween we will be announcing the contest winners and the prizes they won. The sponsor, Dollar Shave Club Team will be selecting the best of the best, so make sure the costumes you post stand out.

 What could you win you ask?

• One of you will win a $200 Visa gift card.
• Ten of you will win 12 month subscription to Dollar Shave Club. That’s an entire years worth of razors sent directly to your door. Every. Single. Month. How freaking sweet would that be?
• Twenty-Five of you will win One Month subscriptions to Dollar Shave club. They’ll send some sweet razors to your door. If you like the blades and the convenience, you can start service. If you don’t, you cancel your account and move on with your life. Easy enough?

A few important things to note.

Anyone can join the bench and nail their submissions, however winners must be able to provide a US shipping address. Winners emails will be provided to DSC for claiming of prize. Other than that, make sure your submissions are on topic (meaning Halloween costumes and not just Halloween related images) and that they follow our normal guidelines.

You can browse the official contest bench here.

If you have any questions you can shoot us an email or ask them in the comments section below. Good luck!!!!!!

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We have tens of thousands of users. We have 84,000 nails as of the writing of this post. Over 16,000 different workbenches. Needless to say, we have a crap ton of content going up each day, as well as a crap ton of new users that are joining the community.

We also have a page in our about section called “Guidelines” that lays out our expectations of the community.

Now we aren’t stupid. We know people (especially men) don’t read the instruction book before they do something. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever read the “terms of service” of any product or site. I just check the box saying I did and carry on about my business.

A select few users seem to use MANteresting as a place to post pictures of women dressed in scantily clad clothes, small bikinis, in their underwear, and on a very rare occasion…completely naked. When we send them emails saying they can’t do this, or when we end up deleting their content, they get pissed. Rightfully so, as guys you’d think you’d be encouraged to nail hot chicks right?

Here is why you can’t:

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Since we are quickly approaching the 30,000 nail mark (crazy since we aren’t even two months old!) we finally have a large enough database to make categories worth while. It’s about time huh?

If you look on the menu bar you’ll see the category tab with a whole slew of different options. Check it….

Click any category you like and prepare to see some awesome nails. My personal favorites at this point “funny”, “cars and motorcycle”, and “animals”. If you would like us to add (or remove) a particular category just drop us a comment here or get at us on twitter at @MANteresting, and let us know.

NAIL AWAY!

-The MANteresting Team

p.s. The Android and iPhone development process is moving along nicely and we hope to have a more mobile friendly version of our site available soon.

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Coming at you with another feature. We’ve had some users reach out to us asking for the ability to make a workbench private. One indicating he does not necessarily want his boss being able to see his nails. As always, when you ask for something, we listen. You can now make workbenches private.

If you click the “add” tab in the menu bar and select “workbench”, you will notice a new button “private”. If you click that private button and create your workbench, any nail added to that bench will be hidden from all MANteresting users, it will also be hidden from the homepage.

What’s more, this image with not be indexed in our search feature. Even if someone types in the exact URL to a nail in your private workbench, they will only get a “Sorry you can’t view this nail” error message.

We will eventually give you the ability to grant users (that you choose) access to your private workbenches, but for now it’s locked down to just the creator.

Any bench you have made private will show up at the bottom of all your benches when looking at your individual user page. Private workbenches will have a small icon by it (see image below). You can always add or remove the private status to a workbench by simply click the “edit” button on that workbenches page.

Private workbenches are perfect for people who might want to store personal images of their family and friends, but do not want the general community to be able to see said family/friends.

You could also use a private workbench to nail images that you don’t think the community would find interesting, like if you have an extreme obsession with socks. You can now create your very own private “Favorite Socks” bench, nail 1,000 images of green socks, and not worry about it cluttering up the homepage. Win-win for everyone.

Private benches, we assume, will also be used by users that want to push the boundaries of our TOS. Just to be clear, Jesse and I will still be able to view ALL users workbenches (private or not) to ensure no content is being published that could get us in legal trouble. If you’re not sure a nail meets our TOS, use a private bench to store it. If it flat out violates our TOS, don’t nail it at all.

We hope you guys like private benches because we are pretty darn excited about them. Now get to nailing!

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The second most requested feature from users has been a system that limits the amount of duplicate content appearing on MANteresting. Renailing is incredibly popular, and when someone posts a picture of an epic Chili recipe, it isn’t uncommon for that nail to be renailed 10 or 20 times throughout the day. Awesome that people like stuff enough to want to store it to one of their workbenches, annoying that this cluttered up the homepage.  We originally rolled out the “report” button hoping that users would flag inappropriate and/or duplicate content. If two different users flag the same nail, that nail is not removed from the website, but is hidden from the homepage view. The amount of nails going up per day has been insane and moderation was taking up waaaaaaay too much time. Soooooo, Jesse and one of our main developers spent the last few days working on some new code that punches duplicate content in the nuts. Here’s how things used to work:

• Let’s say JohnDoe nails image X.
• User SnoopDizzle likes image X and wants to renail it to his man food workbench. Image X is duplicated and appears at top of home page as image Y.
• Now user GuacamoleMan sees image Y and wants to renail it, thus creating image Z. Instead of image X being shown as “renailed twice”, image X was renailed once and image Y was renailed once. Lame.

• JohnDoe nails image X.
• SnoopDizzle really likes image X and wants to renail it back to his “man food” workbench.
• If image X is renailed within a twelve hour time frame of it’s original posting, SnoopDizzle’s renail will be hidden from the homepage, but is still viewable to SnoopDizzle (and the rest of the community) on Snoop’s man food workbench page.
• JohnDoe’s original of image X will show “1 renail” at the bottom.
• Now GuacamoleMan sees image X and also renails it. This renail is also hidden, and JohnDoe’s renail count on image X increases to “2″. Thus creating an infinite loop of positive renail credit.

For now Jesse and I arbitrarily picked a twelve hour window. As soon as twelve hours and one minute passes, a renail of image X will appear at the top of the homepage again as image Y.  Why? While we want to give the original nail author as much credit as possible, we also need to allow old content to be re-promoted after a certain period of time. If we simply hid all renails indefinitely you would likely miss out on a lot of awesome content as the number of nails going up per day is so high (we assume you probably don’t want to scroll through 1,000s of nails every time you visit). We know the system isn’t perfect, and believe me, we are working on new algorithms and code that will make renailing even better, but we hope this step in the right direction makes you a little happy. As always, leave any comments or concerns you have in the comment section below. Deuces, -The MANteresting Team p.s. Make sure to check back tomorrow as we will be releasing yet another SUPER AWESOME feature that will make you want to projectile vomit all over the place because you wont be able to handle the excitement.

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We are excited to announce the introduction of two new pages to MANteresting. The “Top Voted” and “Wall of Shame” pages are our latest and greatest feature and we think you are going to love it.

As you visit MANteresting you are, by default, taken to the “Everything” homepage. This shows all of the most recent activity users are nailing. Lots of complaints came our way about duplicate content. Sometimes the “Everything” page would get pretty frustrating to browse because the same funny picture was renailed seven different times within five minutes. This definitely takes away from the user experience.

Enter Bumping:
So Jesse and I wanted to think outside of the box. Instead of having our “popular” page be based off nothing other than the amount of times an image has been renailed, we wanted to implement a voting mechanism. As you hover over a nail this is now what you’ll see…

Sexy is it not? If you like the nail and want to show your support, simply click the “bump it” button to push it higher on the “Top Voted” page. The nails with the highest number of bumps are displayed on top. Within a day or two you will be able to filter the content on the “Top Voted” page to view the most popular nails of the day, the last week, the last month, or all time. Until we get that filter coded in, be aware the “top voted” page is defaulted to all time bumps.

Bumping is so cool we did away with “liking” a nail, since they are almost the same thing. Don’t worry though, we migrated all of the previous “like” data in to our bumping structure, so it’s all good in the hood.

For Shame:
You’ll also notice in addition to the Bump It! button there is a Shame It! button. This button is perfect for images that DON’T violate our terms of service, but are really disturbing and deserve to be publicaly shamed. Examples of nails that deserve shaming; anything Nickelback related, a boquet of flowers, kittens, and back boobs. Definitely shame all backboobs…

Think of the Shame It! button as a “dislike” button for Facebook. From time to time, we will be featuring the worst of the worst. We expect the Wall of Shame to be both utterly awesome and terribly disturbing. (note: please continue to use the “report” button for any inappopriate images that don’t meet our TOS; porn, spam, kittens, etc). 

But wait, there’s more…
In an attempt to further reduce the number of duplicate images appearing we are asking users to consider bumping an image instead of renailing it. If you see something really awesome, but don’t necessarily need to attach it to one of your workbenches, “Bump it!” instead. On your user page (get there by clicking your username on the top right of menubar and selecting “my page”), you’ll notice on the left hand side a new link that says “view your bump history“. Every nail you have ever bumped is saved to this page for you…

Long story short, if you like a nail, bump it. If you like a nail, and want to categorize it for safe keeping, renail that sucker and bump the original.

The voting mechanism is brand new and we know we still got some work to do on it. Within a week or two here are some of the changes you can expect with it…

• After clicking the bump it or shame it button, the number of bumps will immediately appear (currently you have to refresh page to see the change).
• The current algorithm is simple: Bumps – Shames = Total. Not too long from now, however, it will look more like this: Bumps + Renails + Comments x Magic – Shames = Total.
• The “Top Voted” page will likely become the default home page. This way new and old users alike will ensure they are seeing the most manteresting content on our site each time they visit.

That about wraps it up. We’ve spent a lot of time (and money) on this feature and we really do think it helps show you guys we are SOOOOO much more than just another “Pinterest copycat”. We have a lot of plans for the bumping system down the road, but for now we are focusing our attention on the user experience. Smoother navigation and more efficient browsing here we come!

If you have any problems with bumping and would like to recommend some changes feel free to email us at dudes(at)MANteresting.com. We like hearing from you

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Exactly one month ago, Jesse and I launched MANteresting. While we believed in the potential behind the site, we weren’t sure others saw the same. Launch day (Feb 16th) was awesome. You guys helped us hit 5,000 unique visits on our very first day by spreading the word on FB and Twitter. Our stats tapered off for the next ten days, averaging closer to 400 visits a day.

But then something exciting happened. We got our first major media mention. Guy Kawasaki, a NYT best-selling author, tweeted about us multiple times and got the ball rolling. Since then, we’ve been mentioned on ABC, TechCrunch, Gawker, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, MSN, CNet, and dozens of smaller scale publications. We saw a crap ton of traffic in a very short period of time. 

Our site started crashing, our email notification system went down, and weird bugs that we’d never seen before were popping up left and right. These are all very good problems to have, frustrating, but good because it meant we were growing. We’ve managed to work out most of the kinks and bugs. We upgraded our servers. We have an iPhone and Android app in the works. And we are just weeks away from releasing some really cool features that should only help fuel the MANteresting fire.

The development of MANteresting is quickly becoming a “full-time” job. Responding to media requests, interacting with our users, managing our contractors, talking with potential investors, not to mention we still have to be awesome husbands, has definitely been exhausting. Fortunately for us, we are uber motivated and have no plans to slow down. Go big or go home right? 

Alright, so now is the time where I share our first month traffic breakdown. For those of you unfamiliar with the internet and website scaling this will mean nothing to you. But for those bloggers and internet junkies that track this kind of stuff, hopefully you find these numbers as impressive as we do. Here’s what we accomplished in our first 30 days…

We broke half a million page views in less than 30 days! That’s absolute insanity. As a frame of reference, It took my other blog 3 years to reach 900,000 pageviews. MANteresting will pass 900,000 pageviews before it turns two months old. Another encouraging stat is that we had over 124,000 unique visitors come to our site. The most “unique visitors” my other blog has ever had in a single month is about 9,000.

We wanted MANteresting to succeed. We had high expectations for the site. But we never could have anticipated just how quickly this thing would take off. The best part about this whole thing is that MANteresting is really only about 50% as cool as it is will be. If you guys are loving it as much as we think you are right now, I can’t wait to see how you’ll interact with the site once we implement some of these super secret features we are working on.

As my boy Buzz Lightyear once said….

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We’ve had a handful of people reach out wondering why there isn’t a way to view nails by category yet (sports, food, funny, etc). The answer is pretty straightforward, we don’t want to release a crappy feature.

Categorized pages will be great, but until we build up our nail database more (say 25,000+ nails) it would be more frustrating than it would be helpful. After we get a few other key features rolled out, we will be focusing on highlighting specific content. Both through category pages, as well as a most popular page. We know that having the homepage only can be a little frustrating, so we appreciate your patience as we build out more of this architecture.

We’d rather build a feature right and take a little more time, than build it wrong and push it too quick. If there are other categories you would like to see, in addition to those above let us know and we will add them.

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It seems that you guys really enjoy renailing some of the more awesome content that shows up on MANteresting. This is great because it means you are finding things that pique your interest. The downside is that, since we are still a small startup operation, this often means the same nail will show up two, three, or four times really close together. Like this…

This can be quite frustrating for the user as it seems like all you are seeing is the same stuff over and over again. Pinterest also has this problem, but since they have so many more users, there are often bigger gaps between duplicate content. Until we grow a bit more, this will always be an issue for us.

We are in the process of building out a “popular” page which will show the best content on MANteresting. This page will also help to significantly reduce the number of reposts the MANteresting community sees.

The thing is, we are thinking outside the box and instead of having the popular content simply be the most “renailed” image, we are brewing up an ever better way to determine what deserves to be featured. A way that will totally rock your face off and make the site a million times more manteresting. 

So it might take a few more days, but it will get rolled out, and we are confident you’ll like it.

Standby.

-The MANteresting Team

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We are a little over two weeks old now and have loved every minute of growth since we first launched. We’ve been fortunate to be mentioned in some major media outlets (Tech Crunch, ABC, Huff Post, Gawker, The Star, etc). This has brought us a flurry of traffic and a GREAT increase in our user base.

As time has passed, Jesse and I have had to make some decisions on the type of content that is/isn’t acceptable on MANteresting. We definitely appreciate the female body (our wives can vouch for that), but we don’t want MANteresting to become Playboy, or even Maxim for that matter.

There are a million shades of gray when it comes to determining what is/isn’t appropriate, and to be honest, moderating flagged content sucks. Instead of being able to focus our energy on awesome features like an iPhone app, we find ourselves moderating a lot of questionable content.

We still want to give users freedom to nail what they want as long as it meets our Safe For Work (SFW) terms. It appears a small number of users are not quite understanding what qualifies as SFW so we thought we would break it down for you.

Here is an example of three images we do think are safe for work…

Snoopy is definitely SFW

We know this might make a few of our users mad, not being able to post every picture they want of Katy Perry (she seems to be quite popular here), but we hope that all of the other awesome content and categories our users push  keeps you engaged. If all you want to do is post pictures of half naked women, we probably aren’t the right site for you.

It is impossible for us to keep up with the number of nails that go up each day, so we ask our users to help maintain accountability amongst the community. If there are nails that you feel like violate our SFW terms, please hit the report button. This sends Jesse and I an email notification. We review that specific nail, and if we feel it violates our TOS we pull it. If it’s a pair of shoes (seriously why do people flag shoes?) we will remove the flag and leave the nail up.

If you have any concerns, comments, or feedback you want to get our way, you’ll notice the homepage of MANteresting (not the blog, but the main site) has a bar on the left hand side asking for feedback. If you click it, you can leave an anonymous (or non-anonymous) recommendations as to some features or bugs that you would like to see rolled out. You can also vote on features other users have requested. This is the best way for us to know where to prioritize and put our energy.

Lastly, we have some exciting features that we are just days away from releasing. They will really help step up the level of interaction amongst users. It’s gonna be epic.

Things are only getting better from here guys. Thanks for sharing us with your friends.

-The MANteresting Team.

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Update number two coming your way. Let’s get right to it….

1.The bookmarklet doesn’t suck anymore!

Number one complaint from users was that the bookmarklet didn’t work on a bunch of sites you wanted it to. We had our developer put some serious time in to it, and we are happy to report that it should pretty much work anywhere you want it to. If you still run in to issues with it, shoot us an email and let us know ’cause we have checked it off our list.

2. Viewing Nails from Home Page.

We just rolled out a more conveinant way to look at nails from the home page. Before you had to click the nail, get redirected to the full nail view, and then click back in your browser. This was pretty cumbersome and annoying. Now, when you are surfing from the homepage simply click the nail and it will hover over the home page in full view. When you are done looking at it, click off in to negative space and you can keep on browsing right where you left off.

3. Notifications are just hours away from being finished up.

You’ll soon be able to get email updates every time someone comments, likes, or renails one of your images.

On another note, we were fortunate to get some pretty good PR over the last few days and have seen a skyrocket in new user signups and site traffic. This makes us very happy. We are motivated to keep rolling out features and making the user experience even better. Stay tuned, things are about to get very manteresting

-The MANteresting team

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Welcome to the blog. This is where we will be updating you all, as needed, on any news or updates relevant to MANteresting.com. It’s especially important to check back over the next few weeks as we plan to kick some major butt, and make serious improvements to the overall user experience. We can’t share all of the features we want to roll out ’cause those other sites might try and jack ‘em, but here’s what we can tell you we are working on.

User efficiency.

We know some of the navigation can be a tad cumbersome. We are coding in ways to keep you from having to click around so much. We’ll be making the full nail page overlay the homepage. When you are done looking at the nail, you just click of it in to negative space and can continue where you left off (kinda like how Facebook does things when you click on a picture).

The bookmarklet.

We know the bookmarklet needs some serious work. It doesn’t seem to be taking well to websites that end in .htm or .html so keep that in mind. It also wont work on Facebook or Flickr, however we probably won’t change that for privacy concerns. Making the bookmarklet more functional is at the top of our list. The bookmarklet is pretty much good to go and should work pretty much everywhere

Notifications.

You’d probably like to be updated when new people start following you or your workbenches. Or maybe you want to get notified when someone comments on one of your nails. Pretty soon we will have notifications implemented and you can choose what types of things you want to be notified about.

Friend Finding.

While it’s currently possible to find your friends by typing in manteresting.com/u/THEIRUSERNAME, we know that’s not very convenient. We have our developers working on a way to not only find friends that are currently using the site, but a way for you to easily invite your friends to join in on the fun. More people = More nails = More manly content.

Improved searching.

Our search bar is functional, but not as polished as it could be. We’ll be rolling out ways for you to tag images (if you want) which should help narrow down search results to the most relevant content.

Secrets.

That’s about all we can say for now, but we are definitely pumped about some of the things we’re brewing up.

If you guys have any concerns. If something isn’t working like it should. If you want to see a new feature. Or if you just want to tell us how much you love the website. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE feel free to shoot us an email and let us know. The only way for us to make MANteresting more awesome is to hear from the people that use it.

contact@manteresting.com

Until next time,

-The MANteresting Team

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