We're excited to announce the release of another feature that we've heard a lot of requests for: anonymous participation. Turn it on and users no longer have to create a slinkset account to vote, comment and post on your site. Unregistered users get a field to leave their name for posts and comments just like how most blog comments work. We're convinced this is going to make it a lot easier for site creators to get other people involved initially. So much so that we've turned anonymous participation on by default for all newly created sites. Turn it on or off under "Settings" => "Basics":

Our #1 feature request right now is traffic stats so we made it happen. We've been hesitant to do this because we didn't want to introduce a security issue by allowing users to add arbitrary javascript, but because all the request have been for Google Analytics specifically, we realized that arbitrary javascript isn't necessary. Just give us the Google Analytics Domain ID you get from Google (or give us your tracking code and let us figure the ID out) and we'll create the javascript for you. Right now you can add your Analytics Domain ID in the admin view under "Settings"  => "Advanced".  It looks like this:

We're sorry to report that we've had a small lapse in service from our DNS provider. Worse is that even though things seem to be working again, because DNS is heavily cache you may still be experiencing issues. This could mean you cannot get to slinkset.com (or a site created with slinkset), or that if you do the page does not load correctly with CSS files and/or images missing. The only solution is to wait the cache out. Again, we're terribly sorry about this and will be looking into getting backup DNS into place in case it happens again.

So our friends over in the UK have created a site for people to post and comment on Infosec related news.  For those of you who don't know "Infosec" refers to Information Security.  The site is appropriately titled Infosec Update, please go check it out. The creators of this site are a UK-based Infosec consultancy named Mandalorian that needed somewhere to manage their bookmarks.  They started collecting so much good stuff they thought they would make their site public and share it with the rest of us. Congratulations on the launch guys!

That's right.  Silicon Alley Insider has just launched The 2008 Silicon Alley 100, their annual list of the 100 most influential and important folks in New York's digital-business community.  They wanted to make the process more interactive and available to everyone, so SAI decided to work with us to create the Silicon Alley 100 Voting Booth! We're super stoked, the site went live today and has already been getting an amazing response.  So get on over there and add your thoughts to the SA Top 100. It's been a great pleasure working with SAI so far.  We've also been working with them to create a slinkset for one of their other sites Clusterstock.  If you're interested in the stock market or the finance world, I suggest you check it out as well.

It's been another hectic month, but we're both now back in San Francisco and aching to get new features out the door. We're working hard on getting unregistered user participation live in a week or so, as mentioned in the Industry Standard. Thanks to Ian for the writeup. In the meantime we've exposed a couple hidden pages that have been around for a while. Eventually we'll get to letting you edit the menu, but for the time being we thought we should expose these somewhere so people can use them. Take a look at the footer of your page and you should see a "Recent Comments" and "Leaders" link, like so: Enjoy.

Each slinkset site now has search. The search form should be in the upper right corner of the page below the menu bar. Look for one of these: If for some reason you want your search form hidden you can do it on the "Designs" tab of your site admin under "Advanced" => "General". The results should include links and comments ordered by relevance. Please give us feedback on the quality of your search results and we'll tweak accordingly. Thanks to ultrasphinx for making this relatively easy and thanks to Garry from Posterous for starting me in the right direction. As always, please get in touch with any ideas or issues.

We're happy to announce that today we pushed out widget functionality for all sites. At the bottom of your site you should now find a "Widget" link. There any anyone can grab an HTML snippet to embed the popular links from your site on any other page they like. You can see how it looks right now by checking out the "Feature Requests" widget in the sidebar of this blog.

We're sorry to report that we're having some trouble this morning with images and css loading (see the header above? neither do we). Amazon S3 is currently down which means that our images and css are not getting served correctly and some site save operations are failing. I'll update when we know more.... UPDATE: 2PM EST - S3 is still down, but we've got some CSS back up. Sidebars, thumbnails and many other images still missing. UPDATE: 7:30PM EST - Finally. S3 is back. That was brutal. We are tremendously sorry that we weren't prepared for this. Suffice to say that we are taking steps to lessen our dependency on S3 and make failover quick if/when this happens again. Like, right now.

It's been a hectic week so far. Thanks to TechCrunch and thanks to everyone who tried out the site. Some really cool stuff got created. A special thanks goes out to Chris Pirillo, for the awesome sites he created (iphone.lockergnome.com and apple.lockergnome.com), his blog post about slinkset, and for putting us through our first digging. We're excited to get back to cranking out new features. Check back soon!