PlayStationSpot

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: yet *another* company jumping (late) onto the blogosphere twitter social networking bandwagon. Like the title says, we’re on Facebook now - but we’re not there “just to be there.” We’ve re-created everything you find here on the PlayStation.Blog - news, pics, videos, links - all in one central location. We’re all about flexibility - find the PlayStation information you want in the way that you want - and here’s another easy option for you.

So you’re the type of reader who subscribes to the RSS feed, gets the email updates, and still drops into the site just in case… what does this page offer you? PlayStation Events.

Our promotions department will use Facebook to let you know every place they’re going to be (Coachella this weekend!), and in turn, you can let them know you’re coming through the app’s excellent event system.

Another reason to join us? To let everyone on your friends list know that you’re a loyal fan of PlayStation.Blog. Because you *know* they obsessively read your mini-feed. Find our Facebook page here.

PS - Keep in mind, this is our first go at this, and Facebook is pretty darn flexible. Any applications you’d like to see on the page? Should we build our own apps? Let us know.

Day in, day out we come into work, and it’s heads down trying to crank out a post or two about something new to the world of PlayStation. We know we’re doing a decent job when we pull in a couple hundred comments, or when that post rating inches close to 5.00. But it’s nice to hear it from the outside - which is what happened today. This here PlayStation.Blog is an official Webby Honoree in the Games-related category.

“Of the more than 8000 entries submitted to the 12th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree.”

So the way I see it, that’s an 85 or so - a solid B. Not bad for a blog that’s less than a year old (other Honorees include Destructoid, GameSpot, GameDaily, GamesRadar), but certainly there’s room for improvement. Next year, it’d be great to see PlayStation.Blog in the more prestigious Nominees group (best of luck to this year’s noms: Wired Game|Life, Gamasutra and Zero Punctuation’s home, The Escapist).

So how can we make that happen? By serving you, the readers, better. In the past months, we’ve introduced a number of new features to make this site more useful: in-line commenting, faster loading, post tagging, and the aforementioned post ratings. I’d also like to officially introduce another new feature today: tag feeds. Here’s how it works:

See the tags at the bottom of this post (”awards, psb”)? They can be used to find all the posts this blog has ever put out there on specific topics - pretty standard in the blogosphere. But here’s something that isn’t: you can now subscribe to any of these tags. So say you only want to be notified when new Resistance info is posted. Just click on the Resistance tag, and all the Resistance-related posts will show up.

Now go up to the address bar, and just add the word “feed” at the end. You’ll be given the ability to then add a Resistance feed to your RSS reader (I use Google’s reader, but they all pretty much do the same thing). Now any time we post something with the Resistance tag, it’ll show up there.

This works with any tag on our site: Gran Turismo 5, THE EYE OF JUDGMENT, Firmware Updates, anything. Perfect for finding those title/topic-specific posts when your RSS fills up with hundreds (or thousands) of posts per day.

We’ve got some other nice features on the way in 2008. What would you like to see implemented?

Today we’re rolling out yet another new feature to the PlayStation.Blog: post ratings. At the bottom of each post you will now see the familiar 5-star square-rating thing.

At first it will display the current average rating, if there is one. To assign your own rating to a post simply move your mouse over the squares and click on one. One square is the lowest, five squares is the highest.

We’re always looking for feedback on the content we post here, and obviously your ratings will help with that. We get a lot of good comments here on the Blog, but the vast majority of them come from a very small percentage of readers. Hopefully this feature will help empower those who aren’t comfortable composing a full-on reply to our posts.

Thanks, and happy rating!

First off, we heart WordPress, it’s been a great platform for us to develop and run PlayStation.Blog. However, like most software, it never does exactly what you want it to do. That’s what makes the WordPress plugin system so sweet. We’ve used a number of plugins to tweak the functionality of this blog, but once again, sometimes there isn’t a plugin for your exact needs. What do you do? Develop your own. And that’s just what we’ve done on a number of occasions.

When we launched the direct response feature on this blog a few weeks ago we said that we’d be releasing some plugins to the WordPress community. Today is the day.

The full technical details/downloads for each of the plugins is available over at cnp_studio, the development shop we work with on this blog. Head over there to get your WordPress geek-on.

If you’re interested, here’s a brief overview of the two plugins we’re releasing:

Comment Replies

Think of it as a threaded response-lite. We wanted our authors to be able to respond directly to comments, but not create a completely threaded conversation. That’s the purpose of Comment Replies. You also have the option to style the responses in a number of different ways. Full details/download.

Image Rotator

On the front page of this blog we have a graphic banner that rotates (at the top) to feature different items with a corresponding link. Initially, we created a simple manager on the backend, but we quickly ported it over to a WordPress plugin. Just like the Comment Replies plugin, you can customize how the plugins works. Full details/download.

That’s it for now, we hope to share more in the future. Enjoy!