What’s Included

In each email you’ll see two of our favorite recent entries from around the site, and a few submissions from the Question Collective. You get all the information you need packaged neatly within one email. For each submission we showcase the user’s name, link straight to their profile, link straight to the discussion of each submission, number of responses and so on. For each featured entry from the site, we also display its category, and a short excerpt from the piece. You can preview what one of these emails looks like here.

Subscriptions

If you’re a member of SoulPancake, you’ll automatically be subscribed to get the emails. Of course, we know some of you already have enough email to deal with, so turning them off is incredibly easy as well. Simply login to SoulPancake, navigate to Settings then to My Account and un-check the Subscribe to SoulPancake Weekly Highlights checkbox. Or you can just click the unsubscribe links at the bottom of the email. Then you’ll never receive these emails again.

We hope you enjoy the Weekly SPoonfuls!

How It Works

When you click “Remember Me” we use a persistent cookie that lets your browser remember who you are. The cookie remains in tact until you logout of SoulPancake or the cookie expires. Adversely, if you don’t click “Remember Me” we use sessions that keep you logged in until you close the browser.

As with any other web-based service like Gmail, Facebook or Twitter, if you’re using a public computer, it’s always best to logout when you’re finished browsing, and make sure not to click “Remember Me” when first logging in.

Security

Since the persistent cookie lets you stay logged in to SoulPancake, it’s very important to protect each member’s critical account information at all times. We’ve added a new confirmation field to your Settings under the My Account tab. Before you can edit or update your email address or password, you must first verify yourself to the system, by confirming your current password.

This way, even if you login to SoulPancake in a public place, and happen to forget to logout, you can still take control of your account at any time. Of course, as a precautionary measure, be sure to never give your password out to anyone you don’t trust.

Definitions

Session Cookies: These are temporary and are erased when you close your browser at the end of your surfing session. The next time you visit that particular site it will not recognise you and will treat you as a completely new visitor as there is nothing in your browser to let the site know that you have visited before.

Persistent Cookies: These remain on your hard drive until you erase them or they expire. How long a cookie remains on your browser depends on how long the visited website has programmed the cookie to last.

Definitions from Allaboutcookies.org.

Your New Home

Every one of us now has a place to call home on SoulPancake. If you’re an existing member, login and click your name. If you’re new to SoulPancake, signing up is a breeze. Your profiles track all of your discussions, submissions and any direct replies you receive from around the community. You can also share a little bit about yourself, connect to twitter (more on that later), and link to your website. To view other people’s profiles, simply click on a profile pic from any discussion thread, or whenever their username is mentioned in discussions.

Discussions & Replies

Tracking everyone’s discussions is fairly straight forward in terms of functionality. We are particularly excited about the way direct replies are being handled… When you login to SoulPancake, to the right of your name is an @reply notifier. When someone replies directly to anything you’ve said around SoulPancake, this will notify you of the new message. Click the reply notification to view all of your @replies, which are stored under the main tab in your profile.

Question Collective Submissions

From your profile, you can now see all your past submissions to the Question Collective. Clicking on “See them all” opens up your personal gallery. You can also navigate to “My Submissions” from the main nav.

Twitter Integration

Yup, we love twitter too…
And now we’ve made it even more seamless to communicate between both communities. In your “Settings” page, there is a new tab called “Twitter” where you can fill in your twitter username and password. Once you’re done, you’ll see a little “Tweet this” button when you’re leaving a response or submitting to the Question Collective.

The way we’ve integrated twitter is pretty unique. Every time you leave a comment or upload a question to the collective, and you have “Tweet this” enabled, SoulPancake will send out a tweet to all your followers, linking back to the discussion you’re having, or your submission. You never need to leave SoulPancake, manually go to twitter, type in the tweet, shorten the link, or anything like that. We have a group of randomly generated phrases that will get tweeted to all of your followers once you hit Submit. The system knows where you are at any given moment, so everything is automated.

You can disable this altogether in your settings and the “Tweet this” button will not be visible. Of course, connecting both accounts is totally optional, but we think it makes for a more dynamic impact when being active.

Optimization, Behind the Scenes

In addition to introducing a slew of new features to SoulPancake, we’ve done a lot of cleaning up behind the scenes. We continue to focus on providing a stable infrastructure that allows us to innovate the way our community actually interacts. Our growth up until this point has outpaced our initial expectations, and we’ve been doing our very best to keep up.

Thank you to everyone who continues to be a part of our ever-growing community… Enjoy!

Show Us Your Mug

Everybody needs an identity. By now you may have noticed a small image next to your remarkably thoughtful comments.  To customize your image, simply login to Soul Pancake and click the Change Your Settings tab from the top toolbar.  To change your image simply click Choose An Image.  Once you have found your perfect mugshot, go ahead and click Save Picture.  Next you can crop, drag, pull and bend your image until you get it just the way you want it.  When you think your image is perfect, simply click SUBMIT and that’s it, you’re ready to roll.

Quick Titles on the Question Collective

In an effort to make the Question Collective more elegant and interactive, as well as adding some eye-candy in the process, we have integrated some new hover over effects that come alive when you hover over a thumbnail on either the homepage grid, or any thumbnail in the Question Collective.

Keep a Count

While we all absolutely love to see and read your thoughtful and in depth comments, answers and assertions, we do have a 4,000 character limit.  We have instituted an easy way for you to keep count of the amount of characters that you have left when leaving a response.  You will now notice a character count down on the bottom left corner of the input field.  This will notify you if you pass 4,000 characters.  Don’t worry, you will not lose what you have written, the submit button will become inactive, and you’ll get some visual cues. In reality though, 4,000 characters is plenty of space.

Summing it All Up

Alongside some of the more notable features mentioned above, we’ve been working really hard on the image handling and processing happening behind the scenes. We’re laying down the groundwork for some really exciting stuff to come. You’ll notice a new universal header, and some general refinement and optimization throughout. We are more than excited about the response and interest our community has given us so early on. We hear you loud and clear and continue to work tirelessly on features that will complete the “social loop.” We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Enjoy! and be sure to stop by SoulPancake.

Let’s start with the basics. Once you have created your account (which you will need to start contributing), glance at the top of the page where you will see your name. As long as you are logged in this toolbar will follow you wherever you go. On the right hand side you will see a button that says UPLOAD NOW, so don’t be scared, go ahead and click it. Now you can start getting creative. Note that there are several other places around Soul Pancake that will take you to the upload page as well.

The Questions Collective is all about getting creative with your submissions. The idea is for you to take a photo or an image, and creatively put together a question for the Soul Pancake community to answer. Once you upload your image for all to share, the community will start discussing and contributing as well.

On the upload page you’ll see a big blue button that states “Select an Image.” But wait, “Where do I get an image, and what the heck is a JPG, GIF, or PNG?” To put it simply, these are three common image file format types for graphics on the internet. Basically they are the letters that directly follow the name of your image on your computer that differentiate which file type it is. So where should you go about getting images? Well, for starters, if you own or have access to a digital camera, you can shoot pictures to your hearts content and let your creativity be your guide. There are also several stock image resources, both free and for a fee. You can choose from vast libraries of images that may help explain your question or submission. A few popular pay stock images sites include, iStockPhoto and Corbis, while StockVault remains free but be sure to read their terms of use. With a simple search on any major search engine, you will be able to find several other resources of images.

So, now that you have your amazing image that so perfectly describes the question that you are dying to ask, what do you do with it? Does size matter? How do I edit it or add stuff to it? Well, an optimal size for an image would have a width between 1000 and 1600 pixels. What you would want to avoid is uploading an image with small dimensions as it will get stretched and become pixelated, thus leaving you an unhappy camper as your masterpiece won’t be seen to its true potential. If you do not have access to, or are unfamiliar with photo editing software, there are several free online photo editing website that can help. Here is a simple list of a few that you can use, and once again with a simple search you will be able to find several others.

• FotoFlexer
• Picnick
• Pixenate
• Splashup

With editors such as these, you can crop and arrange your images to your liking to really express your thoughts. Once you have your image ready to go, head back to the Soul Pancake upload page and click the big blue “Select an Image” button. You will then be prompted to choose the image that you intend to use. Once an image is chosen you geo-tag it (which is a fancy word for “enter a location”). Once this is complete simply click the Submit button to move on! Next, ask your question or give your image a title, and enter a brief description or story behind your image… Click “submit” and you’re all done! Processing your image may take a few seconds, so don’t be scared to dive in and answer some from around the community.

Soul Pancake is where we spend most of our time. And on this site, we’ll be exploring our ideas, thoughts, concepts and generally anything else that brews up in our heads while we take bigger and better bites out of Life’s Big Questions.

Welcome and Enjoy!