The Siphs Blog

Well, you asked for it, so we delivered: SiphsMail now has an affiliate program! If you refer someone to Siphs and they subscribe to SiphsMail, we’ll provide you a 20% commission on the payment. Better yet, we’ll give you a commission if the subscription is renewed the following year.

But don’t just start running around telling your friends to go to Siphs.com (well, actually, please do), to get paid you need to be an affiliate member. Send an email to support@siphs.com and let us know that you want to make money spreading the good word. We’ll reply with instructions to get you set up. You’ll need to be a member of Siphs, so go ahead and register for your free account.

If you have any questions about the affiliate program, check out our FAQ. Of course, you can alway contact us with any questions or concerns at support@siphs.com.

Yup that’s right!  Our PLUS & PREMIUM subscribers now have even greater control of their widgets!  To customize these new items, visit the “Customize Template” page of your Siphs account and scroll to the bottom of the page.

First, a very very warm thank you to Josh Lowensohn for featuring us on Webware. It’s not everyday we get such wonderful coverage! That said, I thought I would take this opportunity to address the comment Josh made about our “unfortunately named” venture. A quick history lesson is in order. Many of our users will be interested to know that Siphs originally started as an online community and collaborative platform for researchers in life sciences. What you say? Seriously!? That’s right! You can read about our initial service in a PLoS Biology article that featured our work.

Article
Leveraging the Knowledge of Our Peers: Online Communities Hold the Promise to Enhance Scientific Research

Siphs is actually an acronym for “Scientific Information Processing & Health Sciences.” We liked the name then, and we most certainly like it now! If you want to learn more about our previous project, feel free to send us an email at info[at]siphs[dot]com and we would be happy to let you know what happened!

Happy Sharing!

Arpan

SIMPLER FORMS
We replaced the captcha with a simple math question and made the “Your Name” field optional.

MORE SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPORT
The form now includes buttons to post to a number of social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc).

STATISTICS & RSS FEEDS
Registered users, both free and paid, get statistics that show the breakout of where people are sharing their content. These users will also get RSS feeds for their Most Popular & Most Recent shares.

Do you want to see which social media sites people are sending your content too?  Well now you can!  You can find the graph at the bottom of the SiphsMail View Statistic’s page. Hurray!

That’s right!  If you are using our SiphsMail widget, you can now get an RSS feed of the most shared items within the last 90 days.  The feed is ordered by most shared to least shared, includes at most 20 items, and shows the number of shares along side each item.  In addition, the statistics section of the site now includes stats for all of the supported social bookmarking/social media sites we have included.  In the coming week, we will be upgrading the statistics section so stay tuned!  And as always, if you have suggestions or comments, send them our way!

-Arpan

Last week, we added support for the leading social media sites to our link sharing service SiphsPosts.  This week, we added the same support to our SiphsMail widget.  We have also changed the widget service a bit in response to some of the feedback received.  Every member will now have full access to the customization interface!!!  It’s exciting, I know.  The only difference now is that we will display our logo at the very top of the email-this/share page as seen in the image below.  For users who need more than the free number of emails or who simply want to remove the Siphs logo entirely from the page can do so by signing up for a subscription service.  Phew - stick around, there are a lot more changes ahead! Have fun!

Keeping with the theme of branding and statistics for Email-This or Tell-A-Friends scripts, we have created a FeedFlare unit that will let your branding show up whenever someone clicks on the “Email-This” link below your posts. Why show FeedBurner’s logo when you can show yours and when you can add in your own custom content or third-party advertisements? As an example, our RSS feed’s Email-This button now points to our SiphsMail form, and now shows our brand!

So, you think that’s amazing! How can you have your brand show up you wonder! It’s very very simple actually. All you have to do is log in to your FeedBurner account, navigate to your RSS feed’s FeedFlare section and add some personal flare.

In the section where it asks you to “Add New Flare” just type in the following…

http://www.siphs.com/extras/feedburner/siphsmail.feed.flare.xml.php

..and click on the Add New Flare button. Once the unit has been added, all you have to do is check off the checkboxes that appear to the left and presto - you’re good to go. Now - don’t forget to log in to your siphs.com account and customize the templates. While we don’t mind seeing our Siphs brand come through, the whole point of this is so that yours comes through instead!

-Arpan

SiphsMail subscription users now have the ability to see who is sharing/forwarding their content. Users with Plus or Premium subscriptions will now get a list of people from their SiphsMail statistics page. The information includes: (1) name, (2) email address, (3) date of the sharing event, (4) and the link that was shared. Now some of you might raise some privacy concerns, so to address those issues, we have made the sharing opt-in. Information will only be shared with the publisher if the end-user has agreed to do so by checking the appropriate box on the Email-This form.

Here’s a screenshot of what the leads would look like - disregard the nytimes.com link in the image (that’s just there for testing purposes!).

Happy sharing!

-Arpan

Here is another quick release. We have added limited support for some of the leading social media / bookmarking / networking sites.  The next time you attempt to send a post, you will see the supported icons in the bottom left corner.  Here’s a screenshot -