Happy Birthday InfoBarrel!

For those of you who didn’t know, two years ago today InfoBarrel.com opened up our doors to the public to begin writing. Over the last two years the site has experienced tremendous growth, attracting just shy of 20,000 writers and publishing over 35,000 articles.

InfoBarrel’s growth has been phenomenal and it has been an amazing ride watching it grow from a tiny little site with a few writers, to the thriving writers community it is today. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited we are to continue watching InfoBarrel mature into one of the largest web sites on the Internet.

So, in the spirit of InfoBarrel’s second birthday, I think I will share some fun statistics with everybody

1 Year:

Alexa ranking: Roughly 60K (global)
Published Articles: 4341
Articles per day average: 56.61
Writers: 2497

2 Years:

Alexa ranking: 7342 (global)
Published Articles: 35,200+
Articles per day average: 130+
Writers: 19775+

As you can see, we’ve made some pretty big strides in the last year. We would like to thank everybody who has participated in the site for all their hard work and we look forward to growing with all of you in the future.

Happy Birthday InfoBarrel!

This is another thing that has been a long time coming.

You guys have been asking for some InfoBarrel banners for awhile. Even though it has taken us some time to get them done, we did listen, and a few have finally arrived.

The few we have so far are basic but are prepped and ready to occupy a little corner of your blog.

We have three sizes available right now, 120×120, and 300×250.

InfoBarrel Banners

120×120

300×250

It has been awhile since we’ve done a blog update but I thought this was some relatively big news and that I should share it with the community.

As everybody around here knows we have been experiencing tremendous growth recently.  Whenever there is growth in a business, it winds up creating a progressively larger work load.  To compensate for the huge volumes of content we have been receiving over the last few months we’ve decided to bring another person into the administrative team.

We have brought another local resident of the Greater Vancouver area in to help manage our work load, allowing us to spend more time marketing InfoBarrel.

Our newest team member is Tyler Chomos (applause)!!

Tyler has a background in financial management and is also an accomplished bartender (great for those long nights at the office).  His responsibilities here at InfoBarrel will be to manage the article queue and periodically help moderate on the forum.

Tyler goes by the handle ‘TyGuy‘ here on InfoBarrel and had been a member for quite some time before we took him on board.

Without further adieu, give a warm welcome to Tyler!

Hey everybody,

Today we are launching something we are pretty excited about!  Today we are launching InfoBarrel for charities.  Every few months we will choose a new charity and our users will be able to be given the option to donate any of their articles to the cause.

Our first charity will be the Huntington Society of Canada.  We have chosen The Huntington Society of Canada as Ryan McKenzie, one of the co-founders of Infobarrel.com has a sister who is suffering from Huntington’s Disease.  Ryan’s sister Courtenay was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease in 2006 and has been in a constant battle with the disease ever since.  Recently she was lucky enough to get to carry the Olympic torch for the 2010 Paralympic games in Vancouver BC.

Our goal is to raise $2500 for Huntington’s Disease prior to moving on to our next charity.  Once we get the program running smoothly, we will be looking to the community to help us decide which charities to support.

How it Works
Writers can pick and choose which articles they would like to donate to charity and can easily change them from charity to personal articles at any time through the ‘My Content’ control panel.  When an article is donated to charity, 90% of the money generated by said article will go to charity.  2% will still be paid to the referring member and 8% will be used for server expenses.

Our ultimate goal is to have a database of tens of thousands of charitable articles allowing us to generate very generous donations to a number of charities month in and month out.

For more information on InfoBarrel for Charities, checkout http://www.infobarrel.com/InfoBarrel_for_Charities

To read our weekly updates on how much we’ve raised for Huntington’s disease, check out our Huntington Society charity page at http://www.infobarrel.com/InfoBarrel_for_Charities_-_Huntington_Society_of_Canada

For those of you who aren’t constantly monitoring the InfoBarrel forum, I’d like to introduce to you a bunch of changes and updates we’ve done to the site.

This week has been very busy here and we have plenty of cool new things to announce. So without further adieu, here is what we’ve done.

UserVoice Feedback Button – Gone
After a year of complaints about the Feedback button on the side of the site either interfering with functions of the site or slowing the site down we’ve decided to remove it.  Between our community forum and our contact us form, we feel there is more than enough options for providing feedback.

Navigation Bar
We’ve received a lot of feedback that having the expandable navigation bar at the top of the site made it difficult for new users to figure out how to post content.  To rectify this, once you’ve logged in, the navigation bar will now stay open.

Forum Speed
The forum was running kind of slow before so we tweaked a few pieces of code to dramatically speed it up.

Forum Post Count
Interested in knowing how many times you’ve posted on the forum? We now have a  statistic to show you exactly how many posts you’ve made.

Duplicate Image Titles
Previously when uploading an image to the site, if a similar image with the same title existed, you would have to reupload your picture with a different title.  This feature has been updated so even if an image exists with the same title, it won’t stop you from creating another.

Category Functionality
In the past, people were having issues finding the correct category to publish their articles in.  The method we employed to hunt down you category was just plain difficult to use.  We’ve implemented a new method that shows you your category structure in a treed out view.  We’ve also provided a search function that will give you numerous suggestions if you type in a keyword.

Auto Tweet
One of the keys to making money on any web site is exposure.  Our goal at InfoBarrel is to supply our contributors with the absolute largest arsenal of tools to maximize the traffic and revenue to their content.  Our latest feature allows you to authenticate your Twitter account with InfoBarrel and whenever you publish an article, InfoBarrel will automatically post a link to your article with the article title on your Twitter page.  This might only take a minute or two to do by hand, but we believe the more time we can save you in the promotional department, the more time you have to focus on creating great content.

Hey everybody,

This is just going to be a quick update, but important none the less.

We’ve had a few people concerned about their age being listed on their profiles and wanted a way to not show it for privacy reasons.  Instead of spending a bunch of time creating a function to hide your age, we’ve removed it altogether.

After a little deliberation we’ve concluded that there isn’t much value in knowing how old somebody is.

Hopefully this makes everybody a little bit more comfortable when publishing on InfoBarrel.

Hey Guys,

We’ve wanted to be able to put Amazon product ads in with your articles for quite a while now and today we’ve put it together.  You are now able to ad in an Amazon ad by choosing an Amazon product category and then by typing in some keywords to help select the products that will appear on your article page.  You can ad in these new options on any existing article as well as any new article.  To add in the keywords and category go edit your article(s) and you should see and Amazon Products Link box on the right side.

You also need to signup and attach your Amazon Tracking ID to your account.  You can Sign up for Amazon here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/.  Once you have signed up, log in and grab your Tracking ID, located on the left hand side of the page when you log in, and paste it into your My Account page on Infobarrel.

Enjoy, and, as always, let us know if you have an comments or issues and we’ll help you out.

Hey Guys,

We’ve been doing some work on our server setup to get rid of the loading time on the site.  We’re doing a 2 stage plan here that should get us to a place where our setup should last us quite awhile.  The first stage was finished up yesterday and we’ve noticed a good increase in loading speeds across the site.  We’ve set up a forum topic for people to post to if they are experiencing any noticeable/lengthy load times.  So let us know if the site is running slow for you or if you’ve noticed it much faster than it was a couple days ago.

Forum  Post: http://www.infobarrel.com/forum-topic.php?id=364

Thanks,
Kevin

Hey Everybody,

We are making an effort to increase the quality of articles on Infobarrel and as a result we’ve raised the minimum article length from 250 words to 325.

While most of you are writing articles far larger than this anyways, the few of you who write articles that are less than 325 words should see increased search engine traffic to the longer articles which should equate to more money in your pocket.

We are striving to be a high quality writers community, and to do so we need to make sure we are viewed as one.  This change will affect everybody in a positive manor.

Thanks!

We’ve had a few different locations over the last year and a bit, but it has been a while since we’ve made a solid office upgrade!  While we aren’t officially in this new office (at least on paper), until the beginning of November, the land lord has let us move in and start working here early.

Since I thought it our office might interest a few of you, I’ve snapped a few pictures.  It is located in beautiful Port Moody, British Columbia, roughly 30 seconds from the inlet.  We’ve got a Starbucks within 100 feet of the building and Rocky Point is only five minutes away.  Whats especially great about this office is we have plenty of space to expand if need be.

On top of two bathrooms and a kitchen, there is also a board room with a giant 46″ LCD screen for slide shows and stuff.

Front Desk

Waiting Area

Main Office

Hey Look! It’s Kevin! (I sit to the right of him)

The good ol’ Kitchen

No office image collection would be complete without the token bathroom shot!

Hope you like our new office!