Five Things I Bet You Didn't Know about Epinions.com
Jun 03 '01 (Updated Jun 12 '01)
The Bottom Line Here are five tricks of which new members may not be aware.
OK. I'm not really going to make a bet with you, but I do hope that at least one of the five things I list here is new to you. I am mainly writing this for members who are new to Epinions so I hope you long-time members will go easy on me when you discover that you already know all five items. If after reading this, you have any questions, please do not hesitate to put your question in the comments section or send me an e-mail.
1. You CAN preview your epinions with the bold and italic effects showing
When you type a review, it is a good idea to use bold and italics in the review for headings and/or emphasis. However, when you click on "Preview Opinion", you are taken to a preview page that does not show bold or italics. Not only does the preview page not show the actual bold or italics, it hides from view the code you entered to create bold and italic effects. Nowhere on the preview page will you see a <i>, </i>, <b>, or a </b>. This feature can put a new member into an endless loop of editing-previewing-editing-previewing in an attempt to figure out why certain text is not appearing as intended. It also creates problems in that we end up with published reviews where half the review is in bold because the author forgot to put in a </b>.
To keep this short (ha), I won't go into why Epinions does this. Instead, I will just tell you how to preview your reviews with the text effects showing before you publish. Let's say you have finished typing a review titled "Five Things to Know" and you have clicked on the "Preview opinion" link. You check the spelling and find that you are ready to publish. Right before you publish your review, click on your account link at the top of the Preview Page. This will take you to your account page where you will notice that the review you are working on is now listed as "Unpublished Content". From your account page, click on the title of the review and you will see your review in final form with all effects showing. If it looks good and you want to publish it, click on the "Update" link within the review (it is in a brown box on the top right side of the review), follow the steps and publish your review with full confidence that all your desired text effects are showing properly.
Actually, from the Preview Page I simply right-click the account link and open my account in a new window. Within that window I click on the review title and do a quick view to see if everything looks correct. If so, I close that window and then click "Publish" on the Preview Page window which is still open.
2. You CAN view another member's reviews by category
I'm embarrassed because it took me quite a while to discover this one. If I just wanted to read a person's computer reviews, I used to scan page after page of the person's reviews sorted by date. Little did I know I was two clicks away from a "Sort by category" link. Let's say another member has written 153 reviews and you would like to read just the book or movie reviews the author has written. Unfortunately, when you click on the "View more opinions by DrDad" link you won't see any option to sort them by category. Well, that's because Epinions has hidden it under the "Ratings" tab. Specifically, to view someone's reviews by category, from the Profile Page click on "View more opinions by DrDad", then click on the "Ratings" tab/link, then click on "Sort by category".
3. You CAN be notified about new reviews from your favorite authors (even when the Epinions e-mail alert system is down)
Most veteran Epinions members already know about Peter Tiemann's (ptiemann) Notification system. Peter provides an alternative to Epinions "New Opinion" Alert system. Once you register at his web site, you will be taken to your main page where you can subscribe to other members and see a list of members that user Peter's system to subscribe to you. Subscribing to be alerted to someone's new epinions is simple (just enter the person's Epinions ID and click "Subscribe"). At the web site, you can sort new reviews by person, category, or time, and you can define "new" as anything between "today" and "the last 2 weeks". The site also lets you sort the "Just In" reviews by category.
The system takes hardly no time at all to learn. It does involve checking in at the notification site instead of checking your e-mail, but it has much more functionality and greater stability than the system Epinions uses. If this is the first you've heard about it, I recommend you give it a look. You will need to remember (drdad) at least one member's ID (drdad) in order to start subscribing (drdad) to someone's reviews (drdad). Feel free to use (drdad) any member ID that you like (drdad).
Ptiemann's Notification System
http://www.newepinions.com
4. You CAN search epinions another way
Within Epinions there is a search box that allows you to search the Epinions web site by products or by members. There may be times, however, when you would like to do a more thorough search of Epinions. For example, you might want to search by review title or even search for reviews containing specific text. Such searches currently are not possible within Epinions. However, it is possible to use an outside source to search the Epinions web site. When a search engine searches pages only within a specific web site, such as Epinions.com, it is called a "Site Search". To conduct an Epinions site search using the search engine Google, go to www.Google.com and put the following text in the search box before your search terms: site:http://www.epinions.com. For example, if I wanted to search the Epinions web site for any reviews that contain the words "ballerina clown", I would do a Google search of site:http://www.epinions.com ballerina clown. This would bring up a list of all the reviews at Epinions that contain that text.
One limitation of using a search engine to do a site search is that the search engine can only return pages that have been indexed (listed within the search engine). If my most recent review has not been examined by the search engine for indexing, then it will not show up in a site search. In short, a site search does not search every page within the web site. A second limitation of a site search is that the results are not organized as they are in the Epinions "Search by product" page. Thus, it can be time consuming to examine all of the results a site search will produce. However, by using specific, detailed search terms you can improve your chances of finding what you are seeking.
I have used a Google site search of Epinions only a few times. However, to the best of my memory, each time I was able to find the exact review I was seeking or one similar enough to suit my needs. Finally, Google.com is not the only search engine that can perform a site search, but in my opinion it is the best.
5. You CAN include special characters in your reviews
Have you ever read a review where the author included some unusual symbols such as © or ® and wondered "How did they do that"? Have you ever wanted to use a word with an letter accents (such as "Résumé") in one of your reviews? Well, one way to do it is to type your review in MicroSoft Word and use MS Word to insert special characters. When finished, cut and paste your review to Epinions and most likely the characters will show fine (to you). However, you should be aware that non-Microsoft users (Macintosh users, Unix users, etc.) probably will not be able to see some of those characters. The better way (the way I demonstrate here) is to use text entities or numeric entities to create the special characters when needed.
Text entities are a type of "code" that you type in order to get a certain character. For example, the text entity code for the copyright symbol is © (note that all text entity codes start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semi-colon (;). The text entity for the letter "e" with an acute accent is é. In a review, to create the word "Résumé" I would simply type "Résumé".
Numeric entities do the exact same thing as text entities, but use a number to reference a special character. The numeric entity for the copyright symbol is ©. The advantage of using numeric entities over text entities is that they are more widely accepted by multiple platforms/browsers. Text entities are easier to remember, though.
Given that there are hundreds of special characters, I will not list them here. Instead, I will point you to a couple of sources that list either the text or numeric entities for the available special characters. Both of the sites I list below show you how to create the character and what the character looks like.
HTML Character Entities
http://www.intuitive.com/coolweb/entities.html
--This site shows text entities (not numeric entities), but it does divide them into supported (everyone should see them correctly) and unsupported (not everyone may see them correctly) groups.
Complete Latin-1 Character Table
http://www.cwru.edu/help/interHTML/examples/isolist0.html
--This site shows both the text and numeric entities for the most widely supported characters (everyone should see these correctly).
Conclusion
I hope I have provided at least one bit of information that you did not already know about Epinions. My goal was to inform new members how do deal with some of the limitations of Epinions (the Preview mode, the New Opinion Alerts, and the Epinions Search box) or how to locate some of the less obvious features of Epinions (sorting reviews and creating special characters).
Thanks for reading, and I welcome any questions or comments.
Bret (DrDad)
I could not have included Thing to Know #5 had I not learned about special characters from someone else. My thanks go to MobiProf for his informative article (which, among other things, explains why the Epinions Preview mode doesn't show bold or italics):
How to include mark-up codes in your reviews
http://mmmm.epinions.com/content_1486200964
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Epinions.com ID:
DrDad
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 - Top 500 |
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Location: Oklahoma
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 192 members
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