A week or so ago we deployed a number of new features to topikality, including our most asked for feature — article links from the email.

We’ve resisted making this change for a while, partly because it’s such a difficult problem to solve. But also we wanted to integrate the article voting and therefore the machine learning aspect of topikality, into this system. As you know, the more you vote for the articles you like, the better the quality of results you’ll get.

The new voting bar

Despair no more! We’ve implemented a system that takes you directly to the article page and adds a small voting bar at the top of that page. This means you can click on a link from the daily email you receive, which will take you directly to the article you’re interested in. You can also then vote on whether this article is relevant or not. This system bypasses the need to go through the topikality website. It also reduces the number of clicks you need to make, whilst still enabling topikaly to learn what you like.

Warning techie stuff [please feel free to jump to the next paragraph]. There are a couple of things that you should be aware of when using the voting frame: the voting frame is implemented using something called frames & if you know anything about html you will know these are not the best thought part of html! The issues with frames are that the status and address bar do not reflect the page you are on which can be confusing. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this. We think this is an acceptable tradeoff but if you don’t like this then you can opt out.

One other thing about the voting bar is that the similar documents functionality doesn’t work, you will need to be in the article view to use this.

Opting out

This new feature is optional, so if you don’t like it you can opt out. To opt out go to your preferences you’ll see “Use voting frame?” change this to no.

If you opt out you will still receive your daily emails, with the list of articles topikality has found for you. The links in this email will now take you through to that article on your topik articles page. You can then click on the article and vote to keep or discard, as you would normally.

The advantage of this mode of operation is you get to see the summary and you get the similar documents functionality.

Usability audit & bug fixes

We’ve also had a usablilty expert audit the site and have incorporated some of her changes. There will be more to come in the near futurewith respect to this.

And finally there have been a number of minor bug fixes and back-end infrastructure changes.

Anyway we hope this latest release will help make topikalty more usable.