shareable libraries
We think our new shareable, collaborative libraries are important enough to get a blog post of their own, so here we are! Previously, users were limited to a single, personal library. We are now enabling the ability to maintain multiple, separate libraries and also making them more friendly for sharing.
The new libraries allow you to interact with scrible in a more meaningful way than ever before. You can now keep topics of interest separated in a more concrete fashion, with each library keeping separate saved pages and tags. For instance, all of the pages saved for a research project can all be kept in their own library, separate from the pages saved for personal use. Tags you create in reference to 16th century literature won’t get mixed in with tags for great recipes and interesting reads.
We’ve also added the ability to share entire libraries instead of only individual pages. A teacher can now collect material on a topic, and share the entire library with students through one action instead of sharing multiple links. The library is also a living entity, so as pages are added or changed, anyone with access to that library will see the updates in real time.
Once you have the feature enabled, you’ll have an “Other Libraries” tab added to the top right of the main library interface. Clicking that tab will bring you to the library selection page, pictured above. Here is where you can select and manage your various libraries. The “Create New Library” will open the dialog to start a new library. The process is straight forward, just name and describe the new library and you’re all set to go. 
Once you’ve created the library, or click the “Manage” link, you’ll be brought to the “Manage Library” interface. There are three tabs, the first is the general tab. From here, you can edit the name and description of the library, just hover over either field and you can edit it right on the spot. This is also where to go in order to delete a library you no longer need.
The second tab is used to invite others to the library. You can enter a list of email addresses, separated by commas, and give them all access to your library in one fell swoop. Once you’ve done this the invited users will show up on the next tab, “Access & Permissions.”
This tab will show you all the users that have been invited and their permissions for the library. By default, invited users are set to only have “read” access. They can see the contents of the library, but cannot change, add, or delete content. The check boxes next to each name allow permissions to be set for each individual quickly and intuitively. You can also remove users entirely from the library by clicking the red “X” next to their name.
scrible Launches Student Edition
We’re excited to announce the launch of the free Student Edition of scrible! We’re rolling out brand new features that we’ve custom tailored to the student experience. In addition to an increase in storage space, the Student Edition makes 5 powerful new features available (detailed below).
Free Upgrade for Students
If you already use scrible and registered with a “.edu” email address, you can upgrade to the Student Edition for free from the Settings Page in your account. If you’re a new student signing up with a .edu email address, you’ll be shown an option to upgrade for free during the sign up process. If you have a .edu email address but didn’t originally sign up with it, you can add it as a secondary email address via your Settings Page. This will then allow you to make the upgrade. If you’re a student without a .edu email address, let us know here or hit us up at contact@scrible.com and we’ll hook you up. If you’re interested in the advanced features in the Student Edition (described below), but you’re not a student, let us know here and we’ll try to help you out.
5 Powerful New Features
The 5 powerful new Student Edition features enable you to create sophisticated reports from you researched articles, easily capture citations while you’re reading online, generate bibliographies with one click, distill all of your highlights and notes into simple summaries and collaborate with others via group, topic or project specific Shareable Libraries. Nearly all of these features (except for citation capture) are accessible from within your Library (as shown here) once you’ve upgraded to the Student Edition.
Reports
The first new feature is a robust report interface. We’ve added the ability to bring the annotations from your saved articles into a rich text editor. Once you’ve selected the articles you want to work with and clicked the Add to Report Button in your Library, we take you to the report interface, which is a split pane view with the articles shown in a Source List on the left and the text editor on the right. You can selectively click on annotations in the Source List to add them to the report on the right. This allows you to easily bring your annotations into the editor and integrate them into your reports using the fully featured editor. Once you’ve finished writing, you can share the report using all the methods you’re used to, such as social media, permalink and email.
Citations & Bibliographies
To go along with report writing, we’ve tried to ease a major pain point: proper citations and bibliography creation. We’ve added a citation manager to our Toolbar so that you can create citations right on the webpage or article as you’re working. When you click on the Citation Button in the Toolbar (shown here with the green box around it), you’ll be shown the Citation Generator Window. We autofill some of the citation info and you can easily fill in the rest. Once you’re done, you can automatically create citations with a single click in all the major academic formats, such as MLA, APA and Chicago. This citation info is saved with your article for future use so that once you’ve filled it out, you’ll never need to touch it again.
Once you have your citations saved, you can pull them into our dedicated bibliography interface, seen in the screenshot here, or directly into the report interface described earlier.
Summaries
If that all sounds too heavy, we also added a summary view of your annotations along with some meta information about the article. So, you can distill down and extract out just the important highlights and notes. By showing you just the good parts, you’ll have a clean view of what matters most. Shown here is the summary for just one article, but you can pull in as many saved webpages as you like at once.
Shareable Libraries
Lastly, we’ve added the ability to collaborate via multiple, Shareable Libraries. You can now create separate libraries for various groups, topics and projects to keep your saved and annotated articles organized in an orderly fashion. You can also invite other folks to your Shareable Libraries so that you can work together to collect, save and comment on articles and Web content. If you’d like to learn more about Shareable Libraries, check out this blog post.
That’s it for the overview of scrible Student Edition. As always, we love any and all feedback. So, feel free to leave a comment below, drop us an email or – and this is the best – send us feedback here with your thoughts!
scrible adds support for Google sign in and more
If you’ve signed in recently, you might’ve noticed even more additions to our sign in options. We have rolled out support for the OpenID standard, which means you can now use your existing Google or Yahoo account, or any OpenID provider of your choosing. This includes all of Google’s offerings, such as Google+, Gmail, Google Apps, and Google Education accounts. Using any of these services to sign in to scrible means you no longer have to juggle yet another set of account credentials. The same goes for using a Yahoo account, or any generic OpenID provider. To start the process, just click the button of your favorite service and you’ll be taken to that site to sign and and authorize scrible.
The scrible service requires an email, first name, and last name. If we can’t get these from the service you’re signing in through, you’ll have to fill them in.
This is a one time step and you’ll never be prompted for this information again after sign up.
If you’ve already created a scrible account using your Google or Yahoo email, you can still use the new sign in feature. When you choose what other service to sign in with, if we already have an account registered to that email, we will ask you once to verify that you are the owner of that account.
You will have to enter your scrible password for the account as a one time (and last time) authentication step. After that, all you’ll have to do is click on the service of your choice and you’ll be signed in to scrible automatically (as long as you’re already signed in on that service, anyway).
Edit pages straight from the library
Keeping the library feature ball rolling, we’ve also added the ability to edit page information right from your library. If you look between the checkbox and owner column for each entry, you’ll find a happy little triangle icon (delta, for the mathematicians out there) just like the one we use for editing labels.
Clicking this icon allows you to open a dialog to change the title and description of any entry straight from your library. Each of the pages above has just a title, so let’s say I want to change the description for the top page, the wiki entry for “Combat Shield.” I’d click the triangle icon for that row and be greeted with the following dialog:
I can then add whatever description I want to add, in this case I’ve left a note to myself as to why I found this article useful. After hitting submit, the dialog will close and the update will be represented in your library in realtime. So once that dialog closes, you’ll see the change you just made like so:
The process is the same if I had wanted to change the title instead, I would’ve just edited the title field. Hopefully this streamlines the process quite a bit, as before you had to load the page in order to edit these fields. This is another enhancement that came about from user requests, so please don’t be afraid to leave us feedback.
Kayak-style multi-tag filtering
Image via CrunchBase
We’ve rolled out an improvement to our tag system that allows you to filter your scrible Library by multiple tags at once. If you’ve ever used Kayak to search for flights, you know what we’re talking about. With our new change, if you look at your Library, you’ll see that each tag now has a checkbox to the left of it.
Clicking a tag will now toggle that checkbox to let you know it’s “on.” This is where the old system stopped. Now, you can toggle additional tag filters by clicking them as well. If I wanted to show only pages that I have tagged “funny” and “news,” it would look like this:
You’ll only be shown pages you’ve saved that have both the tag “funny” and the tag “news.” If you want to get back to viewing all pages, you can either uncheck the labels you’ve checked, or click the “All Pages” filter and it will clear the currently selected labels. This new approach offers a simple and powerful way to quickly find a needle in your Library haystack. Let us know how you like it via our Feedback page
or emailing us at contact@scrible.com!
Introducing our refer-a-friend system
We are happy to announce that we are rolling out a shiny, new referral bonus program! There’s a new, big, red button at the top of your library labeled “Earn More Storage.”
This button will launch our invitation dialog so that you can tell your friends about scrible. In this dialog you’ll find a few ways to spread the word about scrible.
First, you’ll notice button to post to Twitter and Facebook. These buttons will launch a window to allow you to post to your social network of choice. In these posts will be a personalized URL as well as a default message. Feel free to change the message, but you’ll need to keep the URL intact in order to gain credit for these referrals. We also provide your personalized URL below these buttons which means you can use it anywhere on the internet you want.
Next is the option to import your address book from other services. We support import from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, and AOL. Choosing any of these options will prompt you for your credentials to these services (which we throw away as soon as we’re done) and allow you to pick contacts from your address book on that service to invite to scrible.
Last is the option to manually enter email addresses. As you can probably piece together, this option provides you with a dialog to enter your own email addresses. After entering the desired emails, you’ll be able to fill out a custom subject and message to accompany the invitation email we’ll send them.
So what’s the point to all of this? Using any of these methods, if a user follows your link and signs up, we’ll keep track of it. If that user then continues to use the service and interacts (for now saving or sharing) with 3 pages and you’ve both verified your accounts, you both get a 25 MB boost in storage. You can earn this 25 MB boost up to ten times, bringing your total storage up to 375 MB for absolutely no cost to you or those you invite.
scrible takes out the trash
Ever been on a page you’ve saved and decided you didn’t need it any more? Before, you had to navigate back to your library and find the page. Starting today, you can move it to the trash straight from the page. If you view a page from your library, you’ll now find a trash button in the toolbar in case you want to get rid of it.
This new button only appears on pages you have some kind of ownership of (either a page you’ve saved or have a shortcut to) so there won’t be any confusion as to who can or can’t delete something. So if someone sends you a link to a page saved on scrible, there won’t be a trash can in your toolbar since the page isn’t yours to manage.
