And there was much rejoicing.

As a feature relied on heavily by many (including myself) back in the AppDeploy Forum days, I'm very pleased to announce that ITNinja's own brand of email notification is now up and running. Like most any feature, this is a "version 1" release that we will expand and improve upon but I think what we have today will be appreciated by most everyone just as it is.

It is on by default, so please feel free to turn it off in your profile's new "Notifications" tab, but right now any Question, Blog or Link that you follow which has an answer or comment posted will generate an email notification like the one pictured here:

By default you automatically follow anything you contribute to on the site so, when it comes to receiving email alerts on answers to your questions, and comments on your blogs and links, you should be all set. However please note that you do not automatically follow questions you answer. Soon we will introduce an option to receive email notifications for answer and comment replies. But until then you won't get an email notification if you comment on something and someone else replies to your comment (unless you've explicitly hit follow on that content).

Update: As of our 2/7/2013 release, new email alert notification options allow for you to be alerted via email when someone comments on an answer or a comment you've made (so you need not follow everything you answer or comment upon). This new capability may be turned off, but is on by default in your profile now. As is another addition: email alert notifications for new software tips created on software that you follow. Note that this is currently version-specific so you will get notifications for specific versions of software titles that you follow.

Not seeing email alerts? Please check your junk mail as in testing these alerts were pretty consistently intercepted or filtered as spam. The emails will be coming from noreply@itninja.com and if you’d like to create rules to deal with them, they will all start with "[ITNinja]".

In preparation for this we prepared a nice place for you to better manage what it is you follow in our last release. You can follow most anything and doing so will affect what shows up in your personal activity feed as it always has, but as you can see we have been (and will continue) adding value to this notion of following those things you care about.

So what else does "following" get you? Remember you can filter your view of the Software Library by what you follow today and we'll introduce optional notifications around the introduction of new tips on software you follow in the future. Even sooner, you can expect to start seeing "following" tabs in places like the Q&A home page to add even more value to the following of software, topics, communities and other tags throughout the site. As always, we've got tons planned for ITNinja, but we love feedback and your comments here can help steer where we take things next so please tell us how we can improve (or just how awesome you think the ITNinja product group team is).

For a full list of new features, ehnahcements and squashed bugs see, ITNinja Code Update: 01/22/13