The Official TerraBlog's New Features Archives

February 14, 2007

Changes to How We Do Indexing

This morning we rolled out a significant change to the manner in which Terrablogs handles blog indexing on the blog portals. People were very excited when we added the ability to index any RSS enabled blog, and today we effectively "cut out the middle man" by making the indexed entries link directly to the blog entries themselves, without the intermediate excerpt page.

We received dozens of requests for this change and we hope you like it!

Posted by Admin at 01:33 PM | Comments (32) | TrackBack

March 02, 2006

Now with Entry Excerpts!

Check out the new entry excerpts on all of the main pages! Now you can view excerpts of the most current blog posts by clicking the arrow beside each post title.

It's also worth noting that Chattablogs has surpassed 19,000 posts. Wow!

Check it out!

Help us make things happen
We need a new server to keep Terrablogs alive! Please donate!

Thanks,
The Terrablogs Team

Posted by Admin at 01:04 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 28, 2006

New Entry Author Feature!

If you've got a blog with more than one author and have wanted to change an entry author's name, you know how hard it is to figure out. In the olden days of yore, you had to go to the Edit Entries menu and select Open Power Editing Mode and then change the Author in a drop-down list and select Save and then rebuild. Whew!

Well, those days are now gone. Once you've saved an entry as draft (or even published it), you can change the entry author by simply selecting the Author drop-down box below the Post Status drop down. Then save your entry again. That's it. Now it's right at your fingertips inside every single Edit Entry menu.

Help us make things happen
We're still working towards a new server! The current server can't handle the load and it is slowly dying. We need a new one in order to keep this thing going! Please donate!

Again, if you like Terrablogs and want it to keep going, please donate towards a new server.

Thanks,
The Terrablogs Team

Posted by Admin at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

New Delete Uploads Feature! (because we love you)

Check out the new "Delete Uploads" item on the left side of your editing menu!

Look for this icon:

Now you can dig through the photos and whatnot that you've uploaded and delete them. Oh yes, it's cool. Be careful, though! Once you've deleted something using this we can't bring it back! It's gone forever!

Read the instuctions at the top of the Delete Uploads page before using it.

You're welcome.

Also, please donate! We're still working towards that new server!

Posted by Admin at 09:52 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 13, 2006

NEW: Terms of Service

All Terrablogs domains now have a Terms of Service ("TOS") document that can be accessed at the following URLs:

The TOS for each domain can also be accessed via the navigation at the bottom of every domain's main pages.

Posted by Admin at 04:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 12, 2006

Tweaky Tweaky Tweaks

Say that five times fast.

Hovering your mouse pointer over a date in the calendar view will now allow you to see how many posts were made on that date! Check it out on any of the domains!

Also, please donate today if you have not already done so!

Because We Love You,
The TB Admins

Posted by Admin at 12:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

The Beat Goes On

Masters of the Terrablogs
You know it's going to be a good day when you get an email that begins "Dear Thankless Masters of Chattablogs..."

Yes, sometimes we Terrablogs administrators do feel thankless. But that's OK. We keep working hard anyway to bring you cool new features like the calendar — which has been further improved with weight.

Who ate all the pies?
What do I mean by weight? I'm not saying the calendar ate all the pies. I'm saying that now you can get an idea about how many entries there were on any given day (weight) based on color codes. Here's how it looks:

Notice that there's a key below the calendar. The colors beside each date correspond with how much relative activity there has been for any given month. Whatever date you've selected turns blue. The little box with the X in it indicates a day where there are no entries. Go check it out on ANY of the domains by clicking the calendar tab! It's nifty. It's simple. It's colorful.

Terrablogs: We Color Your Blogosphere.

We're sinking!
If you like what we're doing with ALL of the blog domains (yes, we're biting the bullet working on all of them right now), please show your appreciation by donating! At present we can only do so much to keep this system running, and we desperately need a new server to keep things going! Every day tends to be like dodging bullets as issues crop up unexpectedly. Seriously, we're having to put out fires all over the place at times. Please donate today if you have not already done so!

Peace,
The TB Admins

Posted by Admin at 11:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 10, 2006

New Features; the Work Continues [Updated]

In our never-ending quest to make Terrablogs the best blogging portal we continue to make incremental (and sometimes substantial) enhancements to your blogging experience. Most of these changes come out of our love for cool things and our own love for blogging. Some, however, come out of necessity when we are faced with the ever-growing challenge of keeping this project running. Every once in a while we have what we think is a good idea, so we spend a little time and make it happen. Some changes you will never see since they happen behind the scenes; however, we work hard to make sure that everything we do has a real benefit for you, the user, so that you continue to enjoy your blogging as much as we enjoy having you as bloggers.

This entry is the first (well maybe the second) of what we hope to be a series. The intent of this series is to let you know about the work we are doing so that you might appreciate and enjoy all the new features as much as we do. So, without further ado, here's what we've been doing lately.

FRONTPAGE UNIFICATION:
As was noted in the last entry Chattablogs got a bit of a facelift. Shortly thereafter Atlblogs and StLouisBlogs got facelifts as well. It is our plan to give each of our blog domains a facelift in the not-so-distant future. We are working with our graphic design team to determine color schemes and such for each domain and soon after we nail down those details we will continue with the facelifts. [UPDATE (7:30pm): We decided to go ahead and unify all the front pages today. We quickly created some new logos and pushed out the code to all blog domains so that we could get the process started. The logos are possibly temporary and the color schemes are definitly going to change, but now we've got everyone on the same page and we can all enjoy the new features.]

In a technical sense, these facelifts were a great advancement for us, the Terrablogs administrators. The unification of domain frontpages means that we are able to more quickly and efficiently make changes that directly affect all users, such as the release of new features. As you will see from the continued list of new features, anything that is released on one of the unified domains gets automatically released on all the others. Hooray! In the past it was quite a hassle to make changes across multiple domains because it entailed changing dissimilar code on multiple different domains. Not an easy task for a project that isn't paying the bills. Hopefully this unification will kick start our creative juices and allow for more innovation, which will mean more fun for all. Also, the unification will allow us to more quickly and easily roll out new blog domains, so that all your friends in Chicago and Pittsburgh and New York can stop harassing us about getting their blogging portals started. :) They're coming, trust us. However, they're not going to come until we are able to purchase a new server. But that's a story for a different time. However, I will say, do consider supporting Terrablogs.

In an aesthetic sense the new look is just sleek and sexy, in my humble opinion (IMHO). There are also a few added little benefits for you. You are now able to easily tell which blog the recent comments are coming from and are able to do a Google search of the current blog domain right from the frontpage. Ain't technology great?

THE ENTRIES CALENDAR:
As you can see here, we've released a calendar which allows you to view entries, and comments, by date. Unfortunately the calendar only works for non-IE browsers right now. We fully intend to make the calendar page IE-compatible in the future, but at this time IE's annoying ability to render perfectly valid html and css as worthless garbage makes it prohibitive to make the calendar work for that browser. So, if you are using IE and are able, do yourself a favor and get a browser that works and that isn't evil. There are still a couple of tweaks in the calendar interface that we are de-bugging and hope to release some time very soon. So keep your eyes open.

AJAX IS COOL:
For those of you who don't know what AJAX is, check this out. We'll wait right here for you. Now, don't you feel smarter? For those of you too lazy to read that whole article and increase your knowledge of the World Wide Web around you, you know who you are, I'll just say that AJAX is a really cool trick allowing a web page to serve up new content for you without having to refresh the entire page. It allows the webpage to only change the the piece of the page that needs updating and leave everything else alone. To see an example, check out the frontpage of Chattablogs. You should notice a link that says "more" just below the "recent comments" section, and a similar link just below the "recent entries" section. If you click on this link, don't blink, because before you know it the content of the pertinent section will be refreshed we the next batch of comments or entries, whatever the case may be. Cool, ain't it?

Well, that about wraps it up, except for some behind-the-scenes changes that we can talk about later, if you ask really nicely. If you have any ideas about ways that we can improve Terrablogs, don't be shy. Let us know. Leave a comment in this thread. We can't guarantee that we will be able to make all, or any, of the changes that you suggest, but we do love hearing feedback from our users and it is our intent to make this service usable for YOU. Until then, enjoy the show, and don't forget to tip your waiter.

Posted by Admin at 07:30 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

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