All 37 entries tagged BlogBuilder

Slow posting of entries

Many users may have noticed over the past week or so that the posting of entries has occasionally (with no real correlation to time of day or what is being posted) been extremely slow, and this has led to a few cases where people have accidentally posted two of the same entry by clicking the “Publish Now” button twice.

We have made improvements to two areas which we believe may have been contributing to the problem, and have released these changes this morning onto BlogBuilder.

If you experience any issues with publishing an entry, for example where the entry takes more than 15 or 20 seconds to publish, then it would be extremely helpful if you could email us at blogs@warwick.ac.uk with the time of day, the content of your entry and all the settings on the “Create entry” screen (Who can see the entry, who can comment on the entry, whether the entry is show in collections, whether the entry has “Show trackbacks” and “Send Technorati ping?” checked).

Mathew Mannion : 09 Nov 2006 10:29 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New features

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released today with some new features:

Textile 2

In order to provide better editing capabilities for entries and comments, we have upgraded the markup library that we use to Textile2, which supports new features such as tables and footnotes. The full list of Textile2 features are available for viewing here

Obviously with such a large change there may be minor errors that occur. Any problems can be reported here or on the Blogs Feedback Forum

“Watch this entry for new comments”

You can now “watch” or subscribe to entries in order to be notified by email when there are new comments on them. You can stop watching them at any time by clicking the link in the notification email. To watch an entry, check the checkbox underneath the comment form when you make a comment or click the link at the top of the list of comments for an entry.

Requesting Deletion of a comment

If you make a comment and wish for it to be deleted by the author of the entry, you can now click a link at the bottom right of your comment and send an email directly to the author of the entry.

Scheduled Entries

It is now possible to schedule entries to appear at a time in the future, for example if you wish to maintain a regular posting schedule on your blog or if you wish for it to appear, for example, after a lecture or assignment deadline.

Collaborative Draft Editing

When you save an entry as a draft, you can now allow other people to view it before it is published by giving them the link to the draft entry. To get this link, click on the title of the entry from the Admin Entries screen.

As always, if there are any problems, feel free to comment on this entry.

Mathew Mannion : 30 Aug 2006 16:58 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (27) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New version

There was a new release of BlogBuilder today with some new features and improvements:

In–Browser Photo Editing

You can now edit photos to touch them up and make them more blog–friendly after uploading them by clicking the Edit image icon in the gallery (or the "Edit image" link on the Admin Your Images page). This will allow you to use a number of tools to perform minor modifications to your image (resizing, cropping, rotating, enhancing, even adding a lomo filter or snow) and save the changes to your blog.

Other Changes

There have been a few other minor changes, mainly in that any problems that users have experienced in writing single–line comments or entries and the end being cut off (particularly after using an acronym such as WGA) should not appear any more.

There have also been some minor changes to the way that blogs send RSS feeds to help speed up requests if information has not changed, and users can access ATOM feeds of pages by appending /atom or ?atom=atom to the URL.

Mathew Mannion : 21 Aug 2006 11:29 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogbuilder update

There has been a new release of Blogbuilder today with a few improvements and new features:

Alumni Permissions

As well as writing entries that can only be seen by staff and students, users can now write entries that can be seen by all Alumni users who log in with their WGA users. This will not work retroactively and Alumni users will not be able to see "University–only" entries (only "University & Alumni" entries). If you find that the Alumni permissions do not work for you, then you may well have one of the old Alumni accounts we created before we had a proper authentication system that points to the WGA. If you are having trouble, let us know and we'll check out your account.

If you have joined the WGA and wish to maintain access to your blog after your ITS usercode expires, see this entry

[media] Tag

The Warwick Blogs syntax (Textile) has been extended in order to allow users to post sound or video files on their blog that are hosted externally, such as MP3 files that are uploaded to a hosting account or video files from YouTube or Google Video.

You can put these onto your blog by taking the URL of the MP3 or video (or the URL of the YouTube/Google Video page where it is located) and wrapping them in a [media] tag as follows:

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_YMigZmUuk[/media]

Which will produce the desired result:

Mathew Mannion : 14 Aug 2006 14:15 |  Tags: BlogBuilder ITS Media Update |  Comments (28) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Entry permissions

Follow-up to New groups system from Blogbuilder news

As an extension to the way that webgroups are now integrated into Warwick Blogs, there has been a slight way to the way permissions work when you are creating an entry. You can now search for specific groups when creating an entry by clicking "Find a Group", which allows you to find students for a particular module or course on–the–fly.

Along with this, in the "Manage your Groups" page on your blogs Admin page, you can add groups to this also, so you can search for groups as well as users. These groups update automatically, so the people who are on the module "ES425" now are not the same who will be on it next year, so bear that in mind when creating the entry.

Update: We've also fixed a problem with posting special characters into comments with our nice new slide down AJAX comments

Mathew Mannion : 07 Jul 2006 14:22 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update Webgroups |  Comments (12) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New groups system

A new small release of Blogbuilder was released last night, with a few very minor bugfixes (apologies to anyone who hasn't been able to make game reviews for a while), and a transference to a new system for organising groups.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, any favourites that you have for groups before (such as the module IB104, Philosophy 4th Years) will have been removed and you will have to re–subscribe to these groups. You can do this by:

1. Going to the Blog Directory
2. If the Group that you want is not on that page, click on Departments on the left
3. You can then see a list of departments. If you are looking for an individual module, you can click the link at the top and search for it by typing it in the field

Once you are at a group page, you can click on the heart icon next to the title to add it to your Favourites.

Mathew Mannion : 04 Jul 2006 09:43 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update Webgroups |  Comments (13) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Major update

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released today with some small fixes, and two large new features:

Customisable Sidebars

Something which we've been working on for a while, and that some people have asked for, is the ability to customise the aspects of the sidebar on your blog. By going to the "Admin" area of your blog and then clicking on "Sidebar", you can now re–order, remove and add sidebar items to your blog.

There are two ways to add sidebar items to your blog: either from a remote feed (RSS or Atom), or from a plain text (Textile or HTML). We've also implemented a number of wizards that can help you to add your Flickr photos, del.icio.us links or a feed from Warwick Podcasts directly to your sidebar easily.

At the moment, when you display sidebar items, they can either be an image feed, a podcast feed or a normal text feed. If there are any other types that you'd wish us to implement, let us know.

For more information on what you can do with your sidebar, you can read the Frequently Asked Questions.

In–page Comments

The popup comments windows have now been replaced with an Ajax drop–down that opens when the link is clicked and can be closed again. When you access comments from one of these windows, you can also post comments without leaving the current browser page.

Other Minor Fixes

There have been a couple of other minor fixes, specifically with Chinese characters being previewed in entries and some minor CSS fixes, as well as fixes with the help popups and gallery captions

If you have any problems with the fixes, or any features in BlogBuilder, as always you can report it by commenting on this entry or by posting on the Blog Feedback forum.

Mathew Mannion : 27 Jun 2006 09:49 |  Tags: Ajax BlogBuilder Sidebars Update |  Comments (25) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New version

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released today, with a few improvements and minor fixes:

Fixes

• My Comments should now sort comments and display results exactly as expected
• The new "Preview" pane should act properly when saving as a draft afterwards

Improvements

• If you have statistics turned on on your "About me" page, you'll be able to see the number of comments posted, as well as a list of who has you on their favourites.
• RSS feeds have been slightly improved
• The front page colours are now slightly more readable than before

As always, if you spot any problems or issues, feel free to comment here or on the Blogs Feedback Forum (you may need to be signed in to read the forum)

Mathew Mannion : 07 Jun 2006 11:42 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

14th March downtime

We are upgrading to the latest greatest version of the Oracle database where all of the Warwick Blogs data lives on Tuesday 14th March between 09:30 and 11:30. This will mean that Warwick Blogs will be unavailble between those times.

: 09 Mar 2006 09:54 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Maintenance |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Trackbacks and Galleries

Released a small (functionality wise) update to BlogBuilder today, with some pretty big code changes, so if you see any problems it would be very helpful if you could comment and tell us what they are – there shouldn't be any problems but, as with any change, it's difficult to be 100% certain.

• When you trackback a non-Warwick Blog that supports trackbacks, it should now correctly show the URL of your entry to that blog.
• There should now be no problems with turning off trackbacks or pings for individual entries.
• The bug that caused the trackback counter to increment when a post that was trackbacking it was edited has been fixed.
• The My Comments screen now shows "Today" and "Yesterday" where relevant just like entries do (and we're working on the other problems with the My Comments page ordering wrongly and not updating fast enough).
• Galleries now have a maximum description length of 4,000 characters, and tell you much more politely if you exceed it.

For those who care: This update has taken a long time because there's also a backend upgrade where the code now uses the new features (foreach loops, autoboxing, Generics) in Java 5, which makes the code a lot nicer and safer to work with, and removes 2,286 iterators in the BlogBuilder code and replaces them with foreach loops (in almost every case)!

Mathew Mannion : 02 Mar 2006 18:43 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Galleries Trackbacks Update |  Comments (15) |  Close comments |  Report a problem