Recent entries created by Mathew Mannion

Mon 12 Sep 10:46

BlogBuilder update: Better tags

There has been a new release to BlogBuilder this morning, with a few fixes that people may find useful:

Custom Taglists

You can now create a custom taglist on the Admin -> Appearance page of your blog by clicking Yes on "use Custom taglist" and entering a list of tags into the field below.

Easier to tag entries and images

You can now get suggestions when you're typing in tags for your entries or images. For a short visual tutorial on how this works, you can see the entry here: link

Miscellaneous

  • Chinese characters in profile titles now work
  • Chinese characters in tags should now display correctly (but not when you click them yet)

Mathew Mannion : 12 Sep 2005 10:46 |  Tags:  |  Comments (12) |  Report a problem

Wed 07 Sep 15:47

BlogBuilder update: Tags

Today there have been a number of changes to the way BlogBuilder works, which have been outlined below:

Categories are dead. Long live Categories Tags!

Since Tags have been introduced, it has become plainly clear that they are a more powerful version of categories (you can do everything that you could with categories with a tag, and more, such as adding multiple tags to an entry) and as a result categories have been removed to help in system simplicity. This means, that among other changes:

  • On your old posts, any categories that you had are now a tag
  • "Categories" on your sidebar have been replaced with your "Top 5 Tags", which show your five most used tags
  • "Top Categories" has now become Top Tags as is mainly different in that it's now actually useful because it counts the number of entries with a specific tag, rather than the number of blogs with a specific category.
  • The "Create Entry" screen has been tidied up somewhat and looks cleaner
  • When you subscribe to another blog, you don't subscribe to posts out of a specific category, you subscribe to posts out of a specific Tag.
  • There is a new "Edit your tags" screen in blog options, where you can Edit your tags (so you use popular tag names for related entries), add Synonyms to your tags (so if you have tags for joke and limerick, you might want both of them to have a synonym of Humour) or delete a tag
Miscellaneous Other Changes
  • The "Appearance" page in your Blog Admin settings has now been split into two pages – Appearance and Settings, to be more intuitive.
  • The PDP entry options should now appear for all students, even Holly.
  • There's tag and image counts on the front page
  • Chinese Characters should now work in Tags
Known Issues
  • When you click on a Chinese-Character tag to see all the entries for it, it won't work – this is a known issue and should be fixed in the next release. Sorry.
  • There is a known issue with posting comments that causes them to be very slow – please be patient, comments ARE working but take time, and this will be fixed soon hopefully

We realise at the moment there is a debate about whether categories should have been removed, and at the moment there is no feature to select which tags appear in your sidebar (by default, it is your five most used tags), but this feature is on the way – this is an interim stage to make sure everything is perfectly in place before the start of term.


Mathew Mannion : 07 Sep 2005 15:47 |  Tags:  |  Comments (13) |  Report a problem

Fri 02 Sep 11:21

BlogBuilder update: Custom CSS

There has been a new release of BlogBuilder today, with the following changes:

New Features

  • Advanced users can now modify the designs of their blog using their own custom CSS styles through the Appearance page. An example of this in use is here, and you can find more information in the Frequently Asked Questions.
  • You can now see pages showing images for a particular tag by clicking on the links on tags added to images.

Improvements

  • You can now turn Notifications (emails you get when you get a new comment or trackback) on or off on your "Appearance" screen.
  • There is now a link to "My saved drafts" if you have any unpublished entries under "Create Entry" on your blog.
  • When you create a TV or Movie review, you can now select the image from your gallery or upload a new image.
  • When you create a World-Viewable entry, by default the commenting permissions are now set to "Staff/Student" (but can be changed manually to Anyone)

Tweaks/Bugfixes

  • A slight problem with RSS feeds for Favourites in Firefox has been fixed.
  • Technorati should now do better in indexing pages on the site and working out what content is new.
  • A problem where when you edit an entry and preview it, settings for trackbacks/technorati pings are lost has been resolved.
  • Tags now display slightly nicer at the bottom of entries

Mathew Mannion : 02 Sep 2005 11:21 |  Tags:  |  Comments (28) |  Report a problem

Wed 24 Aug 15:26

BlogBuilder Update 24/08/05

A new version of BlogBuilder was released this afternoon, with the following changes:

Zip File Uploads

Rather than the cumbersome method of uploaded each image individually to a gallery, you can now upload a collection of images at the same time to a certain number of galleries if they are in a Zip file (a Compressed Folder in Windows XP). This allows you to upload a number of images that are all related to each other to the same gallery.

For example, if I had 40 photos from Final Fling, I could put them all into a Zip file and upload them all together into my Final Fling gallery, tagging them (see below) as "final fling final_fling". All the images in that Zip file will then be put into the Final Fling gallery as Final Fling 1, Final Fling 2, Final Fling 3… and all of them will have the tags specified.

Movie and TV Reviews

You can now make reviews of tv shows and movies in the "Write Review" option when you create an entry. This is not quite as easy as other types of review as you cannot get the picture of them from Amazon – but you can place a link to a related web page (say, at imdb) and also provide an image, say if you found a movie poster and then uploaded it to your gallery.

Tags

You can now tag images and entries with a series of keywords that are related, allowing you to find related entries on Warwick Blogs. For example, if you write an entry about your work at the University of Warwick, you might tag it as "work warwick unitemps university_of_warwick", and then this entry will appear on aggregate pages relating to these tags. This will also help your search rank on services that check such tags, such as Technorati.

Gallery/Image RSS Feeds

You can now get RSS feeds of a gallery by going to that gallery and clicking the RSS 1.0 / RSS 2.0 buttons that appear on the bottom left. This allows you to keep up to date with images that have been posted in this gallery.

Technorati Pings

A few teething problems with Technorati pings have been fixed, and these should also now be aware of any tags that you put on an entry.


Mathew Mannion : 24 Aug 2005 15:26 |  Tags:  |  Comments (23) |  Report a problem

Tue 16 Aug 16:35

BlogBuilder Update 16/08/05

Another new version of BlogBuilder has been released with some new features and improvements:

Galleries
  • You can now modify images and galleries on your own blog when you're logged in whilst viewing the galleries yourself
  • You can now remove images from galleries with a single click
  • You can now view slideshows for individual galleries
  • Slideshows should now display all your images and galleries properly
Inserting Images into Entries
  • You can now insert images into your blog posts that are centred in your entry
  • You can now insert images that are thumbnails to the full size images
  • You can now insert images even if they are not in a gallery

These are basically improvements to the form that you get when you click the little icon next to "To insert an image" on your "Create an Entry" screens, allowing you to add an image from a gallery or from another website easily.

What this does, when you click the "Select this image" button (or on a layout), is insert a piece of HTML code into your blog entry that will produce the desired affect.

Game Reviews

There is a new type of entry – Video Game Reviews. They work pretty much the same as DVD reviews too, and display the name and publisher of the game along with any rating you have given it on your blog. You can also view all Game reviews on each person's blog, or throughout the entire of Warwick Blogs.

General Improvements
  • When you delete comments from your admin screen, it now returns you back to the admin screen rather than to the entry itself
  • Emails for a new registration when you request a blog now indicate that your blog has not been made "live" yet
WGA Members

Blogs will be transferred shortly between your current usercode (which will expire) and the new usercode that has been set up. Once this has happened you will be emailed with your new usercode and password.

If you have not already contacted us about keeping access to your blog, please see the entry here.


Mathew Mannion : 16 Aug 2005 16:35 |  Comments (23) |  Report a problem

Tue 09 Aug 16:52

BlogBuilder Update

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released this afternoon:

New Feature: Creating a new blog is now a little more friendly.

First time users will see some links and some information and all users will receive an email welcoming them to WarwickBlogs and giving them a few links.

New Feature: Technorati pings.

You can now turn Technorati pings on on your blog on, which will send a notification to the Technorati website whenever you make a public post. You can turn these off and on per post also, and by default your blog will not notify Technorati.

New Feature: Making External Trackbacks

You can make related entries to blogs outside of the University, and (if their blog is set up well) they will receive notification that you have written a related entry.

New Feature: Deleting Internal Trackbacks

You can now delete internal trackbacks. The link from the original Warwick Blog will remain, but the link back from your blog to the original post will disappear.

Improvement: "No-Textile" rule for non-logged in commenters

Commenters who visit your blog without logging in can now use Textile in their comments.

Improvement: Comment and Trackback emails

Emails received when you get a new comment or trackback have been improved, so that they arrive with the correct sender name and email address (if they have been inputted) and the subject lines display a little better.

Improvement: Internal Trackback emails

You will now receive emails when someone within WarwickBlogs makes an entry that links to yours in the "Writing about…" field.

Fixed: Making trackbacks about other Warwick Blogs posts

When you make a trackback about another Warwick Blog post, it should now find the post that you are talking about and put the title of the post and blog in properly.


Mathew Mannion : 09 Aug 2005 16:52 |  Comments (14) |  Report a problem

RSS2.0 Atom

Search this blog

Tags

Most recent comments

  • Hi, Do you have a list of keyboard shortcuts? I can see Ctrl+b for Bold and Ctrl+i for italics works… by Mike Downes on this entry
  • I don't know what I have done and I have 2 blogs… definitely practise by on this entry
  • I am aiming to achieve better organisation and planning skills and focus on how to deal with disrupt… by on this entry
  • N.B. we responded directly to Sian when this query was asked via another channel. For reference, Fee… by Simon Harper on this entry
  • I was pleased to see this change: "We've modified the Atom API to allow setting of arbitrary permiss… by Sian Prosser on this entry
Not signed in
Sign in

Powered by BlogBuilder
© MMXXIV