All 7 entries tagged BlogBuilder

Custom CSS Removal From Blogs

Soon, we will be deploying new changes to BlogBuilder, which include major changes to the markup and CSS for the pages in order to make them more accessible and neater.

As a result of this, all Custom CSS that has been added to blogs will be removed, and you will revert to your default CSS - with the new design.

To make sure that nothing is lost, I have (painstakingly) gone through all blogs with Custom CSS and compiled it into a text file, which you can see below:

link

If there are any problems, contact me – else, the changes will be made, probably sometime this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Mathew Mannion : 15 Sep 2005 13:06 |  Tags: BlogBuilder CSS |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

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: BlogBuilder |  Comments (12) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

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: BlogBuilder |  Comments (13) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Deleting empty blogs!

Looking through our stats we can see that there are a lot of empty blogs in the system. Many people have tried out blogs by just registering and not even writing a single entry.

We're going to tidy things up by going through and deleting any blog that is more than 6 months old and has no entries/images/favourites/comments/etc

As fair warning, we'll not be doing this for a few weeks, so if you want to claim your blog before it is deleted, just go and write an entry or upload an image. Even if your blog does get deleted, there is nothing stopping you from coming back and registering another one again in the future.

At some point in the coming months we will also be making a whole load of blogs read only. This will happen to blogs where the owners have left, this will prevent any entry creation/commenting/etc…

We're giving people a better welcome screen and email now when registering for a blog, so we hope that there won't be as many empty blogs out there this year.

: 05 Sep 2005 15:08 |  Tags: BlogBuilder |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Small update

We just rolled out a small update that includes one fix, one improvement and one new feature.

The new feature

We have upgraded to SlideShowPro 1.2 which has given us the ability to put nice little thumbnails in when you hover over the image numbers in a slideshow.

The improvement

Commenting should now be a lot faster when you comment on a blog with lots of comments.

The fix

CSS is now properly included in the headers for the comment popups.

: 05 Sep 2005 15:02 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Comments CSS Performance |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

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: BlogBuilder |  Comments (28) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

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: BlogBuilder |  Comments (23) |  Close comments |  Report a problem