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Ever wanted to add navigation buttons to other blogs or to your WebSite Tonight website?

Now you can with our new navigation editor. 
 
If you have a paid Blogcast account, you can edit your navigation by selecting Navigation from the Design Blog Menu. The editor allows you to add new navigation items as well as subnavigation items.  Subnavigation items are only supported if you have a Deluxe or Premium Quick Blogcast account.




Subnavigation items show as a fly out menu when you hover over a navigation item.




Navigation is supported by our newer templates. We are working to have navigation support for all our templates. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Most administrators want to moderate blog comments by approving them before they are made public.  When a trusted individual leaves frequent comments, however, it is a really tedious process to approve the commenter again and again.

For those special individuals whose comments you trust, you can moderate their comment once and add them to the un-moderated commenter’s list. Any comments from individuals on the un-moderated commenter's list display immediately on your blog.

Don’t worry, if your un-moderated commenter suddenly turns rogue, you can take away the privilege at any time.

To approve a comment and add the commenter to the un-moderated commenter’s list, select Comments from the Manage Entries menu. Click the checkbox in front of that person’s comment and select Approve Comment and Add Commenter from the Select action drop-down list. Then click Apply.

Check out  Managing Un-Moderated Commenter in our help center if you need assistance.

Now that you’ve been tagging your entries with our new tag feature, you may want to give your readers a way to easily see which tags you use the most—and to let them click the tag to view all entries using that tag.

That’s what our new Tag Cloud widget does.

The Tag Cloud widget is used to display the weighted list of tagged entries. Tag Clouds describe, by relative size, which tags are most and least used. A tag cloud can increase your site’s “stickiness” by encouraging readers to check out some of your tags.

To add the Tag Cloud, select Sidebar from the Design Blog menu and then drag and drop the "Tag Cloud" into the Active Widgets columns. That's it…well, make sure you’ve been tagging your entries. Check out Managing Quick Blogcast Tags in our help center if you need assistance.

Let us know what you think!

Ever want to know how many visitors are checking out that new blog post? Whether visitors are enjoying your entries?  Who’s commenting the most? Or which entries are being discussed the most?

Now you can—in real-time—with our new real-time statistics.

There is a new section on the Statistics home page (Manage Blog --> Statistics) that links to these new statistics:


Let’s take a closer look at these statistics:

Hourly Entry Views

This statistic keeps track of your entry traffic for the current 24-hour window. You will know right away if a new entry is getting traffic with this new statistic.


Only entries that have been visited show up on this page. Visits are broken down by what hour the visitor viewed the entry.

Entry Survey Results

See the votes visitors cast on your entries (Liked, Disliked, or No Opinion) if you have the entry survey enabled.

Most Frequent Commentors

View a list of your visitors’ emails that comment the most on your entries.

Most Discussed Entries

View a list of entries that have generated the most comments from your visitors.




For additional information on the new real-time statistics, visit Managing Quick Blogcast Statistics.

We’re releasing eight new templates to help you create a new look and feel for your Quick Blogcast site. These templates offer more flexibility and some of them match templates used in Quick Shopping Cart® and WebSite Tonight®. 

We’re also making it easier for you to change the header image in the template. A few of these new templates give you the ability to change the default header image by clicking this icon:

Check out the new templates below:

Category:  Restaurant
Name: Diner

---

Category:  Generic
Name: Elemental

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Category:  Community
Name: Helping Hands

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Category:  Health & Fitness
Name: Home Care

---

Category:  Political
Name: Homeland

---

Category:  Health & Fitness
Name: Nutrition

---

Category:  General Business
Name: Office Space

---

Category:  Sports
Name: Self-Defense







Templates that support two sidebars coming soon!   We will post them here once they are released.

Quick Blogcast now lets you add tags to your blog posts. From a programming perspective, categories and tags are nearly identical. But from a blogger’s perspective, categories and tags are quite different.

Imagine someone coming to your blog for the first time. They may read a blog post and really like it and then want to read more. But they might not be interested in everything you have to say. That’s where it’s nice to put your posts into categories so people can find things they are interested in reading about.

Tags complement these categories and allow you to further define your blog posts. Think of tags as being the index of a book. When you’re digging for something in a book, you really appreciate a good index. Used correctly, tags can really help users find blog posts they are interested in. Categories could be compared to a table of contents, helping users navigate to broad sections of content.

But you’re free to think of and use tags and categories however you like! We just want to let you know that you can use them both in Quick Blogcast. Check out our help center’s information about tags for the details.

Not every blogger intends to share his or her thoughts with the world. Some may want a private communication area for family, friends, or both. Or maybe just an online journal you can access from anywhere. If privacy is your intent, you may not want your coworkers, ex-girlfriends, or any unsavory people stopping by your blog and checking it out.

If there’s one thing about the Internet that many people have found out the hard way, it’s that it’s not private. If you want your blog private and don’t want to find out the hard way about the Internet’s reach, you’ll want to check out Quick Blogcast’s new privacy feature.

Making Your Blog Private

Once you turn privacy on, simply give the username and password you create to the people you want to read your blog. Then, not even search engine spidering can read your stuff—only the people with the username and password can.

Let us know what you think!

We had been receiving feedback from many Quick Blogcast users requesting that we provide a way to preview your blog entry while you are writing it.  Many people found it tedious to have to publish an entry, go view the live entry, and then go back to the editor and make more changes.

Publishing and then viewing the live entry to “preview” is a thing of the past with our recently added entry preview feature. 

Whether you are writing a brand new entry or editing an existing entry, you can click the “Preview Entry” button below the entry editor.  This opens a new window that shows a preview of your entry on your live blog.   You don’t even need to save your entry to see new changes in the preview.  Simply make any change in the editor and click the “Preview Entry” button to immediately see those changes in the preview window. 

If you have any problems with this preview window showing, make sure to allow app.quickblogcast.com to open pop-up windows or disable any pop-up blocking utilities you may be using.

We always welcome user feedback either through this blog or through our feedback link in our application.  This feature is a direct result of user feedback.  We read all of our feedback and take all feature suggestions into consideration.

Let us know what you think of this new feature and continue to send us suggestions on how we can improve our product.  We enjoy hearing from our users and knowing how we can improve their blogging experience.

A few months ago, we added the Site Building Dashboard which lets you easily switch between your WebSite Tonight®, Quick Shopping Cart®, and Quick Blogcast accounts. Now, we’ve added a Template tab to the Site Building Dashboard.

 

The Template tab allows you to conveniently manage your templates for WebSite Tonight, Quick Shopping Cart, and Quick Blogcast from one screen. Even better, the Template tab makes it easy to select a template that is compatible across all three applications, which lets you give your users a seamless transition from your blog to your site to your store.

 

If you’re the Blogcast administrator, manage your templates by logging in to the Blogcast account and clicking the Templates tab.

 

Once you click the Template tab, do the following:

 

·         Click the Filter button located towards the upper left of the screen.

·         Select a category from the list.

·         Select which application you want the template to work with (this helps you to match the look and feel across your site, store, and blog).

·         Click Update to refresh the list of available templates. 

·         Select the template by clicking on the thumbnail and then clicking OK.

 

If you want to change the template for another application, click Change Template next to that application and repeat the steps above to filter your choices. If you don’t have a Change Template button, click the Dashboard tab and assign an account.

 

The Template tab makes it easy to switch your template and get a consistent look and feel across your sites. Check it out and take some time to let us know what you think! 

We’ve released an updated version of our  GoDaddy.com Quick Blogcast for Facebook .

View All.

People visiting your profile can now read and comment upon all your entries from within Facebook, rather than the previous maximum of ten. The number of entries per page can be controlled within the settings page.

We’ve improved the formatting of images and videos from your Quick Blogcast, as well as neatened up a few loose ends that prevented people from posting links within the comments.

At this time, when you post a blog entry, these stories are not showing up on the wall. This is a known issue, and we’re working towards a resolution.

Tips and Workaround:

Adding Blogcast to your profile box:

Since the changeover to the new Facebook format, many people have asked us “where’s it gone?” To ensure that your friends can find your posts, log into Facebook and follow these steps:

Applications > Edit>then, click “Edit settings” for Godaddy.com Quick Blogcast.

You can now add a profile box, which your readers can locate within your Facebook profile under Boxes.

Adding a Blogcast to bookmark to the Application taskbar

For quicker access to your Quick Blogcast application create a bookmark within Facebook’s application toolbar. To do this look for “Bookmark Godaddy.com Quick Blogcast” on the application toolbar when you are within the Quick Blogcast Facebook app.

Wall notification using FriendFeed

As noted above, posting new blog entries doesn’t lead to the expected notification on your wall. While we’re working on this issue, I’d like to suggest this workaround:

If you use an aggregation service, such as Friendfeed, that publishes events to your wall, this can restore notifications to your readers shortly after you publish a new entry on your Blogcast.

Within Friendfeed, all you have to do is add your Blogcast URL to the blog service on the add/edit services page.

Have fun,

John
Widget Wrangler.

We recently launched the new Quick Blogcast Statistics tool, a fresh, interactive design for working with your blog site’s statistics. The new statistics tool replaces the previous one; however, for a limited time, you can view your previous statistics in the Classic mode.

Why We Implemented the New Statistics Tool
We designed the new tool in an effort to provide you with the most accurate information for your site and to offer more control over how you view that information. Quick Blogcast's new statistics tool gives you access to statistics and reports for various features of your blog, including how visitors are getting to your blog, how frequently they're visiting, what they're viewing, and on what entries they're commenting.

While the Classic statistics tool provided some similar information, the new statistics tool provides many enhancements over the Classic tool. The new statistics tool is not merely a redesign with a different view of the same information; it is an entirely new method of collecting data. It exceeds the Classic tool in its ability to collect accurate, realistic statistical information for your blog. Because these tools are so different, some reported data may be inconsistent between the Classic and the new statistics tools.

Why Your New Statistics May Not Match Your Classic Statistics
The previous tool and method of collecting statistical information did not always provide a fully accurate account of your blog site’s statistics, because some hits to your site do not represent valid users. This is not to say we collected inaccurate information. Rather, the collected information included traffic to your site generated by web bots, such as Google, that crawl your site and can produce erroneous hits from invalid or non-existent URLs. The system also collected information from some non-automated visits, such as generated screen captcha images.

Classic statistics might show that you received 100 visits to your site last week, while the new statistics tool displays only 11 visits for the same period of time. Such a difference is likely because the Classic mode includes visits to your site from Web crawling bots and other hits that do not represent your site’s actual viewers.

Not all statistics display such radically different results between the two tools. For example, the reported statistics of the Classic tool Article Views and the corresponding Entry Views in the new tool should be quite similar.

Because the Classic and new tools collect different sets of data and use different methods to collect it, we cannot measure the history or statistics that were collected in the Classic mode. However, the new statistic tool provides a truly superior experience over the Classic tool and once more new statistics are collected, you will have far more accurate data to compare for your statistical history.

Why the New Statistics Tool is Superior to the Classic Tool
Now that you know our reasoning for the update and the differences in collection methods, let’s go over the ways in which the new tool is better than the Classic tool.

The Classic statistics tool had the benefit of providing real-time statistics. The moment you accessed a given statistic, we collected the information and provided it immediately to you. Unfortunately, this method of data collection did not include the same verification level as the new statistics tool. Therefore, the collected data included the traffic generated by automated and other invalid users.

The new statistics tool collects information and calculates it before it is presented to you. The tool filters out the superfluous and invalid hits and verifies that the traffic is coming from actual users, providing accurate information about your viewer’s browsers and operating systems. This process occurs nightly.

Additionally, the new statistics tool has many features that exceed those of the classic tool. For example, the Classic tool did not provide any visual displays of your information, such as charts and graphs. The new statistics tool, on the other hand, includes a Visits at a Glance section and offers options to view your data as a pie chart or detailed graph.

With the new statistics tool, you also have more control over the period of time for which you want to view your statistics. You can set the time period (day, week, month, or year) for any of the statistics you want to view. The Classic tool only provided a time range for certain statistics in the article views.

We are very excited about the new Quick Blogcast statistics tool and we want to know how you’re enjoying it. We welcome all your feedback.

For additional information on the details of the new statistics tool, please see Managing Quick Blogcast Statistics.

Go Daddy’s File Folder for Facebook

What is it?

Go Daddy File Folder is a free, quick, and convenient place to store up to 1GB* of your files online. In this way, you can easily share your photos and files with your Facebook friends. No more worrying about email attachments or inbox storage limits. However, if individual files are over 50MB, then you may want to worry a little, since that exceeds our maximum for a single upload.

What does it cost?

Go Daddy File Folder is free. The cost is merely about 10 seconds of set up and a couple of minutes familiarizing yourself with the options.

What is it not?

Go Daddy File Folder is not an extension of our Go Daddy Online File Folder, which integrates closely with our webmail program and offers features, such as encryption, zip file creation, a file drop box, FTP access, and a tool to keep your desktop and remote files perfectly in sync. For the time being, Go Daddy File Folder is a stand alone service for use within Facebook.

What can I do with it?

With Go Daddy File Folder, you can upload home movie clips, photos, and recordings. You can even use it for work files, such as documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets, so you can share files with coworkers and associates that have access to the folder.

Actually, all the files you upload can be made private, shared amongst friends, or made available to anyone that finds your profile. You can also add a password to further restrict your friends’ access to a file. Please note that any of your other friends that you grant access to your File Folder could easily forward a file or password to another individual. So, a bit of forethought in sharing can save a lot of interesting conversations later on.

Where do I get it?

Log into your Facebook account and go to the GoDaddy.com File Folder.

What else do I need to know?

There’s quite a bit to know about using the Go Daddy File Folder, but that’s why we have help files, comments on our blog, and a love of receiving constructive criticism on how we can improve this program to make it more useful to you. I anticipate a request of more space for free as being popular; so please consider that considered, for the time being.

I hope you enjoy Go Daddy’s File Folder for Facebook, and look forward to hearing about how you’re using it.

*We don’t need to place a small disclaimer in tiny type at the bottom of the article claiming a Gigabyte = 1billion bytes or 1000 MB or anything like that. We’re giving you 1024 MB

The WST Team has been working hard to make the WST Page Designer even easier to use.
We've packed in more features, easier navigation, expanded screen workspace, a better
WYSIWIG experience, and yes! faster speeds.

Take a look at our demo and see how we've changed your website creation experience. And when
you get a chance to test drive the new editor yourself, please take a moment to let
us know how you like it.  Your feedback is what drives the changes we make in the
application, so keep it coming!

For version 2.2.4, we made some changes to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) editor built into Quick Blogcast.  You’ll notice some visible differences the next time you choose to customize the look and feel of your blog.  For a detailed explanation of this feature, see Customizing Your Template Using CSS.

Better Organization Means Easier Maintenance

Previously, when customizing your blog, CSS changes were saved over the original default CSS files.  This characteristic made it difficult to distinguish your changes from the original CSS. If you’ve ever made a change that caused your blog to display incorrectly, you know how time-consuming it can be to find and fix offending styles.  With the new design, all of your changes are visible in the right pane of the Style Sheet tab so that you can easily see exactly what you’ve changed.  The left pane displays the original default style sheets.  All color-related styles are viewable by selecting “Color Css” in the drop-down list, while theme-related styles are available under the “Theme Css” selection in the drop-down list.  To modify any of the default styles, you can select and drag from the left pane to the right (or copy and paste them).

Automatic Backup

Have you ever accidentally deleted or changed styles that caused your blog to display incorrectly and were forced to revert back to the default CSS, thus losing all of the customizations that made your blog unique?  Wouldn’t it have been nice if you could have reverted to your last published blog instead of going completely back to ground zero?  Well, now you can.  Each time you publish changes to your blog’s appearance, your last-published customizations are automatically saved for you and are viewable by selecting “Old Customized Css” in the drop-down list above the left pane on the Style Sheet tab.  If you ever want to revert a portion or all of your blog to the way it used to look, simply select the “Old Customized Css” option in the drop-down list and move any of your old styles over to the right pane and re-publish your blog.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

We’ve also added an Apply checkbox on the Style Sheet tab, which allows you to turn on or off all customizations you make to your blog without losing your changes.  For example, you might not have time to finish a blog face lift you’ve started, but you really don’t want to lose all the changes you made.  No problem, just uncheck the Apply checkbox and publish your changes.  All of your customizations are saved, but they are not visible to the blogosphere until you decide you’re ready to go live.  At that time, simply check the Apply checkbox and re-publish* for instant gratification.  When the Apply option is un-checked, the preview window displays your blog without customizations.  If you want to preview your blog with or without customization, simply change the Apply option and the preview window is updated.

*Please note that you must publish your blog after changing the Apply option for your changes to be visible by your blog viewers.

One of the worst things that can happen when online blogging is losing what might be your best blog entry ever because you get logged out of your account or because a toddler, cat, or spouse accidentally yanks out the power cord at an inopportune moment. Whatever action crashes your draft entry, the common factor is you forgot to save your draft while you were ’ writing it. It’s even more frustrating when you try to rewrite the post and it ends up a fraction of the original length, because you’ve lost 20 minutes of material and only remember 1/3 of what you first wrote.

No longer will you suffer this fate. We’ve added additional protection to Quick Blogcast with an autosave function to ensure that if you have to take that trip down memory lane you’ll only have to go back two minutes at the most.

Save Me!

We now save your work in progress every two minutes. Should the worst case happen and you lose your work, we ask you if you want to continue work on your draft in progress or start another one. While this is a fabulous safety feature, it’s truly an emergency measure and shouldn’t be used as a substitute for saving a draft post.

For a detailed explanation of this feature, see About Quick Blogcast Autosave.

Enhanced Blog Search:

Blogcast visitors now have more control over their search options, so they can perform entry searches more efficiently.

How to make use of New Entry Search?

Visitors to your blog can perform a Basic Search or Advanced Search using the search component in the blog sidebar.

Basic Search

The Quick Search or Basic Search will fetch results by matching the search term with entry titles from the prior three months.

Advanced Search

In the Advanced Search, visitors have more control over the search they want to perform by selecting an option from the “Search in” and “Date Range” lists.

We also released several performance enhancements that we hope were so seamless never noticed. Please keep your comments and feedback coming and remember to check out the new forum within Go Daddy Connections.

We've just launched an exciting feature that allows you to integrate your Quick Blogcast with your Facebook™ account. This connection is designed to publicize your blog with your Facebook friends and colleagues in a cozier environment than the wild and woolly World Wide Web. By integrating Quick Blogcast, your Facebook friends see your blog entries in your profile and can be notified of new entries through the News Feed mechanism.

To set up this integration, just go to this set up page, whether you already have a Facebook account or not. If you don't have one, Facebook will prompt you to create one, and then add the integration automatically after the account signup process. You can also visit the Facebook site to obtain more information about the Quick Blogcast Facebook application and ways to get involved.

In addition to adding your blog entries to your profile, you can choose to have the Quick Blogcast Facebook integration allow your friends to comment on your entries from within Facebook. Since we can access your Friends list and you presumably consider those individuals friends (or at least known acquaintances), their comments don't require authentication or the normal spam-blocking technologies that your public view requires. The comments appear automatically on both your Quick Blog and your Facebook site. However, the commenter’s profile image and link only display on the Facebook side.

When you create a new entry on Quick Blogcast, Facebook is automatically notified and updates your profile accordingly. If for some reason that doesn't happen, you can click Refresh Profile within the Quick Blogcast section of Facebook to do it manually. Facebook also posts a notice in your Mini-Feed, which may or may not get picked up by the News Feeds of your friends.

One of the greatest things about this Facebook integration is that it exposes all your friends to your blog. The people we care about don't always remember to check our blogs periodically, and feeds are still not mainstream enough for everybody. But if your friends are on Facebook, then they're presented with your new entries every time they visit.

Let us know what you think by adding a comment here or on the About Integrating Quick Blogcast with Facebook page.

If at first you don’t succeed, remove all attempts that you tried in the first place.

Thankfully, that’s not the way we operate here. After two interesting ways to approach the remote email blogging feature, both of which relied on you setting up a blog-specific email account, scrambling for mail server settings, and trying to recall your password, setting up a remote mail account was hardly quick or easy. With our improved process, setting up a remote mail account to use with Quick Blogcast has never been easier.

Previously, we asked you for your email address, mail server, user name, password, and the default category where blog entries should be posted. Now, we just need to know the email address you want to post from and the category you’d like the posts to go in.

What is it?

Email blogging allows you to send a post to your blog from anyplace you can send email.

Where is it?

To set remote blogging options, from the Manage Blog menu, click Settings, and then click the Email Blogging tab. There are detailed instructions on the page as well as within our Help Section.

Once you’ve set up your remote blogging account, send an email to: yourfullblogaddress@myqbc.mobi

For example:

If you use a full domain: www.blogurl@myqbc.mobi

If you use a sub domain: sub.blogurl@myqbc.mobi

What else do I need to know?

• This feature currently works for only one email address per blog at this time.
• Pictures are not resized presently, so we attempt to show what you send us.
• Not all mail clients preserve the email formatting. So for best results, send us either HTML or Text-only mail.

When people ask me whether they should have a blog or a forum it’s usually an easy answer: set up both. I’m now following my own advice and have created a Quick Blogcast forum within Godaddy.com Connections.

What This Forum Is

The Quick Blogcast Forum is a place for QBC customers to gather and discuss the program, how they use it, challenges they've overcome, and any tips and tricks they’ve picked up along the way.

If you've solved a problem that someone else may benefit from reading about or have one that someone might be able to solve, we’d love to hear from you. The forum is lightly moderated and predominantly self-policing; the rest I leave to your good judgment.

What This Forum Is Not

The Quick Blogcast Forum is not an official support venue. We have 24-7 phone and email support for all our applications. For any pressing or time-sensitive concerns, those avenues would be your best bet.

I'm starting out with a few basic topics, but please start your own if you can’t find one relevant to the topic you want to discuss. We’ll open more focused areas if the need arises. Thank you very much for your feedback, and I hope you enjoy getting to know your fellow Blogcasters

John

QBC Team