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

        

 

Greetings,

We recently released version 2.2.1 of Quick Blogcast, which contains two updated features as well as a general Spring cleaning of the interface.

Blogging by Email Revised – The Wait is Over

For those of you blogging by email, and patiently waiting and waiting, I have great news. The Blogcast team has updated this feature to be set up faster and easier than ever before. For those of you who don’t have this service set up, now would be a good time to do so. It’s quite painless; just enter an email address from which you want to send posts to your blog. It’s that easy; just mail to your blog, wait a few minutes, and your post automagically appears.

You can locate this improved feature by selecting Settings in the Manage Blog menu, and then click the Email Blogging tab. We provide detailed instructions on that page as well as within our Help Center.

A New Way to Add Podcasts

This Quick Blogcast update is not just a graphical makeover; we’ve added requested functionality that makes life easier for the podcasters among you. Podcasts used to be connected to an entry, which works well until you add the wrong file by mistake. We’ve removed the sidebar item but have added two locations where you can edit your podcast settings. You can access these new areas by either clicking the audio or video player place holder or by clicking the icon within the New Entry page toolbar, and then selecting Insert Podcast.

Editing your podcasts in this way is the first step to easily uploading your media files separately or in bulk and then creating the show details afterward. Again, further details can be located in our Help Center.

Additionally, we’ve added pop-ins where pop-ups used to display. This addition is not earth-shattering but in combination with the other UI changes, it makes the Blogcast admin section a nicer place to visit.

Thank you all for your continued feedback and suggestions.

        

We're improving the infrastructure that Quick Blogcast runs on in the near future. While there will be minimal disruption--practically none for most users--some of you will have to modify your existing blog set up within the coming weeks.

If your blog is using a domain purchased from GoDaddy.com® , then you are excused from the next few paragraphs. We've got you covered and apart from a momentary glitch, where a black cat may appear to leave the same comment twice, there should be no noticeable outage.
 
If you bought your domain from anywhere other than Godaddy.com then we ask that you log into that account and point your blog's domain over to our new servers. In the near future to maintain continuous service for your readers you will need to amend your domain's "A record" to point towards 208.109.80.14 rather than 64.202.189.158 where it's currently being directed. This is the same process that you would have used when you initially set up the blog.
 
During the next few weeks we'll be running both server groups so the changeover, after you've pointed the blog to the new location, should be seamless with no loss of posts or comments. When we are close to deprecating, a wonderful $10 word for turning off, the old servers ,we'll mail the remaining users asking them to make the switch quickly or ultimately risk that their blog will be unreachable to the outside world.
 
 

        

Greetings,

It's been a week since we've unleashed our video encoder on the world, and during that time many of you have found your way to encoding and posting entries with the new tool. I did promise an in depth guide. Then it struck me that the process flows well. So, I want to hear from you if you've found that not to be the case. Rather than rewrite the help file, I’ll go into the feature in a little more depth.

Which formats are supported?

Nearly any format your Windows 2k / XP or Vista can display is fair game for the encoder. You should be able to encode from WMV, QuickTime, AVI, Mpeg-1,-2,-4, DV within an AVI container, FLV, and .3gp (common to many mobile phones ). You can also use most USB and Firewire web cameras, including DV cameras to record directly to your Blogcast.

What format am I getting?

We are creating Flash video .FLV VP6-E for Flash video.

Why Flash

The overwhelming majority of people that watch videos on line, do so at their computer. Even people that own portable players with a video feature predominantly consume video on their main system. Chances are that your viewers already have flash installed or have a system capable of running it.

Is this a podcast?

Great question. The answer is a qualified maybe. There are few mobile devices that can play FLV presently, but realistically flash video is not yet a portable format. We already have support for mp4’s within Quick Blogcast, so the people that wish to have a video in a format that can be downloaded are already covered by our existing features. While the links to the movies are syndicated, the files themselves are not.

TIPS

Don't encode the entire video when you're trying out the quality settings, unless it's a really short video.

When you have a long video set a start and end point about 20-30 seconds apart over the “busiest” part of the video. (Find the most movement within the video).

For most talking heads against a steady background, you can get away with the lowest quality setting for the small and medium sizes.

Can we ask questions?

Please do.

        

Greetings

The Blogcast Odometer has rolled over to 2.1 and it’s come back from the shop with more features, including a new photo service and the power to vlog (no, it’s not a typo, nor is the keyboard Transylvanian). Vlogging is an easy way to add video to your entries. But first.

Have you seen mah bucket?

We’ve added Photobucket to the list of supported services that let you easily retrieve your content while creating an entry. You add this under Manage Blog > Services.

Once set up, you can click on the within the New entry page and then select photobucket from services. Et voila , your public pictures appear for easy addition to your blog.

Video Blogging, (aka vlogging)

But, you say, just go along with it, it’s easier this way. “I can already blog within the application, by using a client such as Scribefire, post direct from my Flickr account, or a slough of other services with the remote blogging feature. I can podcast or I can moblog via the email service, and yet there’s more to do?”

No, there’s not more to do but there is more that you could do; should you want to. After all, there’s no right way to blog. Although there are innumerable wrong ways. Where possible, we’ll include tools that demonstrate the capabilities of the Blogcast to an entirely new audience. For instance, when we added podcast abilities, we offered the chance to explore a new area and get your feet wet, while keeping your credit card dry.

What is it?

It’s an easy way to record, encode, and upload video files to your blog. Using your webcam or practically any video file your system can play, we encode your monster files into something compact and ideally suited for the web. Then we upload it.

Why do I want it?

There are so many reasons. Let’s start with the most important. It’s free with your account…err… I mean Quality. Most services that allow you to upload your video files encode them for you on their servers (That take up resources). So, for the most part, a one-size-suits-all tradeoff has to be made regarding the file size and quality.

We’re doing something a little different. All the encoding occurs on your own system. Not only eliminating a long upload time, but more importantly leaving the choice of how good it looks up to you.

How do I get it?

All paid versions of Quick Blogcast have this feature. It can be located under Manage Entries > Add Video. Then you click the Add Video button under new entries or click on the New Entry page, which lets you add a previously saved video.

And?

There will be an in depth post along shortly; explaining in detail how to use it. Meanwhile, let us know how you’re using these new features, or if there’s something else you’d like to see within the program,

        

Greetings,

We’ve upgraded the commenting procedure within the blogging application we use (GoDaddy.com ’s Quick Blogcast) to more effectively counter comment spam.

The first time we receive a comment from an email address unknown to Quick Blogcast, we issue an email asking the sender to confirm their address before passing the comment along. Once the email address has been confirmed, the comment will display to the owner.

This is not a retroactive measure, so if you’ve already posted to any of our blogs with your mail address, please be on the lookout for this confirmation.

        

As mentioned in our previous post we have added additional measures to Quick Blogcast to better combat Comment spam. So, today it’s time to dig a little deeper into this new feature and the changes that accompanied it.

What is it?

A series of measures designed to reduce comment spam on your Quick Blogcast site. These include the captcha graphic (security code) on the comment page, time based limits that specify how many items you can reply to in a given time period, email verification, and some items we’re keeping to ourselves. (It’s amazing what you can achieve with alien technology)

What does it do?

It increases the odds that an actual person is leaving the comment rather than an automated system soliciting you to gamble, buy medication online, or fill in the blank.

The internet is more _ _ _ _

The first time we receive a comment from an email address unknown to Quick Blogcast, we issue an email asking the sender to confirm their address before passing the comment along to the blog owner. Once the email address has been confirmed, the comment will display and the owner can handle it with their normal workflow.

How do I use it?

Most likely, you already are. This is the default behavior within Blogcast, and one we encourage. If you wish to allow anonymous comments, you can do so by going to

Manage blog>settings> Discussions and then Check “allow anonymous comments” and then click Save. This removes the email confirmation process.

Why Should I care?

By doing this we hope you (a blogcast site owner) can peruse your comments without being deluged by a pile of automated junk; leaving you in control of what is ultimately approved as a comment. After that, the relationship between you and your readers will decide which works best for your particular blog.

Anything else I should know?

This is not a retroactive measure. An existing user that’s posted a comment on your blog would still receive a confirmation notice. You can still see comments from those users not yet confirmed by going into Manage Entries > Comments, and selecting view all from the drop down and then looking for items marked inactive. You can manually approve these if you wish.

        

Save me from myself Quick Blogcast 2.0.6 release.

Two weeks ago we updated the editor, added an easy method to post from You Tube, and while pausing only for a few frames at the bowling alley to celebrate, we were back to the task of adding a slew of new features for our Quick Blogcast 2.0.6 release.

Amongst the new features (in no order of importance, developers have egos after all):

Save and Continue

Now when you are composing a post, there’s no need to save your work, go back to the entry screen, and select the post you have just saved before you resume writing.  Just click Save and Continue, and your draft entry is protected from  power cuts, cat induced keyboard input, as well as forgetting you’re in the middle of a post when you just –have- to search for a news story and overwrite your window.  Oh wait! We catch that too.  Attempting to navigate away from an entry in progress now has to be verified. 

Tips:
This only works on draft entries. Once an entry is published, the save / continue button will no longer appear on that post while it remains live.

Greater control over the feeds you display.

We’ve made the podcast RSS2 feed switchable so that those of you that never intend to podcast can remove it from your sidebar. This setting can be located within Manage blog > settings > Entries 

Revised meta data handling to allow you more control.

Over the last couple of versions, we’ve been paying more attention to SEO (search engine optimization) and listening to Blogcast users.  In the end, there was no way to make everyone happy with a default or automated solution. So, we’ve added another song into our Internet production of “Hey Google we’re over here!!!”  (Playing “off Broadband” at a monitor near you). Sorry, I had to add a little meta discussion there.    We had tried a system where we’d automatically create meta tags, description, keywords based on the entries categories (keywords), and on excerpts (the first few lines of your post).

Anti Spam improvements:

Changes on the visitor side and behind the scenes should reduce the number of spam comments that you are receiving. (At least from machines. It’s a bit harder to curtail spammy humans)
Chicklets:

Another popular request was that we auto generate the chicklets. Chicklets are small images, often of a site's logo, primarily used to allow the easy submission of your entries to social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, or sites such as Digg. An example appears directly below this post. We’ll follow up with an article on the benefits of using these services in the near future. You can locate these at Manage blog > settings > Entries. Select your choices then save. Go on...select all. It’s free! They look exactly like the ones below this post.

Until next time, keep your comments and feedback coming.

John
QBC team 

 

        

 We've replaced FreeTextBox, the rich text editor used to create entries, with Telerik's RadEditor with the Quick Blogcast 2.0.5 release. FreeTextBox did an admirable job for the almost two years, but what deficiencies it had were maddening and development on it has basically stalled. We think you'll like some of the new features that RadEditor offers us:

• Safari support
• Ability to paste a Microsoft Word document and have it stripped of formatting
• Contextual menus (right-clicking) show relevant actions
• Improved table creation and editing
• Plethora of expandability and customization options for the future

Yes, I would say there is a plethora of features that we didn't use in this initial release. Future releases will find us tweaking the mix of features and functionality to make things even easier and more powerful. Keep your eyes peeled!

        

Greetings,

It's been a busy few weeks within the Blogcast team. A quick glance at the program may have you wondering, “What's changed?” Other than the version numbers, quite a lot has changed.

Take a look at your Create entry screen. Notice anything? Go on, take a closer look. There's a new icon on the far left which allows you to easily reference your YouTube Favorites. OK, it's nice, but not yet something to blog home about. Unless, you’ve noticed that it's sitting atop a brand new text editor.

New Text editor:

Quick Blogcast’s text editor has been recreated and expanded to include several new features that we've been eager to pass on including the ability to paste from Word, paste from HTML, and provide rich text editing support for Safari users. For more information see our entry that accompanies this one.

You Tube:

We've added a way to easily reference your YouTube favorites within the Create Entry screen. You can set this up by going to Manage blog > Services, selecting YouTube, and then adding in your YouTube user ID. From within your New Entry screen, selecting the filmstrip icon will pop up a dialog box that allows you to select from your favorite clips and embed them within your post.

Thanks

John

QBC team.

        

Under the category of “Assumptions” I would have thought that if there were one part of the Blogcast that wouldn't pose any problems it would be that of categories and how they are used or even if they  should be used. Well after some feedback and chats with some new Blogcast users it looks like I need to come up with another category.  (Things we thought we knew)

Why Categorize?
 
While it depends on the nature of your blog, categorization of posts is usually a good choice. Even if your dedicated to one field, you'll likely address various facets of that topic over time and breaking them up into related sections make it easier for your audience to track. Providing additional fodder for the search engines to digest is an added bonus of doing so. Adding categories also provides a way for people to read only the material they find of interest.  Don't take offense - not everyone is going to share all of your passions and enthusiasm for every topic.  But for those finding a post via a search engine, categorization gives them an easy way to find your similar posts.

A tag, is a keyword is a category? 

While the above terms can be used interchangeably, it can be said that there is no such thing as a synonym. When we leave the physical world and go online, this is closer to the truth than most realize. While single acts of tagging and categorization look very much alike, the intent behind them differs.

Ultimately an item in the world has to possess a physical location (e.g . you can't have a single copy of an Italian travel guide with recipes be on the cooking, tourism or books about Italy shelf).  Since we're no longer constrained by physical space when it comes to assigning categories, it opens up relationship possibilities that would be prohibitively expensive or unlikely to exist in the real world.  Our book now appears on searches for recipes, Italy, tourism, travel, wine, cheese, etc. Just about anything you make a connection to can be used to point back towards that one item and we can apply this to our blogs and podcasts.

Podcaster's especially should take advantage of any meta data they can add around their audio and video files since most search engines can't see into your audio/ video.

A category can be seen as the best fit choice for a single item. 
A tag is a one of a collection of related ideas surrounding an item.

Blogcast allows you the choice of how you handle these, either posting to single categories or tagging each post with multiple categories.

 
Some tips on how to get the most out of your categories.

Merging Categories.

You are not stuck with your initial choices so don't be stingy in assigning categories, as you can always change them later. If you blog about cars and started off on a long list of categories for Porsche, Audi, VW, Mercedes, BMW, you could merge these all into one “German Autos” by going into:  

Manage Blog>  Categories  and then checking the categories you wish to merge. Select “combine categories from the drop down menu and then apply. A dialog box appears and asks you for the new category that will be created from your selection. Note - your original categories are no longer present and all posts are updated to reflect the merge category. 

Updating Prior posts:

If you have only recently started adding categories then the question of how to add them to your prior entries don't take long to surface. We've been there, programmed that, but sadly our T shirt order was never fulfilled.  Within the manage entries > entries view you can  select  all the  entries that you wish to add a category to, select “Add entries to category” form the drop down list,  enter  in the category and save it.  All selected posts have now updated with this additional category.

Renaming Categories:

While I was perusing our feedback mail, yes we really read every one, I noticed that there's no direct way to edit a category within Blogcast.  While that's likely not to be a situation that lasts too long, it's time for a workaround using our merge category feature above.  Take your category with the typo, or a term that wasn't as useful as you thought it would be and select it, merge, and then place your new category name within get this workaround while it's hot as I am hoping to have it fixed soon.

Well that's enough sorting out for the time being. Until next time.

Tag! You're it.  
 

        

One of the many new features in the Quick Blogcast 2.0.4 release is bandwidth overage protection. For the vast majority of our customers, this setting is largely useless since they never go over the existing bandwidth limits. But when you go over whether due to an appearance on Oprah or a popular Digg story (or even the granddaddy of them all, a Slashdotting), the ensuing attention can easily push you (and by you, I mean your account) over that limit. And that means fees will be charged and no one likes surprises.

So this feature monitors your daily bandwidth usage and turns off your blog if you go over. A message is displayed to your visitors (and a status code of 509 is attached to the response, if you comprende) until either the billing period rolls over or you buy some extra bandwidth through a direct purchase or an upgrade to a different plan. We will send you an email when you reach 80% of capacity as well as when the actual overage occurs. At the very least, you won't be shelling out for your newfound popularity.

To turn it on, go to Manage Blog and then Settings. It's at the very bottom of that page and it's a simple on/off decision. Please note that turning protection on after you're already over will not eliminate your responsibility to pay the overage but it will turn off your blog. Also, your decision applies to all the blogs you have since the bandwidth limits apply to them all.

We don't really like shutting down blogs at the height of their glory but we also know that people don't like getting the overage bills either. So we decided to leave the matter in your hands and let you figure out whether the trade-off is worthwhile. As I said above, this literally only affects a few dozen of you heavy-hitters. But you really never know when your big break might come!

(Side note: this is just the beginning of the feature. Our hope is to eventually make it much more palatable than a white screen with a condolence message. Ideally, we'd allow you to start degrading gracefully at predetermined thresholds so that the blog is still displayed but maybe with less entries, excerpts only, no images, or some other way. We'll revisit this in a future release and let you know about the changes on this here blog.)

        

Greetings,
 
QuickBlogcast 2.04 was released earlier today and while  we could describe this release as iconic  it would sadly be leading us into yet another pun filled post, I promise I'll get help but only after telling you about these new features.
 
Bandwidth overage protection
 
While most people never get near their monthly allotment of bandwidth there are occasions where the world beating a path to your door can lead to an unexpected monthly charge, even though they are usually small the keyword here is unexpected. We now have a setting that allows you to stop incurring charges on a blog once it's crossed the monthly threshold. A  full explanation of this feature is within a separate post.  The default option is off  and can be changed here  Manage Blog  > settings > General

 Added support for  Fav icons

 Most of you have noticed the icons that appear to the right off the URL in the address bar and which mirror the identity/graphical identity  the site/blog they are attached to.We'll be adding a tutorial on how to create ICO files but for those of you that already have one you can  get started by going to  Manage Blog  > settings > General and uploading your new Fav Icon.

 Firefox Spellcheck

 We've given the option for Firefox users to use the browsers inbuilt spell checker within all relevant text areas of your blog. It can be enabled under Manage Blog  > settings > Entries  by checking the selection “Enable Firefox spell checker”.
 All of these features derived from conversations with our customers and if there's anything you'd like to see  us address we'd love to hear from you 

 

John

QBC Team.

        

We just added the ability to customize your site's favicon. If you're not familiar with favicons, they're those little icons that show up next to the site name or URL:

The favicon selector control can be found on the main settings page and also on the Add Blog page (if you're a paying customer). It couldn't be simpler to set up: just upload an appropriate image and press the page's Save button.

The tricky part is in creating a favicon because there's a lot of restrictions. For example, it must be 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels high. It must be an ICO file if you want the most browsers to be able to see it: Internet Explorer can only use ICO-based favicons. If you're not worried about Internet Explorer, then you can use GIF-, JPEG-, or even PNG-formatted images and all the other browsers will show them just fine.

There are a plethora of resources on the Web about creating favicons, as this Google search for favicon shows. Favicons aren't terribly important but they are a detail that will make your blog more your own.