Keep Those Doggies Blogrolling
It's been a busy few weeks, but we've finally deployed the 1.2.3 release. Foremost among the new features is what we like to call the "improved blogroll." That moniker was appropriate when we started but I like to think of it now as the "blogroll to the EXTREME"!
The first thing you'll notice is that there is no longer a "Blogroll" menu item under the "Manage Blog" menu. That's because we've moved the entire kit and kaboodle into the "Sidebar" menu item under the "Design Blog" menu. That's right, what was once an entire page is now available in a sidebar item! (If that sounds like a lot of work, I can assure you that it was. And how.)
The next thing you'll notice is that there's a new list in the Manage Sidebar Components page called "Cloneable Components." This currently features just the Blogroll sidebar component. (If you're thinking that there might be other items here in the future, keep it under your hat.) The "cloneable" stems from the fact that you can drag as many instances of a blogroll into your Active and Available lists as you'd like.
Once you've got a cloned blogroll item in one of your sidebar item lists, you can start adding links and give it a friendly name. By popular request, you can even specify that all blogroll links open in a new window. After you've got things just so, click the "Save" button at the bottom of the page and your new blogroll is live on your blog.
Don't let the blogroll name fool you, though. This will take any sort of link you want. You could use it to store navigation links to other pages in your site if you've got the blog on a subdomain. Or links to your friends' sites. Or links to entries that you regard as your best work. The blogroll world is your oyster!
Excellent, I expect more great things like this.
Gary E Smith
Thank you for your compliment! Bill
Sorry to post this here but I'm new and totally lost. I want to know how to post a message/question to this blogsite.
I have a blog with GoDaddy. http://blog.valarbona.com
Joe,
Congrats this is one of the correct places to asks questions on how the blog or any of its features work. Please let us know where you are lost and we'll get a response back to you. We also have 24-7 help by phone and mail which you can locate by following this link which will ensure the quickest response.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I don't see a mail link here for support?
Greetings,
The link to support is certainly not as overt as I would like it to be. Meanwhile this link should get you to the right place.
Regards
John
Thanks for the blog opp, cook-smarter doesn't have a community, so I hope to use the blog as the community page.
But your stupid import feature doesn't import Google Reader rss links, it just times out everytime! Sucky!
Mary,
Thank you for your feedback and I wish you luck with creating a community around your main site.
Google reader exports in a format called OPML which is a common format used to describe a list of URLs often relating to RSS feeds. Presently our import feature only recognizes the information contained within an RSS feed and then imports that. However this is an area that we can look into providing within a future version of Quick Blog.
Regards,
John
Quick Blog Team
Having posted a blg for the past two weeks, I have a couple of suggestions:
1)I would like to see the abilty to add a profile link to a profile page at the top of the sidebar. There is currently no way to inform readers about the author of the blog. Blogger does this, and it's a very useful feature.
2) expand the online help. For example, although there are references to RSS, I don't know exactly what it does or how to implement. Nor can I find any detail within the help section.
Greetings,
Thank you for your suggestions with regards to creating an author / profile page. A workaround at present is to create a blog post with the author info / profile page and then use our blogroll to name a custom section called "profile" and link to the post from there, looks almost exactly like an author page. I'll certainly look into ways we can make that process friendlier.
Help:
It's always a delicate balance between too much info and barely covering the surface. RSS is one such area.I'll take a look at the section and see if we can provide a clearer outline of this subject for a future release.
RSS is a means of syndicating your blog content for users with a suitable reader. One could think of it as a digital video recorder for a webpage, "is there something new here?", if so retrieve it for me to read later.
Every time you post an entry, the contents of that are posted to your blog and also to your RSS feed People with a suitable reader "subscribe" to your feed so that every time you update they receive the article . Rather than people needing to check back to your blog to see if you've updated you're telling them there's new material to read.
To change feed settings
Manage blog > settings> entries.
You can select which feed types to enable as well as how many items to show per feed in this location, whether you reveal your email address and whether you wish to supply full or just excerpted feeds. Rss 2.0 is by far the most common format at present which is why we currently default to it.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
Hi,
I'm thinking about purchasing a Quick Blog to add it to my website that I already host at Godaddy.com.
My problem is that I'm Spanish and my website is for people that speak Spanish. Is there any posibility of changing the text of the software (for example the instructions of the comments form) to other languages?
If not, it could be a nica feature to add in the future.
Other features that you could add is...
1- The posibility to post entries in the future so you write it one day and select the date that they will be public. This way you can write all the entries for a week in one day and forget about the blog for all the week.
2- The posibility of adding your own html to the side bar, the top and bottom of the blog, top and bottom of the entries, before and after the comments... so you can add banners or other type of ads like adsense. This could be a great feature for people that want to earn some money with their blog.
Thanks and I hope you will add this features in the future so I can use quick blog in my site.
Christian
Christian,
Thanks for taking the time to post your suggestions. We'll add your suggestion to list of those to consider with regards to providing an alternate language choice on the pages your readers interact with.
1-: Good news we already do this just set the timestamp ,bottom center, on the entry page and the entry will remain hidden until after the posted time.
2-: This one's a very popular request, at least the addition of html content within the sidebar item has been. Currently users could include their own adverts/ links within the post body itself but that's not a very pretty solution We'll take a look at ways to include content of that nature with a future edition.
Keep watching out for future updates
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
I am also looking for a Blog in spanish, it would be great if you could offer this option soon. Keep in mind how many countries in the world speak spanish!
Greetings,
Thank you for the feedback. Presently most of the support for languages other than English, are related to the visitor's site of the blog . E.g the ability to change the name of the sidebar items. We're making incremental improvements along those lines but having a complete version with the main interface, dictionaries and help is quite a bit further along our road map than we are presently.
Regards
John
I would like to use quick blog for a limited audience, i.e. a small circle of friends. I do not want just anybody who happens by to be able to read everything. Can a site-wide (for QuickBlog) password be implemented? How 'bout "private areas/blog", also password protected? With all the concerns over internet security lately, password protection should be elementary.
Thanks,
Dave
Dave,
Thanks for taking the time to post your comments on the provision of a restricted/ members only area. With regards to such a feature I can see it making sense for the paid blog to have that feature but any ad supported model would be hard to justify given the restricted audience . We'll certainly consider this item for a future release within that context
Regards
John
Quick blog Team.
Thanks John.
Since I posted, I HAVE upgraded to the paid version (for several reasons). Hope to see those "members only" areas soon.
Thanks,
Demi
I just wanted to second the motion for some kind of password protection or other measure of audience control similar to what Typepad and LiveJournal offer. For certain bloggers and certain content it really is a must. I would gladly pay for that feature.
Geri,
Thank you for taking the time to let us know that you'ld like to see added to QuickBlog We are considering the inclusion of this feature within a future release and it's likely it would have to be within the paid blog given that it's hard for protected entries to gather an audience. What form would you like this take? I'm really trying to stay away from requiring people to need accounts to view posts , in essence turning QuickBlog into a hybrid forum/blog/newsletter ,but is any degree of user management being possible without going along that route and requiring quite a bit of management from the author's side?
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Oh no, I would not want my guests to have to sign up for an account in order to follow along. That would deter my audience (family and friends who are not TOO tech savvy or are wary of signing up for things). I'm certain any blog author interested in some form of audience management expects to and is willing to do at least some work to accomplish this. Ideally I would like my readers to be able to gain access simply by typing in their email address (or some other kind of identifier) and a password into a box that pops up when they access my blog. A cookie would allow them to look around the whole blog until they browse away from it. I'd like to be able to import a bunch of email addresses, assign passwords to them, invite people to my blog via email and send them their password. I use a similar password system via Authpro.com for my family website - it works well and is really easy to manage. Another way is to set up a blog-wide password system like Typepad has, but then if/when you need to take away a reader's access, it is difficult because you'd then have to change the password for everybody. Just some thoughts. Thank you for taking these ideas into consideration! Great tool. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for taking to time to send us your thoughts on how you like a private entry feature enacted.
You've given me an idea,or two, relating to the use of email addresses and the difficulty if notifying everyone when the user ID has been changed. I'll run this by the team for consideration in an upcoming release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog
THE CLONABLE BLOGROLL FEATURE IS SOOO USEFUL!!!!!
I've been toying with what I can do with what this mysterious clonable blogroll can do.
WOW! Great Sidebar tool. So versatile.
Ive done a "Hall of Fame" blogroll, with he most acclaimed posts I've done, and then Ive got a blogroll for each category for easy access to all the past post I did. Now I only have 20 posts on my main page, and the rest of the "classics" are happily on the sidebar.
Check it out:
www.nukesandcandy.com
Very creative tool, I salute you blog team. Keep up the good work!
Alexander Wunderlich
.
Sweet....I've been waiting for this !!
More's coming...
Thanks for your patience, Bill
Great to discover this community. Great to hear about the new version. I look forward to using the new features.
How do we find out the client id for google ads. I have it working on my site www.soaarchitectseries.com and would like to know how I get credit for these ads.
Gary E. Smith
Gary,
The client ID is at the bottom of https://google.com/adsense/account-settings at the bottom called "property info" and "adsense for content. To use this feature for revenue generation you must already be, or be willing to sign up for such an account.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Nice job guys...tight application. I have need of posting a file to the root of the site in order to tell Google Sitemaps application that I own the site. This can also be accomplished by adding a meta tag to the index page, neither of which I can do. Can you think of a way for me or someone else to drop and essentially empty HTML page into the root or add the abovementioned tag?
Thanks!
Greetings Craig,
Firstly thank you for the positive comments. While we've just added the ability to add custom html to the sidebar it seems that Sitemaps is rather specfic about the information being within the head section prior to the body but I tried it out of curiousity and it doesn't work citing the need to place the within the head section as the main reason. I'll investigate this further ans see if there's a way we can accommodate this within a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Thanks very much John. Yeah, that's what I gathered from them as well-you need it right in the default.aspx or whatever the index page is that is loaded automatically by the web server.
Do you know when GoDaddy is going to upgrade to the version where we can put HTML into the sidebar?
Thanks!
Craig
It's out there, Craig! Just go to the Manage Sidebar page and you'll see a new cloneable called Custom Text if you're a paying customer.
Hope that helps, Bill
I like quickblog as I'm no longer at the point where I need something like MT. It's quick, easy and relatively robust. But the ability to add custom meta tags is really a must, for cacheing, search engines, etc. In addition, like someone else posted, these days, with the Internet being what it is, the need for being able to password-protect parts, or even the entire blog is just good OPSEC. Not to mention the ability to make sure one's boss doesn't stumble upon postings would be great *grin* Please, please, consider the ability to help users protect their data as something crucial.
Greetings Jesse, Thanks for taking the time to suggest the addition of custom tags and the ability to protect certain areas of the site from the pointy haired boss. I'm certainly see no reason why the metatag features couldn't appear in a future version and we're considering this for a future update. Now the fact the part about private pages is being addressed separately isn't indictative With private posts we'd have to control more than just the access to the site. We'd have to prevent mails to those that subscribe by mail as well as remove the post contents/titles from the RSS feeds. We certainly appreciate those that have taken the time to bring up the need for private posts and given the popularity of the request we'll find a way to do this in a future update. Regards John Quick Blog Team.
I read as much as I could find on this site regarding adding the sitemap to root directory of my quickblog and still found no answer on how to accomplish this. can anyone chime in?
Greetings Jay,
Presently there is no way to add a sitemap to the Quick Blogcast at the owner level. If there's any help material that counters that on our site please let me know and I'll have it removed. This is currently not a feature within the Blogcast but it is on our roadmap for a future edition.
Regards
John
QBC team