Quick Blog release 1.2.3
Greetings,
The blogroll, a portmanteau sitting atop a portmanteau, is enough to make a lexicographer weep for joy as the blogosphere spawns yet another neologism to include in their annual list of additions to the English language.
Blogroll
Talking about additions your ‘humble’ blogroll has been retooled allowing you to create multiple blog rolls with the ability to customize the name of each section. We’ll have a full explanation of these changes in our next entry.
Reverse order
We’ve created an option to allow those with a practical bent document your ongoing projects. Until now people reading your blog may have thought that you started out with a beautiful kitchen and over time replaced it with a nineteen seventies fashion nightmare. This view shows all your posts in chronological order rather than the traditional blog view where the newest post takes precedence. You can choose this view from within the settings menu. Entries tab and then click on the # of entries to display. Now set your posts per page to “all” and set the sort direction to “oldest to newest”
Spell check
Small item ,but several of you were less than amused by our spell checker’s diligence in checking the email field when your visitors posted comments. It’s gone. There’s a list of small changes which I’ll not bore you with just now but which contribute to the ongoing reliability of your Quick Blog. Thanks to all of you that have provided feedback from which the above three items were derived. If there’s any feature you’d like us to consider feel free to leave your comments on this entry.
Great! The reverse order seems like a feature ill use someday to make my readers look at the old stuff, the ones in the dungeon. How about doing this on weekends perhaps.
Thanks for the spell check. My friend is a regular in my page, and he stopped using the spellchecker because it was so tedious, but it just so happens that the other readers already flamed him a couple of times for his grammar. So thanks for that.
So.... ummmm.... Mr. QuickBloging Team, ummm.... I also need the ability to place advertising, how’s that coming up :S ?
Alexander Wunderlich
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Alexander,
First , thanks for the kind words. The good news is that with the 1.2.3 release we're a step closer to being able to fulfill your request.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
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Awesome!! Congrats all around!! :)
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I am not sure I understand- the people on my blog want to see newest comment first so they don;t have to scroll down to the bottom of the page. Is this possible now?
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Sorry about the confusion, the reverse order John mentioned in the entry applies only to the entries page and then only if you've specified "All" as the "# of entries to display" in the "Entry Settings" tab under the "Settings" menu item in the "Manage Blog" menu.
I'll add your request to our list of customer-requested features. Bob's blog does it that way, so I suspect that we'll be offering it sooner than later.
Thanks for the suggestion, Bill
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Hello,
Not sure if this is the right place to post this, if not feel free to delete it. I've clicked the enable emoticons checkbox on the settings page, but I still get no emoticons. I've tried entering them like normal, with quotes, with colons before and after. The online help seemed to suggest it would just be automatic. Do I need to provide quick blog with links to images or something?
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Noah,
We're happy to take questions on the blog especially ones like these that highlight an area which we can accommodate a change.
Presently the emoticons appear only on comments when a visitor includes them within and that the "Enable emoticons" is checked in the discussion settings. Having typed that it would make sense to also work in the manner you expected within the main entry. While a workaround, which you mentioned exists , uploading your own images, it's certainly not in the spirit of Quick Blog and we'll investigate the inclusion of emoticon from within the entries in a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team.
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One small thing that we bloggers would love, to have "pages". Thats right, pages. Lets say I have a limit of 20 posts on the main page, and all ready have 25, At the end of the page (the 20 posts), there should be a "Next page..." Link. I theoritize this is fairly simple to add.
Just helping you guys make your blog service perfect.
P.S. on the go daddy page, Quick Blog link, I read that you guys are marketing it with the slogan "Quick Blog, Zero Advertizements, 100% YOU!". Does this mean your not planning on letting me (a payer) implement advertizing into my blog?
thanks ;)
Alenxander Wunderlich
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Greetings,
The best way to look at the future options re advertising is this. The free blog you have no choice on the content and placement of the advertisments, ie. A paid blog , should it support the feature , would allow you to place any legal content within -your- blog.
I agree that the pagination as described could be a useful addition and will investigate it's inclusion in the near future.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
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Hi. One thing I need help with:
Ive made a post that contains all the links to my previous posts: http://nukesandcandy.com/2006/05/12/the-first-two-weeks-of-nukes-and-candy.aspx
You see, the problem is that some of the links dont work. 12/30 to be exact. I've checked the HTML code and all links are as they should be. But If I click on the on my post, they are broken! :( Please help, two people allready comented on this.
Alexander Wunderlich.
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The solution is very easy. Go to the "Entry Settings" tab of the "Settings" menu item under the "Manage Blog" menu. Near the end of the settings list, look for the option "Replace '--' with '—' in Entry Body." If you uncheck that setting, then all of your links will work.
The problem is that your links have double dashes in them and our parser is replacing them with — willy-nilly. I've added a bug report and this will be fixed at some point in the future.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Bill
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Success!
Its working, Im smiling, my Readers are happy, the world is peaceful, the skyes are blue, the birds are chirping and my shoe laces are untied.
I send you three "cheers" and a "booya"!
Alexander Wunderlich
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Blogroll is very wonderful, I like it.By the way, Why don't support "GB2312" and "GB18030" coding in Categories ? I can't use Categories in Chinese. Will you be making them ?Thanks.
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Thank you for your compliment! As far as I can determine, our database system only supports ASCII and Unicode. I could find nothing in the documentation about the charsets you mentioned.
All of the category data is stored in Unicode encoding and all of the pages are served as that. If you can transcribe your characters from one of those charsets into Unicode, you should be able to store and use Categories in Chinese. I'm pretty sure that that's the best we can do given our systems.
Hope that helps (and isn't too much work), Bill
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Great product guys, thanks. We're supporting a friend w/ brain cancer and the blog has become our communications hub. We have a question on printing... is there anyway we can print not only the entry, but it's comments all at the same time? We like to bring her the latest from the blog when we visit. Thanks again for making this so simple to implement, Dave
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Good catch. There is no way to print the comments along with the entry on the Print Entry page. (And I think the regular entry page is a little too wide for printing, but would include the comments as well.) I will add it to the things to do in the future list.
Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Bill
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After extended use of this marvellous service, Ive gotten some more things to perfect:
Blog Subscription, Publishing, comments:
1. I subscribed to my own blog to see what do my subscreibers get. The email does not have the blog image!
2. For publishing, I sometimes "program" the entries to publish at a latter hour by writting future times on the "time stamp" (dont know if this is a hack), you know how timing is so important. So I publish them, but ill get the subscriber e-mail at that very instant, not when its meant to be published. So my subscribers will see that theres something new on my page, but when they get there... nothing... yet.
3. Comments: If someone writes a URL in their comment, the URL is not clickable.
Just those. I am using it so much Im encountering stuff. Just helping you hard working dudes perfect a good service.
(dont have to answer to this)
p.s. hows that "enabling advertizing" comming up? :)
Alexander Wunderlich
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Alexander,
Thanks for your continued enthusiasm and suggestions which we're adding to our to do list
Regarding the "blog image" for mails. At present it depends on the template chosen whether there even is an image, or a suitable size for email, though will look into a way to accommodate this request as an option
The URL issue within the comments is something we can certainly look at as well as the timing issues on the future publishing. It makes sense for it to work consistently with the email/site content being in sync in the manner you expect.
Meanwhile if you have HTML comments checked in your settings users can leave the link in that format.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
P.S Keep on the lookout for new releases and updates
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Thank your reply ^_^ The question was still there. For example:图书馆(library) is Chinese, I translate it into "Unicode",the "unicode(UTF-8)" is "＆＃Ｘ５６ＦＥ；＆＃Ｘ４Ｅ６６；＆＃Ｘ９９８６；".When I "Add New Category" in Manage Categories,it display "Category name cannot contain special characters (*, &, etc.). Please correct this issue and resubmit." Now, how can I solve it?
My English is not good,I hope you understand what I write. ^_^ Thank you a lot!
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Your English is just fine. I see what you're getting at now. I'll look into the code a bit more tomorrow and see if I can't work something out. The problem isn't the database, it's the special character restriction.
Thanks! Bill
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Dear Bill and Quick Blog Team:
I like your Blog program,and happy to use it. Will you be intending to solve " the special character restriction" problem? It is important for me and most of foreign people,especially Chinese,Japanese,Korea. You know ,they are also very large markets. There are over 80000000 clients on internet in China now. ^_^ Waiting for your good news.By the way,you can discover my country's new buildings in the "map" of satellite of Google.com ,I live in SheZhen ,it immediately next to Hong Kong.
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Hi,
I dont understand why you persist with grey text on a white background. It breaks every design rule. The one comment I get from most all readers is - why is it grey? I cant read anything. Even your own blog is hard to read.
I've given up waiting for a simple clean template with black text. I'm off to Typepad.
It costs more, but it works!
Ivan
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I understand your frustration: we also are not fans of the gray on white color scheme. Personally, I don't think it's impossible to read but high contrast is definitely the way to go with text. If we could make the change in one swell foop, believe me when I say that we would. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as saying "text color = black" or something like that. It's one of those decisions made early on (not by me) that isn't easily changed.
I know that that isn't the answer you may have been looking for, but it's all I've got. We will change it at some point because it's the right thing to do. I am sorry that we couldn't do it in time to satisfy your needs.
Thanks for giving us a try and you're always welcome back, Bill
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Well, its me again, having a lot of fun with my blog.
One little thing. Ive seen in the stats that a lot of people are printing my articles, I believe its mostly for my Drawings. So I tried printing myself to see what they get.
The Drawing doesnt come out. Ive tried in the most recent version of Firefox and IE, and nothing! Got to my page and try it out!
I think it would be a plus for my blog diffusion if people can print out my Drawings.
Thanks for checking this ;)
Alexander Wunderlich
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That is a big ol' bug. I just fixed it and it will be in the next release.
Good catch, Bill
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YIKES, Is it you, me or the techies who run noreply@onlinequickblog.com who format the messy email updates? Guys, we love HTML but sending it to all of our blog subscribers might be a bit over the top.. Now I can only hope you don't write me back and tell me that I need to add a bit of hidden HTML code in some obscure place so that my New Entry notifications wont go out in code...
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Greetings, I need help to get this into context since I'm not sure if the comment relates to the sending of HTML mail in general or badly formatted mail being received by all,some, or just one of your subscribers? I'll subscribe to your blog meantime and see if there's anything untoward appearing. Regards John Quick Blog Team
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