Quick Blogcast debuts.
Friends, bloggers, pod casters lend me your ears.
I came here to bury Quickblog and Podcast not to praise them, too much
but to recognize them as the progenitors of Quick Blogcast 2.0 which we’ve released today.
The Blogcast team will be posting more detailed entries on the new features over the next few days regarding the change so I’ll keep this one brief, if there’s something we’ve yet to cover on the blog feel free to ask.
Firstly let me go into how this came about and what effect this has on the existing podcast or blog accounts you have with us. Other than a greatly increased feature set both bloggers and podcaster’s retain the same plans in terms of bandwidth and disk space.
Basically there’s no way we could infer which blogs are linked to which podcasts in a manner which would have allowed us to merge accounts safely so we’ve left the choice up to you. For those that wish to merge existing blogs into their podcast accounts there’s an entry coming up soon that you’ll be interested in. ( Meanwhile we have it within the help.
While there are many new features, services and abilities within this application I’d like to start out with the most singularly requested item in the program’s lifespan, enhanced template editing. This is a large step towards ceding control over to the users that require it while still remaining accessible to those that may just want to change one of the images.
Amongst our other additions are.
New write entry screen:
The clutter is out and ease of bringing information is in. From this one screen you can link to your prior posts, pull in your photos from your Online Photo Filer, links and create a podcast.
Services section:
An easy way to bring in content from the sites or services you already use such as del.icio.us
Integrated Podcast abilities: (Or integrated blog if you came from Quick Podcast)
Create,upload, and syndicate audio and video files from within your Blogcast.
You’re also going to see a lot more activity on our blog too as we’re eager to introduce you to our many new features and to hear how you would like to see them develop.
I came here to bury Quickblog and Podcast not to praise them, too much
but to recognize them as the progenitors of Quick Blogcast 2.0 which we’ve released today. The Blogcast team will be posting more detailed entries on the new features over the next few days regarding the change so I’ll keep this one brief, if there’s something we’ve yet to cover on the blog feel free to ask.
Firstly let me go into how this came about and what effect this has on the existing podcast or blog accounts you have with us. Other than a greatly increased feature set both bloggers and podcaster’s retain the same plans in terms of bandwidth and disk space.
Basically there’s no way we could infer which blogs are linked to which podcasts in a manner which would have allowed us to merge accounts safely so we’ve left the choice up to you. For those that wish to merge existing blogs into their podcast accounts there’s an entry coming up soon that you’ll be interested in. ( Meanwhile we have it within the help.
While there are many new features, services and abilities within this application I’d like to start out with the most singularly requested item in the program’s lifespan, enhanced template editing. This is a large step towards ceding control over to the users that require it while still remaining accessible to those that may just want to change one of the images.
Amongst our other additions are.
New write entry screen:
The clutter is out and ease of bringing information is in. From this one screen you can link to your prior posts, pull in your photos from your Online Photo Filer, links and create a podcast.
Services section:
An easy way to bring in content from the sites or services you already use such as del.icio.us
Integrated Podcast abilities: (Or integrated blog if you came from Quick Podcast)
Create,upload, and syndicate audio and video files from within your Blogcast.
You’re also going to see a lot more activity on our blog too as we’re eager to introduce you to our many new features and to hear how you would like to see them develop.
I am excited to see how much more control I'll have over the templates, so I can't really comment on that just yet, but a few quick observations:
Really like the improved "Edit Entry" page. Much nicer organization and it will be much easier having a larger window to work with. Thanks.
The Podcast addition is interesting and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Access to published articles and actually viewing the blog is extremely slow. Opening up one of my blog articles took about a minute. Saving blog entries also takes a long time.
We don't have the link to your blog at the top right hand side of the screen any more.
I had hoped the Support link (found under the Help menu) would be fixed.
Are you ever going to place a link on the bottom of the blog viewing page that allows users to review older articles? I now display all my articles on the blog because this simple link is not available (or am I just missing something here?)
julie
Greetings Julie,
Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback on the new look / features. I'll look into the speed issues though as well as restoring our product blog to the top of the page, fixing the help and I agree that the navigation issues still seem to lead to a deadend and it really should be within the templates , which is easier after our changes, so look out for this in a future update.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Cast team.
John, Things have speeded up considerably since I posted my original comment. I really like what you've done with the blogging tool.
I changed over to one of the new CSS templates (from my older non-CSS template), I saw from a response you made to another comment that all functionality does not yet extend to the new CSS templates and I have encountered this with the one that I am now using. I've also encountered some quirkiness with the new template. Is there a way I should report these quirks? Do you have any idea when all the editing options will be live? Is there a way to request changes to templates?
Thanks, julie
Julie,
You can make template suggestions, report bugs, quirks or just tell us what you'ld like to see included on this blog , or by clicking the Feedback link in Quick Blogcast's manager just below the view blog button.
To answer your questions.
All of the templates have all of the features ( unless they have a bug) it was only the legacy templates that would have issues with handling some of our new items.
I believe all our editing options are live if there's a specific case related to that template please let me know and we'll get it resolved.
We have added RSS service since launch and our integration with our online photo filer should be in place in the near future.
Regards
John
Quick BlogCast
Ok, so I tried the services out. I added the delicious service and couldn't see any effect. What does it do if it works?
I couldn't accesss any other service types. They are not available as options (e.g. the RSS service doesn't appear).
If I go to Design Blog > Customise, the preview pane doesn't show the template I'm using. It previews some other template.
I don't see any new options for SEO? For example setting html title tag or description meta data?
It looks like most of the update is a CSS editor to be honest.
Are any of the new features available only in specific templates (I am already on a CSS template).
I also read about the inline video / audio player - but where is it?
John,
In reverse order. The video player is inline and will only show up if you load a video , via the add podcast button, otherwise it remains in the background.We're going to be putting out more walkthroughs on these features in the coming days. Basically delicious is a social book marking site that allows you to share and tag url's on the web you find interesting.
If you are a legacy template, i.e. about two generations back, then it may not display correclty until it's been republished, but would need to check out your specific case and we'll try to repllicate it.
While the css editor is the largest visible change the write entry screen and services section will add greatly to our ability to interact with other services, it's modular nature which will add the RSS and Online File Folder later in the near future. Do get the best out of Delicious you would need an account with them and I'll be posting a guide to using this soon. All of the features are on all templates the just are below the surface till needed.
SEO was not the primary focus of the merge but it moved us closer to be able to offer greater functionality in this area.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
Thanks John,
I guess the RSS service is not there then by design (i.e. coming soon).
I'm familiar with delicious, I created the service, when I try and add something to the post, all I see is a cancel button and a blank text area. I guess the intention is to allow auto tagging of blog entries against delicious tags. I'll wait for instructions, but it doesn't seem to work in my implementation.
Also noticed that when I do almost anything I'm getting a warning message telling me I need to use CSS templates for the new features. I'm 99.99% sure I'm on a CSS template, so can I presume there is no logic in the app checking the current template to see if it's CSS?
i.e. this is a "please upgrade message" that doesn't check the current template type of the specific user?
Don't get me wrong, I like the new CSS visual design/over-ride capability, and the links to recent posts will be useful. It's SEO that's killing me though. Tell me some good news soon on that score :-)
Greetings,
Quick Deli order.
Now here's the part we will explain later
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
Thanks John.
This morning the RSS service option is available. I configured it for 2 feeds, but nothing appears on the blog. Is there a missing step? What should appear and how to do 'make it appear'.
thanks.
Greetings
The RSS option is to allow you to easily link to articles from frequently visited sites. To get the use out of this go to compose entry, click on the link icon,
Regards
John
Quick Blog team
John,
I suspected as much. What would be useful is display of links from RSS feed via a gui item in the side bar for example (i.e. display all of feed in real time). Or perhaps automatic ingestion of content into the blog itself via RSS. For delicious, providing tag buttons directly on each blog post would be a lot more useful than the tag linking service. I kind of see what you're driving at, but to be honest they are two 'chocolate tea pot' solutions to me. Maybe it's time to open source the templates and let the community write the updates :-)
I'm going to take issue with the teapot analogy I find them incredibly useful on a daily basis given the number of sites I visit and want to pull in for later inclusion in a blog. There's no correct way to blog and for most people I've spoken with that user a book marking service already have a browser tab for sending to their service.
The presence of that info in services makes the kind of resuse you mentioned possible, and I already had it down as a future option, but I'm afraid my teapot was a feature I've found missing from countless blogs that I've used and most of the time I spent on posts came from the creation and management of links on page. This merge is still in the early stages and the services opens up these, we're not even scratching the surface on the additional services this week
John
Quick BlogCast
John,
Point taken. As you say, this is a base, with more possibilities coming in the future.
I noticed today that a good amount of changes have been made to the quickblog platform. Some of these changes are great, but some of them aren't so great...
- Viewing all my images in the image gallery is way too slow. I've been a quickblog user for 1.5 years, and i have a lot of images in my gallery.
- My template got changed! It is too wide now (and I don't have the functionality to change that in the customizations page!). This will make the blog page too big for many smaller resolution settings (1024x768 or 800x600)
Greetings Erik,
The changes to the gallery removing the pagination would indeed cause them to load slowly and the good news is that a solution is on the way using our free photogallery which should be in place in the near future. Meanwhile I'm afraid it's slow.
The templates didn't change unless republished so that would surprise me that there was any noticible change until it was republished , they are meant to appear relative to the size of the viewing area which can make them a little wide on a large screen but this was a step towards more control of the template which is by no means finished.
Templates should work 0n 1024 as that's the min spec we created them for 800x600 is another matter there's just not the usage to accommodate them, while we have some narrower templates that would work in 800x600 the space taken up with the sidebar is going to rob nearly a third of the screen.
Regards
John
Quick BlogCast
Thanks for the reply John 8)
I just sent you an email.
Hello. on the template called "photoshoot" the new CSS editor won't allow to change the photo with the girl on it. You can change "header wrapper image", but what about the right side image?
Greetings Matt,
It looks like we currently don't have that option for this template , not all elements on all templates are yet available and I'll see if we can amend this in a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Cast
CSS editor?? Where?!!
If possible, I would love to edit my blogs CSS file.
Erik,
It's not in place yet and it's an item I have scheduled for a future edition.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
I am confused with the new editing features. When I go to my design blog tab and click on customize I do not get my blog template. I get the correct entries but the header and design are different and I am not able to edit the information I have in the boxes at the top. How can I get to those to edit my information? Thank you for your assistance. Denise
Denise,
What may have occurred is that youre existing template was an older one that is no longer present which is where the differnence. If you could try changing template , then changing back to see if this solves the issue. Secondly if you are still having issues please let me know the name of the template and the text you are trying to edit and I'll be able to give a more detailed response.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
I have a similar problem. When I click customise blog it shows the wrong template in the preview. The template I'm using is SkyPod, but the one that shows up in preview is Business1. Some part of the customisation functionality is confused perhaps?
Thanks,
I'm taking a look at it time being though I've been unable to replicate it on my systems as yet I am wondering if it's a caching issue on the local browser or a hangover from conversion. Will let you know what we find out.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
So, my blog suddenly had new text appear in its title. It appears that the update automatically put text back into my header that I did not want.
I am also concerned that I will have to rebuild my sidebar and blog with these new changes. Took me about 10 hours to build the first time, then had to rebuild it again when I went from a free to a paid account. What if I'm happy with the current blog?
Jerry,
Thank you for your feedback on the recent Quick Blog update.
We didn't touch the sidebar at all so I am puzzled as to the inclusion though it's possible that the extra text appeared where it was a default before which hadn't worked and the new templates started displying it correctly. For people happy with their current blog it would have remained functional until the choice to republish the template was made.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
Just wanted to say, I tried out the podcasts earlier, and this is a great addition. This will be a very useful feature for us, and is a very big positive in this release.
John,
Thanks for the kind words. Podcast and blog to me were mainly an artificial distinction in their separation and requiring a separate app for a feature that's essentially adding a media file to a webpage that notifies people of it's existence seemed like overkill. Given that most podcasters wanted to see blog like feature to allow them to create rich show notes / add images, gain comments contiuing to make two separate but equal items didn't make sense. Have fun with it .
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast
Can you revert to your original template and have everything as it was originally?
Also, Now when I try to enter this HTML code
in the sidebar as a Blog roll, it doesn't work now. I have been doing this forever before
Greetings,
I'm afraid the original templates are no longer accessible as the new editor would be unable to modify them, or our new , and upcoming features, wouldn't work on them correctly. I'm afraid the code wasn't captured when you send that to us but if could send me a mail at Suggestions at Onlinequickblog dot com I'll take a look and see if I can assist.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
The new templates give me problems. I upload photos and only pieces show, on the preview, do they actually save that way? And if I make them smaller, they are cut into squares.
I am having a hard time with this. I called Godaddy, and the kid didn;t sound like he knew what i was talking about and told me the new templates, well, my freedom is taken away and they want small spaces for photographs. That is what he said.
he also said what I see is what will show. I really want to change the look on my blog, but if I have to sacrifice, for a crappy look, I will just keep my old page up.
Is he correct, do I really have no freedom like I used to with the old template? Thanks for responding, if you could send me email so I see your response? Thanks :)
Greetings,
Thank you for taking the time to let us know of your experience with the templates. The photo's now only show the portion that will fit into the space available without comprimising the design. Now I realise that we didn't make a good showing of how large the image would be , or were we'd crop it from other than on the Update preview which should be an accurate representation on what the published site would look like. The number and type of images is dependent on template so while the new version of your old one may not accommodate the customizations that you have already made there's a really good chance one of them would be able to.
These new templates have more freedom than the old ones but it's not as apparent.. yet Previously there were no choices of text,font, color on nearly all items. Most of the images where out of reach and whiile I'm far from happy with the current incarnation it's provided a large amount of feedback that can be used to make this far better.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
it look good
I logged on tonight to change a photo on my header. What happened? It used to be easy, you went to CUSTOMIZE, clicked on the image and replaced it. I can't figure this out at all! I can't even change my subheader text. I'm looking for a new blog service tomorrow.
Greetings,
Thank you for your feed back regarding the image upload. What happened was the majority of people that I spoke to , received mails from or comments on this blog were overwhelmingly in favour of adding greater flexibilty . That's not a claim to us getting it right this time but an explanation of why the change took place. To change the image from the design blog screen select the image , usually called blog image (number) and then the screen refreshes with a preview, then browse , upload the image and click on Update preview. If you like the change then proceed similarly for the other images.
The subheader text is an omission that's being corrected and will be restored to all templates soon. I'm sorry that this is a deal breaker but we're continuing to make changes to this section and do hope you'll check us out again when we've improved upon the clarity of this screen.
If you're willing to let us provide more indepth information / set up the template for you please let us know.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
I want to change my podcast RSS feed over to feedburner to take advantage of their statistics, but I still want to host the site using Godaddy and Quick Blogcast. Is there a way to do this?
Greetings,
There is a way to do this presently but it's not a 100% transplant. E.g the autodiscovery links on the page will still show Quickblogcast's feed and people already subscribed to your RSS feed will still be on our feed. I'm planning to have better integration of this feature in a future release where we can totally replace the feed in all locations but for the time being the workaround involves the following.
From your design blog / sidebar menu switch off the Feeds item. Then create a new HTML/txt box and paste in the code from Feedburner pointing to your feed, they have quite a few choices , then post to let your user's know that you want them to update using their feed.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast