Quick Blogging

Our blog has a new home!

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:05:00 GMT

Our blog has moved to a new location. Please click here to see our latest posts and leave comments.

New Blog Navigation Editor

Tim Walker — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

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.

Add Trusted Commenter to the Un-Moderated Commenter List

Ajay Gorur — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

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.

New Tag Cloud Sidebar Widget

Ajay Gorur — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

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!

New Real Time Statistics!

Tim Walker — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:39:00 GMT

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.

More Design Options for Your Blog!

Tim Walker — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:28:00 GMT

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

Category: Community
Name: Helping Hands

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.

Tag your entries

Ajay Gorur — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:41:00 GMT

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.

Unwanted People Reading Your Blog?

Justin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:03:00 GMT

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!

New Quick Blogcast Entry Preview

Tim Walker — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:04:00 GMT

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.

Manage Templates in Quick BLOGCAST

Ajay Gorur — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:02:00 GMT

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're giving it your all. Quick Blogcast for Facebook enhanced

Blogcast Admin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:31:00 GMT

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.

Site Builder Dashboard

Tim Walker — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:45:00 GMT

By now, most of you must have used our really cool Site Building Dashboard, and reaped its benefits. For those who have not seen it yet, let me explain what this is. When you log into Go Daddy, with your user id and password, then select to launch, let's say, a Quick Blogcast account, you will see the Dashboard above the main menu. It is a green header with tabs, that allows you to access your site, store, and, blog accounts - all from one location! From the "Dashboard" tab, simply select the site builder accounts that you want to currently work on, and then switch between tabs to simultaneously work on the products that you have selected. No more messy login screens, no more going back and forth between pages to select other accounts.

Note that you will see the dashboard only when you log in through Godaddy.com. If you have logged in through individual product logins like, app.quickblogcast.com/login.aspx, you will NOT be able to see the Dashboard.

So go ahead, and let us know what you think about the Dashboard. Please suggest any changes or enhancements you may want us to make.

New Quick Blogcast Statistics Tool

Tim Walker — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:59:00 GMT

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.

You don’t want to be late for this gig.. Go Daddy launches Go Daddy File Folder for use with Facebook®.

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:39:00 GMT

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

Take a Peek at the New Version of WST Page Designer

Robin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:53:00 GMT

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!

Quick Blogcast 2.2.4 CSS Editor Changes

Tim Hayes — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:01:00 GMT

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.

Quick Blogcast 2.2.2 Autosave

Blogcast Admin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:01:06 GMT

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.

Adding your Quick Blogcast account to Facebook.

Blogcast Admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:55:00 GMT

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.

Improved Remote Mail Setup

Blogcast Admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:58:06 GMT

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.

Quick Blogcast Now has a Forum.

Blogcast Admin — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:22:57 GMT

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

QBC 2.2.1 Release.

Blogcast Admin — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:54:41 GMT

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.

Quick Blogcast is moving to a new home.

Blogcast Admin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:48:11 GMT

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.

More words about moving pictures .

Blogcast Admin — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:01:28 GMT

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.

Quick Blogcast 2.1 release. Vlogging

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:10:59 GMT

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,

A change in the way comments are handled on our blog

Blogcast Admin — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:13:00 GMT

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.

Spam comments, a dish best served, never.

Blogcast Admin — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:11:00 GMT

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.

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:07:00 GMT

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

Gnarly Editor, Dude!

Bill — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:49:00 GMT

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!

Quick Blogcast 2.05 . New editor and You Tube

Blogcast Admin — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:48:00 GMT

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.

Categorically speaking

Blogcast Admin — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:11:00 GMT

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.

Overage Bills Ain't Good

Bill — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:07:00 GMT

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.)

Quick Blogcast 2.0.4 Overage protection

Blogcast Admin — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:25:00 GMT

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.

The More Personalization The Better

Bill — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:33:00 GMT

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.

The meta the better. Quick Blog 2.03 released

Blogcast Admin — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:01:00 GMT

Greetings and salutations.

Today saw the release of Quick Blogcast 2.02 which adds a feature that many of you have inquired about - meta tags. You can now add keywords, descriptions and add custom data to your blogcast. While descriptions are likely to be the most useful addition for most of you, there are some engines that still attach relevance to keywords. But, search engine optimization isn't just a post, it's a whole blog, where the relative value is left for you to decide.

What are they and how do I use them?

Meta data is data about data. So, while your blog itself is essentially a large gathering of data, you can further describe and classify it. A meta tag is a format that the above data takes within the web page and is used by the site owner to tell the search engines, and people that have nothing better to do than read your html source, just how you think your site should be classified. One of the more useful tags in this family is for description and that's the example we're going to use today.

How to get there?

Manage blog, Meta, settings.

Example

From within the settings page.

Fill out the description. This should be a summary of what you want people to know about your site and its focus. There's no obligation on search engines to pay attention to, or even show this information which is meant to remain hidden. Lastly please keep it short - 150 characters or so. This is not the place for your novel. That's why you have a blog after all:) This we insert into you blog template as:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your description about your blogcast.">

You can do the same for keywords but this time separate each keyword with a comma. Again, please don't go overboard. Most engines no longer count these as a significant. Google doesn't even index them which probably says a lot more than I could were I to go on. I'm not:)

Custom

There are several sites that ask you to include identifying information within your HEAD section to verify that you do indeed control the site.

The Editor

Many improvements to the template editor made it into this release and while they seem small when written down the impact on usability is quite marked.

We tell you the image sizes needed to replace the standard ones on the template.
We've added the ability to remove the background image completely.
Improved the accuracy of the preview, added more context sensitive help plus the usual bundle of changes that most of you would never have known were broken.

Let me know how these changes work out for you. I'd like to preempt a question on what we're doing to improve SEO within blogcast and would like to assure you that we're not finished.

Quick Blogcast 2.01 released

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:01:00 GMT

Greetings

We've recently released version 2.01 of Quick Blogcast to the wild, containing the following improvements and fixes.

Sub headers are back

Firstly, let's get the old business out of the way. All templates now have a working sub-header. This was omitted from most of the 2.0 templates and as promised, has been restored. To enact this fix please republish your template and allow a few minutes for your blog site to update.

CSS editor/ designer improvements

We have also improved the page designer as well as added a CSS editor for those that have requested that feature. This is not the final word on the template designer but rather addresses several omissions that we felt reduced the usability to a less than desirable level. We'll be putting out more information on how to use the CSS editor and just how far you can now take the customization of your blogcast.

New Templates

An additional twenty-four templates are included.

Some fixes to small annoyances such as:

Long titles causing issues on the dashboard page
Adding in per show images for podcasts
Modifying the podcast settings page
Improved in line flash player behavior
Fixed issue related to feeds that have a DTD within them

And many other items that we hope were too small to be noticed prior to their revision.

Blogcast update: Switchable play counter.

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:36:00 GMT

Here's a quick update on our prior post as well as news of an additional option we've provided for users of Quick Blogcast.

Podcast counts

The site counter is now hidden by default and an option to turn this on is available within the Manage Blog settings. Click on Manage blog settings > Podcasts and change the show times played to yes. This will restore the counter for each entry. The majority of people requested this, about 3:1 ratio, remain off as a default.

Titles

The titles have been restored to the main blog and the entry pages: These take the form your blog name: your entry title. If these are missing from your Blog Cast site, republish from Design Blog / Customize and they should appear within five minutes.

Explicit

We've restored the explicit image tag to each entry that is set as such. It precedes the play count/ download link underneath the in line player. This tag only appears when you mark your podcast as explicit.

I'd also like to explain how the stats are gathered, collated and displayed since many of you have inquired about this topic. Every time your audio or video file is requested, we count that as a hit. This includes playing it directly on your site, downloading it, a client requesting it from the RSS feed or someone directly linking to the media file's location. This doesn't mean in all cases that someone has listened to the file, just that they've requested it. All requests through are media servers are tallied once every twenty four hours (around Midnight AZ time) and the main site / podcast stats are updated.

Blogcast Faq

Blogcast Admin — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:52:00 GMT

Greetings ,

Over the past week since Blogcast merged, I've been receiving a lot of feedback on the merge from pod casters looking for their old features or wishing to remove some of the new ones. In reviewing these mails and talking with some of you, the following questions have come up more often than others (and most come from the podcast side):

Where's the large player gone?

The player has been moved to a sidebar item and defaults to off. To activate this, go to Design Blog, Sidebar Drag and "Quick Blogcast player" over to the active side. Click Save. Your player is now back in place. The in line player for sound / video will still appear in the articles.

Comments : how to remove them and prevent their recurrence.

Firstly, we'll prevent any new entries from being created by logging into the blog and then taking this path through the menu.

Manage blog: > settings > entries

Change default comment status and default trackback status to closed

Click on apply.

Now go to manage entries > entries and set the display to 100, or less if you have fewer than 100 podcasts. Click the Top left check box to select all entries and then from the drop down “select action” link pick “disable comments/ trackbacks” then click apply then repeat this process for items 101-200 etc.

Where's the stats / podcast counter ?

We have removed this count temporarily to correct an issue with inaccurate information being displayed. No data has been lost during this process as it's currently not being displayed and should be restored in the near future.

Where's my per item Image?

Previously you could upload a separate image for each podcast, or add in a default image if none existed within the MP3. This feature changed slightly from the prior edition with regards to the large media player now only showing the main channel image. We'll revert this behavior in an upcoming release. Meanwhile all the items are still present and will display within programs that support it. A temporary work around is to use iTunes to add an image to the file. To do this open the file in iTunes, click on “get info” then artwork then click ADD. You can now place your picture in the file.

The player has been moved to a sidebar item. Default is off.

To activate this go to Design Blog, Sidebar Drag "Quick Blogcast player" over to the active side. Click Save.

Where's the explicit tag?

This will be added back into the application in the near future. The items are still correctly labeled as explicit on the large player / rss feed but not currently displayed within the entries.

Thank you all for your suggestions, feedback and questions on the Blogcast. Keep them coming either by posting here or by filling out the feedback survey within the application.

Your first podcast.

Dennet — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:03:00 GMT

So, you've decided to join the world of pod casting. A great adventure lies ahead of you.

So, where do you begin?

Well, to start off, you create a Quick Blogcast account. This leverages the power of both blogging and pod casting, so you can have the right mix of tools to make your site fit you.

After you create your Blogcast account, and have created your template, you find yourself on what is commonly referred to as the Dashboard page. This page gives you an overview of the most used features of your Blogcast.

You'll see your blog Overview, Recent Entries, and Recent Comments, of which will be empty or have a 0 in most places. To change that, let's start by first creating a Hello World Podcast.If you have your own recording software, hook up your mic (and even video camera if you want to be seen by your fans) and start recording. Quick Blogcast handles seamlessly mp3, mp4, mov, and many other audio only and audio/video formats. Just pick which one works best for you.

Otherwise, from the top menu bar, select Manage Entries -> New Entry to use the Podcast Recorder embedded in Quick Blogcast.Next thing you need to do is click on the Add Podcast button. If you are redirected to a settings page, you'll need to enter in your default ID3 settings. Those settings are data that gets embedded inside every podcast you create with Quick Blogcast. When people download your podcast files, and play them, that data allows whatever player they are using to correctly display the information about the podcast, such as the image, podcaster, and more. After you complete that step, or if you didn't need to, you should now be on the Upload Podcast Page. If you created a podcast with your own software, you can click Browse to select the file, then upload to upload it to the site. Otherwise click on Record to start the Quick Recorder provided with Quick Blogcast.

The Quick Recorder program is relatively easy to use, and has plenty of tooltips and help to guide you through it. Once you complete your podcast in that application, you can upload it to Quick Blogcast. You'll land back on the Create Entry Page.
In the Title put in "Hello World!" (or whatever you wish to title your first podcast). For Categories, put in "welcome", or leave it blank, or a category of your choice. You can also select Categories from the accordion control on the left, and add in a category.

Once that has been added in, you can just click on the link to auto fill in the category for the new entry. If you feel like your first podcast fits in more then one category, feel free to add in as many as you wish, and separate by commas.
Now, you'll notice a little player was added to the entry. You can add whatever text you want before, after, or around it. If it's just an audio podcast, you may wish to add a picture, as well. Once you are done, pick Set the status from Draft to Published from the Entry Settings on the left, and click on Save.

Congratulations, your first podcast is done, and for better or for worse... ,people around the world can now hear your voice.

Using the new template editor.

Dennet — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:01:00 GMT

It's exciting, isn't it? Getting to create your own Blogcast? You have something to say, and you know just how you want to say it. This guide is to help you say it the way you want in the environment that best reflects who you are.
We'll begin by assuming you are on the Templates/Colors page inside the Blogcast you want to customize. If you are setting up your Blogcast for the first time, you'll be directed to this page automatically once you complete the first steps of the wizard.

The first thing you need to do is see beyond the images and names. Just because a theme is named "Teenage Poetry" does not mean that it may not be a very good template for, say a Concrete Business. Likewise, Travel 2 may be a good choice if you are starting up "The Claustrophobe's Blog". What is key is to remember that almost all pictures, fonts, and backgrounds can be changed. What you are interested in is the flow and layout of the page. And if the background and font style and color appear similar to what you picture in your head, so much the better.
Take a minute to browse through the list of available themes. And remember, every theme has 6 different color combinations, providing over 450 possible combinations just to start from.

Let's run with the idea of "The Claustrophobe's Blog". While looking through them, you see Photo Gallery. It's nice and dark, and you think it would make a great theme. So you select that one, and see a larger view of the theme, as well as the six color options available for that theme. You decide none of them are quite what you are looking for, but it would make a good base if you can not find anything better. You continue scrolling through the templates, and after looking at them, you decide you like how the Yoga theme has a nice solid border. This makes it feel a little boxed in, but still provides enough contrast to make the blog pop, so you select that template. You also like how the sidebar is located on the right sideflows a little better that way, and the sidebar location is one thing you can't change in a template. You decide you like the first color best, so you click on the Next >> to continue the process.

After loading which may take a few seconds (the application is taking that time to save a private copy of all the pictures and files that consist of the theme so you can customize it to your heart's delight), you'll see the Customize Template Page. If you already have a couple entries published, you'll see the first two in the preview panel, to give you an idea what your blog will look like.

The first thing we'll do is type in The Claustrophobe's Blog into the Header Text bar, and, "Life within a box" will make a good subheader. We click on Update Preview and we see the change. Next we select Blog Image 2, and change the image to one that we have on our computer. After we click upload, we will see a small version of the image. We can specify the repeat if we want the image to repeat, but for this one we'll just accept it who it is, and click Update Preview. As a side note, even animated gifs work, if you want to add a little additional spice to your blog. We then change Header Wrapper Image's background the same way, and set the background color for both of those to Black using the Color Selector, so all the overflow around both pictures are Black. Now it is looking a lot more claustrophobic. At the same time, we notice the header and subheader font is a bit small, so we select those options using the Font Style and Size dropdown boxes. We'll set the Header to Georgia 20, and the Subheader to Fantasy 14. Once again, we click the Preview to see how our changes are going.

Now, the only thing we need is to make the whole thing a bit darker. So we Select Blog and Blog Body, and change their backgrounds to black, and for the font color we select the first template color. We decide to customize the font color, style and font for Entry Title, Entry Body, and Entry Byline to all have a black background, but we give the Entry Title a slightly larger size, making it Fantasy size 20, so it pops a little better. We also decide the entry body should have a very faint watermark, so we create an image, and upload it as the background of the Entry Body. Finally, once we are all done, we click the Publish Button, and within a few seconds our blog is visible for the whole world to see, looking just the way we wanted it to look. By having such a large selection of themes to pick from, and then being able to add background images, change font styles, colors, and sizes, we can completely change an existing template to reflect our blog.

Feature: Setup Online Photo Filer (OPF) in BLOGCAST

Blogcast Admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:05:00 GMT

Blogcast users can now insert photos which they have already stored in Online Photo Filer (OPF). Don’t have an Online Photo Filer? Let’s take care of that bit first.

You may already be a winner.

If you’ve just recently bought or renewed a domain there’s a good chance that you already have the free version of OPF. Log into your account and select “Online Photo Filer accounts” and follow the setup instructions from there.

If you are currently bereft of credits then you can either purchase an enhanced OPF that comes with free prints,more disk space and bandwidth or purchase/renew a domain name. Either way once you’ve set up the OPF account and populated it with several hundred of your favorite images you can now quickly locate and display them within your Blogcast. We do not display private images, and you guess correctly that it never will, since posting a blog is about as private as Henry the Eighth's marriage record.

How to subscribe?

Within Blogcast head for the Manage Blog tab and click the Services item. Along with Online Photo Filer there are other services available (del.icio.us, rss service which will be the subject of future entries ). Select Online Photo Filer from the list and specify the URL of your Online Photo Filer Account and click on the Add Service button. This creates the relationship what we’re about to exploit.

Where to use?

Within the add /edit entry you can click on “insert image from gallery” and then on the Photos tab. Select the photo service from the list, at this time there’s only OPF but I’d check out our blog for updates on that , and select an image from one of your available galleries. Pick a photo and click OK and we’ve just saved you typing another thousand words.

Quick Blogcast release. What's new for Podcasters

Blogcast Admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:15:00 GMT

With the release of Blogcast 2.0 Quick Podcast users gain an entire blog platform and the ability to turn your podcast’s house into a home. We’ve tidied up the workflow for those of you already pod casting while retaining all your settings. To get started create a podcast by selecting “new entry” and then   “Add Podcast” either on the top right of the new entry section or from the accordion menu on your left.

Templates and Website:

Another 55 templates, far greater editing abilities, comments, show notes inline audio and video players and nearly every feature that our Quick Podcast users have asked us for ,barring more detailed statistics , has made it into this version . We’re just as interested in stats and look forward to a future version where we address that concern.

Write Entry Screen:

No more squeezing your show notes into a description tag you can now post full entries, include inline audio and video content as well as pictures, links, comments   and a slough of other features.

Inline Players:

Your audio or video files are now included within the posts rather than opening up a new player.

Services/ Links:

Several of these changes were borne form frustration; mine, of gathering information to place into my blog entries was more time consuming than the content of the post itself. Hence our new services and links feature which gives you quick easy access to your previous entries,   book marking services, access to your public galleries within Online Photo Filer and   just about any other RSS feed out there can be easily referenced and included in your posts.