Site Titles
You can now have set a Title and Description for you Blog Site. The Site
Title will be displayed at the very top of the page in the main title bar area
and the Site Description will show up on the Site Info page. You are
limited to 40 characters for the Site Title a and 255 characters for the Site
Description. Visit the account page on your site to edit the title and
description of your site.
Blog Groups
We've done some re-tooling with the way we are handling Blog Groups
and the way data is displayed. When you visit a Blog Group, like
http://stardockdev.joeuser.com, the articles that were displayed on the
site automatically showed every article from the sites that are associated with
that group. That's not the way it works now. In order to view the
article the site admin of the Blog Group must feature an article in order to
have it appear on his Blog Group site. So if I see an interesting article
on joe.joeuser.com I then need to feature that article before it will show up
on StardcockDev, where previously all articles Joe posted showed up.
Right now in the right bar you will notice categories like
Newest Articles, Top Articles, etc. We are going to duplicate those
sections but they will be site specific. So when you visit
draginol.joeuser.com or stardockdev.joeuser.com you will have a top articles
and newest articles sections that are specific to the site you are on. To
support this there is a new feature in the Blog Group Manager that allows you
to select only the channels you want to monitor. As an example for
StardockDev I have selected on the "developer" channel. So when the
Newest Group Articles section is implemented it will only look for articles
that are posted to the developer channel/categories on the sites associated
with my group.
Site Info
You will notice a new yellow box at the top of the right bar. This box
will give you specific info about the JoeUser.com Blog Site that you are
visiting. It's in real basic form at the moment. In time you will
be able to change the logo in that box and add your own links. But
the main item in there now is the Site Info link which takes you to pretty
much a blank page right now. On the site info page there is a link to
join a Blog Group if that site is a JoeUser.com Blog Group. Before only
the admin of a Blog Group could request for another site to join, now you can
request to join that group.
Custom Audience
We have tweaked the interface for adding Custom Audiences or Private User
Groups. When creating a new article you have the option to have your
article posted so its visible for Everyone, Just You or to a Custom Audience(s)
that you have definied.
Site Specific Channels and Links
When you visit a Blog Site the channel listing now is site specific.
It will only display the channels that have been used for that site. I
still need to update the channel index page though as that still displays
channels for the entire site.
Next Week
That's about it for this week. Next week we hope to finish up a few of
the items I mentioned above and also add a referal system so you can see links
to other pages/sites that link to your articles. Also we hope to add in
the ability to create your own links in the right bar and maybe the ability to
create custom pages as well.
