My Name is William, Bill for Short
Hi, my name is Bill and I'm one of the developers on the Quick Blog team. I've only been with GoDaddy.com® for 10 months, but I was the first one on the team—getting in on the ground floor.
When I first applied to GoDaddy, I was told that they were planning to develop their own blogging software as a replacement for the modified Serendipity program they were offering for free. I couldn't have been more excited. I've been blogging for five years total and four years regularly, so it would have been a dream job for me. These last eight months have been the happiest of my professional life.
Quick Blog, for me, has felt like a culmination of everything I've been working towards. It neatly merges my personal and professional interests and it's really an opportunity for me to craft the perfect blogging tool while getting paid to do so. There's room for improvement—we all know that—but I've never been prouder of something I've built. We've got great things planned for this application!
This is Go Daddy's first product blog—though it won't be the last—so we're really blazing new ground for the company. We plan to use this forum as a way to tell you about new releases; help you understand the features we have; solicit feedback and suggestions; and inform you of service interruptions (if we have them, of course). If you've got anything in particular you'd like to see here, leave a comment and we'll see what we can do.
The Blog Team Rules!!! You guys did a great job on the blog. Can't wait to see all the cool things you add to it! :)
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Well, I don't know if I can speak for everyone but I appreciated all the support you provided during development. Oh, and the Outback food runs!
Thanks, Bill
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Looks like I'm second. I just wanted to say that I'm really excited to see this software develop. The openness and agility of the team behind it sound really good.
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Quick Blog farging rules! All the other blog software out there are just for corksucking bastiches!!
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Roman,
Thanks for the kind words.
Regards John,
Go Daddy Quick Blog Team
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I'll just be Happy to get a Blog up QUICKLY!!
GoDaddy's site is way too oriented to selling stuff & not enuf to get ya going fast!
Cheers!! Billy ;))
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Billy,
Did we make you happy with a quick setup of your Quick Blog?
Regards,
John
Quick Blog team:
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I find the colour of the letters on quickblog very hard to read. I don't like the dull grey letters and I don't know how to use black letters. I am using the quickblog every day at the moment but I think I may have to change if I can't make my print darker.
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Phil,
Thanks for taking the time to pass on your comments with regards to the color choices on your template. Currently the main text color is fixed to the choice of template/color scheme. Experimenting with alternate template/ color schemes . as there are templates that have better contrast between the text and the backgrounds, would be a workaround in the immediate future.
I'm inclined to agree with you with regards to the legibility of gray test on light backgrounds and will request we add in a high contrast option in a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team.
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in your development--it looks like you failed to create a tab that allows us blog users to see the names and email address to our subscribers.
Subscribers are the reason we do this--its like opening a online commerce site without a shopping cart.
It is killing me not being able to see the memebers.
Please tell me you are fixing this. ASAP
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Actually, we purposely omitted access to the subscriber lists because of the thorny issues involved. Readers provide their email addresses in order to subscribe to entries and comments. They did not agree to further correspondence, so we really can't disclose their names and email addresses without such consent. While you may be angelic in your communications with your readers, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that others could be less scrupulous—unfortunately, the rotten egg spoils it for everyone.
We see email subscriptions the same as RSS or Atom feed subscriptions: they're an anonymous way of telling visitors that you've updated your blog. Whether you agree with our actions or not, I hope you can see that they are motivated by a genuine concern for not contributing to the spam problem.
Thanks for bringing this up, Bill
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Not sure what the real situation is with the "Timestamp" field on the New Entry and Edit Entry pages. It always seems to be set for a time an hour behind me. When I remember to change it my entries don't post. Reading through this blog, I think it is an undocumented "Future Publishing" tweak. But, if so, shouldn't the time of the publishing correspond with the "Blog time zone" setting in the general settings area? I have my time zone set to "Central Standard Time [UTC-6]." (Thou I don't see the ability to opt-in or opt-out of daylight savings.) I have not, until now, left one of the entries that failed to publish in my blog. By accident I left one in there (while trying to locate the answer to my problem here) and it has just been published, an hour late :O So, apparently the timestamp does allow future publishing. Then, HOW do I make it so that the published time corresponds with reality?
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When you do you think you will add a preview functionality to the publishing tool?
Yours is the only html tool on the mark these days without a "preview" page outside of the design field.
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Scott,
Thanks for your feedback on providing a preview feature within the design blog section. We are considering this option for a future edition of Quick Blog but we're unable to provide a timeline for such a feature. Please keep a look out for this in future updates.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
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I just subscribed to Quick Blog and Website tonight - now I have to find a new vendor? GoDaddy support just told me that Quick Blog and Website Tonight don't work in IEv7 - is this true?
Why?
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First off, we appreciate your purchase. We'd hate to see you go so soon.
We do not presently support IE7 Beta 2. It is beta software, so it's not exactly a high priority at present. We are aware of the issues and we will likely resolve them by final release when Microsoft automatically updates everyone to the new version. We fully support IE6 and I don't see that changing as new new versions of Internet Explorer come out.
Thanks again, Bill
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Bill... do you foresee a "Quick Forum" product at all? I've been running my blog for seven months now (www.signal26.com), and because of the all of the participation, I'm finding I really need to move into a blog/forum type of atmosphere.
I love my Quick Blog, it's been great. But I really need a forum, and I'm sure there are scores out there who are finding the same thing happening to them.
What do you say?? Help!
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Greetings,
While a forum is an ideal compliment to the blog and it's often better to have both rather than either/ or. Well that doesn't answer your question. We'll certainly consider such a hybrid or a separate forum but I'm afraid there's no timeline that I could provide for you with regards to it. There's some excellent forum solutions available free with our hosting accounts that may be able to fulfill you needs in the interim.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
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Hi John, I just signed up for Quickblog today from godaddy (bought the blog, got a domain name) and was looking around for articles on how to use it! Found your very nice site and one other (by Mike V.)I did manage to get a rudimentary blog up, no entries yet, but still fooling around with format.
I have a few questions:
How do you get things in the sidebar that aren't part of the original components? If I wanted to add a "Free Speech online" button from the EFF foundation, for example, how would I do that?
Can I backdate entries? I have a bunch of articles I want to post, but I don't want them all beginning with July 8, 2007. I'd like to go back a year or so and make it look like I started the blog a year ago. (It's nothing fishy - I just don't want it to look like I posted 50 articles all at once and was hoping I could backdate them.)
Is there any way to add pages to the blog? I want to have a "product review" page that would be dedicated to book reviews, video reviews, etc, Is there any way to make a link in the sidebar that would take me to that page? Or will I have to set up a separate blog for each page?
It took me forever to switch out the image in the template with one I wanted lol, but I finally figured it out. I think.
Lastly, is there a forum for Quickblog users?
I was going to go with typepad or wordpress until I found godaddy. They seem to be pretty good and the support was excellent. It's not their fault I'm clueless about blogs.
Thank you so much. If you can't answer my questions can you direct me to another site?
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Greetings Julia,
Firstly let me apologize for the response time and I hope these answers are still useful to you. If there's anything you would like us to cover on the blog that we've not yet gotten to fell free to post a request here.
It's quite a list and I'll be answering these in reverse order. Firstly , other than this one, we currently do not have a user forum but I'll certainly consider it. Many of the answers that we don't currently offer we're already considering for new items so I won't address those apart from their absence.
There's no static pages option within Quick Blog presently so the creation of a review page would have to take the form of Making a category called review, adding a link to that in the custom txt / html sidebar item and then people would have a page of reviews it's not perfect regarding what you are looking for but it is a useful workaround many people have used.
Other than manually going into the entry and changing the publish time on them we don't have a way to amend that.It depends on the import process used which should bring them over with their original publish time/ dates intact. If you need more specific info let me know what format you are bringing in and I'll suggest the best route to do this.
Sidebar items. For the item you referrenced ( and this refers to our paid blog only ) here's how you would get the EFF button onto the site. Log into your blog. Click on Sidebar which is in your design blog tab. Drag the sidebar item custom site over. It should open up automatically, give it a title then paste in the EFF button of your choice, click on save, then click on the save at the bottom right of the page. This should now appear on your blog.
Ok I think we have those covered
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
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Hi John -
I too, am just learning to use Quick Blog. I'm a novice blogger and have just posted my first entry yesterday. I can relate with Julia. It's hard finding resources for Quik Blog!
My questions are:
1) Is there any way to format plain text in the Side Bar? If you look at my blog, you will see that I editted the tab to say Bio. No problem. But whatever text I put underneath cannot be editted at all. I can't even make a paragraph. And I'm embarrased to say that I don't know HTML. Yet. I have a feeling I'm going to have to learn if I want to blog!
2) Why is there so much more extensive picture editing capabilities in the Template Designe Section (headers) than there are in the Topic section? All you can do when posting a topic is add a picture. Period. When designing a Blog or changing a picture in the heading, you can resize, crop, etc.
3) Finally, and probably most importantly to me, will you ever support maintenance via Mac Safari? Please?
Thanks in advance.
Debs
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Debs,
Firstly thanks for taking the time to try out Quick Blog. I'll answer in reverse order.
Safari, yes. Currently our present html editor reacts poorly with Safari and is long overdue for a replacement. The replacement has already been specified as having to support Safari which is a good occasion for us to look at the other issues in using it for maintaining a blog look out for this in a future release.
The picture editing is inconsistent but it can be resized by selecting it and then dragging the height . length you wish. Cropping is another matter altogether. When we get to the new editor, mentioned below, this is certainly an oversight I'd like to see taken care of.
As to formatting the sidebar I agree that it's rudimentary and the formatting requires some HTML knowledge to pull it off and have it look good. There's a workaround I can suggest though it requires logging into the blog with a browser that supports our rich editor ( I believe Firefox 2 on the mac does) What you do is go into make an entry, format the entry as you would like the bio to appear and then click on the HTML tab, take the code from that window and paste it into the bio Area.) We could certainly make that an easier process and will add that to my things to do list.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
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Debs,
I know exactly what you're going through as a QuickBlog beginner.
Check out my http://blog.acreativedesktop.com website blog to see if something in my sidebar interests you. If you'd like to know how it's done I'd be more than happy to help.
Austin
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Hi Bill - I was wondering if you have any insight to this problem that godaddy have not been able to answer for me. I am on a mac g4 using firefox 2.0.0.12.
When you go into customize blog 'blog content' the font/foreground radio button is ghosted and you cannot select it to change the blog entries headers.
They said they cant replicate the issue, but its definitely there. I have check on other macs and the same thing...Is there an issue with the mac and the blogging software.
I understand your not a help site however as a developer you may be able to shed some light, I would appreciate it - tech support is giving me the run around a bit.
thanks - love you work tho, Sun
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Greetings Sun,
I've taken a look at the It's not a FF or Mac issue. Not all templates have all items configurable , at which point we grey out the choices. The issues is definetely there on your template choice and I am guessing the prior answer came from.
The goodnews is that you can edit the css theme directly to achieve the same effect. It looks like no separate items were created for h3.sf_blog_posttitle by the designer which is why the visual editor is greying them out. You can amend the color / font size directly in the custom css style sheet. Please let me know if there's specific changes you want to achieve that I can provide further assistance with.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast
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