Quick Blog is on the move.
We’re improving the infrastructure that Quick Blog 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(R) then you are excused from the next few paragraphs. We’ve got you covered and apart from a momentary glitch, where a black cat will 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 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 their blog will be unreachable to the outside world.
We’ll have notification onscreen prior to the switchover and ask that you do not make any changes until you either see this notification or we post a new entry. Visitors to your blog will remain blissfully unaware of these background shenanigans.
Great work! I am so glad to finally see a standalone blog application for .NET that is easy to use and highly functional.
I do have a couple of questions about future plans. First, any plans to allow more personalization of format, or even modifying the css files? I would love to be able to make simple changes so it fits the overall design of my website.
Also, any plans to integrate it with a CMS, like DotNetNuke? Or at least make it more easily integrated?
Thanks again, and keep up the great work!
Greetings Blake,
Thank you for the kind words and I'll stick an extra lump of coal in the developer's socks as a bonus
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Godaddy's QuickBlogs have been up and down for the last 48 hours. Is that part of the cutover?
Unfortunately, no. The cutover should be happening in the next week or two and won't affect the visitor-side of Quick Blog except for a few hundred customers whose domains aren't registered with us and have manually set up their DNS. We will notify those customers via email and will leave both sets of servers running simultaneously for awhile to make sure that the transition is seamless.
The problems you've experienced are caused by increased traffic that caught us offguard. Our network guys are building out additional servers that should come online today and we are taking additional steps to insure that the application is running as lightly as possible in order to better weather the midday crunch. I appreciate your patience and patronage!
Thanks, Bill
Last night, we did a release of the visitor side of things that appears to have completely resolved the intermittent issues you noticed. We've got still more work to do to make sure it never happens again, but this will sustain us for a very long time.
Thanks for your patience, Bill
This has nothing to do with the topic on hand, but I couldn't think of anyplace else to put it. Actually, it does have to do with site popularity, sort of, so I guess it's okay.
As my site has a modest popularity level, the nefarious spam trackbacks have made their way over. Since I have e-mail notification set for all new comments and trackbacks, nothing like seeing twenty-five or more (I had ninety-eight once) trackback notifications, all spam. Which is the nature of the beast.
The problem comes in how to clean them out and keep them away. Since I usually ban by URL, as it is now I have to (in order) go to Manage Entries --> Trackbacks, right-click on the address and select Copy Link Location (this is using Firefox in Windows), go to Manage Blog --> Blacklist, select Add Blacklist Entry, paste in the offending URL, select URL in the drop-down menu, and then banish it. Repeating that a few dozen times in a row can get a mite tiresome.
What I would love to have, if possible, is an additional field in the Manage Trackbacks page to where I could, for selected entries, choose "Ban URL" along with "Ban IP Address." It'd make life a whole lot simpler.
Another option I'd like to have stems from how many of the spam addresses are extension variants of one main address; e.g. www.a.com/hi/subject-a, www.a.com/hi/subject-b, etc. It'd be nice to have the ability to, rather than having to ban each address individually, ban an address and all extensions for that address by entering a wildcard, for example www.a.com/hi/* to which QuickBlog would respond by blacklisting all entries at that domain with the sub-heading, but without blocking the domain itself in case it's legitimate. It'd be a terrific time-saver.
Thanks!
Greetings,
Thank you for your thoughts with regards to better handle the management of spam trackbacks. We'll certainly take that into considerations for future editions. Excuse the brevity of the reply for the time being I'd like to get back to this in more detail in a future post.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
any updates or enhancements on the horizon since the holidays are over ?
Well, the move that John alluded to in the entry was delayed several times and now will wait until after the Super Bowl. We will let everyone affected know with as much notice as we can muster and we will make sure that it is as seamless as possible.
As far as updates and enhancements go, we can't really divulge future plans. I can assure you that we've been hard at work getting things done (and we've had several minor releases and bugfixes in the last month that have addressed mainly performance and scaleability issues, nothing worth incrementing the version over though).
We'll keep you apprised, Bill
why don't you work on allowing people to post an entry that they have saved in WORD to the quickblog. This would make it very easy for people that like to save their work and just add it quickly and accurately to their post.
Greetings Robin,
Thank you for your suggestion with regards to allowing direct publishing of Word attachments. There are ways which to directly post from Word either by using Word 2007 which produces a clean html output ( Word contains way more information than is relevant to posting to a blog and it's hard to discern , accurately, between the wanted/ unwanted content which is why pasting from Word to most online services has less than desirable results ) or by using a plug in to word that lets you click, Send to blog, though at the moment I am not aware of any that give particularly good results other than the inbuilt option in the new work
Windows Live Writer, or another client , would also provide Word like functionality is also a suggestion but it's still not ideal if you are taking content already written in Word to copy to the blog.
John
Quick Blog team.
This too is a tad off-topic, but I'm curious. Is there any way to create some sort of "sticky entries", the way they have sticky entries in Forums? If not, can you make it possible?
I'd appreiate having this ability, and I suspect other customers would appreciate it too.
Thanks and reply,
Midge
That is a good idea. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to do it. I'll add it to the things-that-customers-want list.
Thanks for your suggestion (and patronage!), Bill
another wish list (or perhaps an explanation on how to do so in QB):
Inclusion of Image Maps into the edit capabilites of the Template (in other words I'd like to not use a static jpg banner, but one that is image mapped so i could make the words on the jpg be clickable to go to the various categories like news, politics, celebs, etc - see my site for the current look ... just want to be able to image map that jpg Bill. Make it so!
Greetings Zenshadow,
Presently the explanation eludes me such an image map wouldn't be practical using the current templates but that doesn't mean we'd not be interested in making such a change. It would currently need to be built as a template itself or we'd have to allow links in the site editor in the text field which could overlay the graphic , not quite mapping, but quite close to what you want to see. I'd love to say we'll get on this warp factor 9 but currently my impulse is to drive this into a future release for consideration.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I've just started using QB, which is great, but I hit a snag that I can't seem to figure out: flowing text around images. I've got to the image properties thru right clicking on the link that is presented in the status bar. I see the alignments and all - I've tried all kinds of tinkering to cause it to flow text around an image (from either side). Nothing seems to work! I'm not a 'newb', have blogged often... just don't get this. In tagworld we have a series of image selections to show how the image will be placed with radio buttons to select (left - only thing on the line, mid - only thing on the line, right, only thing on the line... left - text flows around it, mid - text flows around it, right - text flows around it are the basic ones --- intuitive to use)... help! You're my only hope Obi Wan!
Greetings,
There may be a new hope, something a little less menacing and from your follow up comment it looks like you have found the solution in using Live Writer. I agree the formatting through the write entry is frustrating enough before we even get to deciding how it should flow. It's certainly an area we'll pay more attention to. Thanks for your feedback.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I really would like the option to have a second sidebar. My content is too cluttered when it's all on one side.
Keep up the good work.
-adam
Thank you for your suggestion. It's a very good idea and I'll add it to the list of things to do.
Thanks, Bill
agreed and seconded.
Hey QBT;
Well, I'm wondering why IE's Feed Detection doesn't discover my blog (http://blogtopicz.com). I investigated it at MS and they say this:
[snipped some investigation into the possible cause - Bill from Go Daddy]
So, I then did a View Source on my site. Lo and behold there's nothing there for RSS (accept some I've added later)... none in the first 512 bytes that IE says it requires... hmmm. Since the release of IE7 has integrated Feed support, I'm wondering why QB isn't allowing that in the header (as well as a means for us to put META TAG data for search engine submittals). Do you want us dirt poor bloggers to fail QB? Are we that bad? Sigh. Maybe you guys will 'fix' it. Include Firefox while your at it! I would really appreciate an answer on this. Maybe there's a conspiracy against bloggers here I can expose? hehe. Thanks!
The basic issue here (it's called Feed Autodiscovery) is that there isn't a tag in the <head> section of the blog templates. I can assure you that there is no ill-will that caused us to withhold that functionality; the reason is so much simpler: the limitations of our templating system. Quite a few of us on the development team are avid bloggers and we all use Quick Blog personally. We sorely want feed autodiscovery as well and it's coming. I can't say exactly when, but it's sooner than later.
Thanks for your patience, Bill
I run several websites.
This Quick Blog, which I'm new at, has me stymied!
I went through all the steps and Published (Several times).
Problem - Nothing is there, but the ADs.
What am I doing wrong?
blog.crissbros.com
Greetings,
It seems like you've resolved the issue on blog though I am puzzled where the chrisbros.com domain came from ( the free blogs are linked only to the domains within your account) which makes it hard to speculate on the issues you were experiencing. Please let us know if any further questions arise.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team