Quoth the blog team, never MORE , unless you excerpt that is
Today’s theme, that should be themes, is the announcement of our new CSS templates into Quick Blog which will gradually replacing the existing templates over the proceeding weeks as well as adding totally new designs. These changes ultimately lead to us being able to provide more flexibility on the templates, as well as a greater degree of user control in the future. If you have your template set up just how you like it, no worries, you won’t need to change a thing.
We’ve incorporated most of the user requests that we’ve received with regards to the templates . If your suggestions or changes are not yet included please keep an eye out for future updates as this is just the beginning. Onto the changes.
More > > : now context sensitive
Until now every entry whether it be three words or three pages has finished off with “MORE >>” not only was it illogical, but it was annoying as many of you correctly pointed out and we agree less is more and it’s gone. Now the only times you will see “MORE>> “is when you excerpt an entry or have chosen the view all posts option in settings or if you are viewing the contents of a category, month which list in a digest view.
We’ve applied the same logic to comments and track backs. If you have them switched off, they won’t appear at the bottom of your entry. If you’ve yet to receive comments we’re only going to display “add comment” rather than “comments (0)"
We’re adding in RSS auto discovery to the main template so that it’s easier for other’s to find and subscribe to your feed within their browser and for many services you’ll no longer need to type out the full feed address, e.g. www.yourblogname.com/rss2.aspx
Default text color is now always a high contrast offering and you will seem many other layout changes including increased width, spacing, the ability to amend more of the graphics and many other components that make up your blog’s public face.
Please note these changes can not be retroactively applied to an existing template and will require the selection and publication of a new CSS template prior to becoming available to your visitors
No comment. Just checking out blog styles. Don't see any for GPS/ATV type activities yet. Well it won't be long now.
Greetings,
Thank you for your feedback, good timing too I was compiling a list of themes to expand on the ones we have and I can certainly see ATV as one and GPS / Geo Tagging as another. I can't promise when they'll appear but the are on the list after we've completed our current batch.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Define ATV and GPS Tagging?????
debs3@att.net
deborahsnead.com
songsofthelord.com
(New Blog manager)
Deborah,
ATV : all terrain vehicle such as a quad
GPS Tagging: (Global positioning by satellite) When you make a post from a mobile device that has a gps function it not only posts the entry with the Time/ date but the location of where the post was originated from. I was getting at the provision of more templates for a narrower set of interests.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
I'm having a minor problem with category capitalization. I originally created a category like "temp", but then decided I wanted it to be "Temp". I didn't see a way to change it, so I deleted "temp" and created "Temp", but "Temp" showed up as "temp"!?! Everytime I delete and re-create with a capital "T", it gets created with a lowercase "t". help.
Ryan,
Thanks for your recent question with regards to the category capitilization. What you're seeing is indeed the case but it's one of those things that "looks odd" but it's as designed, ok it's as designed but maybe not as envisioned with regards to how it works. All of our categories share the same name space , i,e they are not unique to your blog so my category "test" is the same one you have. While we're not doing anything with this presently the idea is across all of our blogs we could then show the latest 10 posts in a category for example.
The first person to "claim" temp did so in lower case and since in the database we see "Temp and temp" , in this case as the same thing" we're looking up "Temp" seeing that it exists and returning "temp"
This is certainly something we'll take a look at in a future edition.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Ahh, that makes sense. I can see how it's useful to share categories, as well as not have multiple entries that are essentially the same thing. The category I'm referring to is "pork". All my other categories are capitalized, soooo... if no one else is using
"pork", maybe you could change it to "Pork" in the system? but not a big deal. Thanks for the reply.
Done. Thanks for your understanding, Bill
John,
Thank you - I was happy to finally find an answer to this question.
I understand your objective, but it is very frustrating. I use my site for business, and it is extremely unprofessional to have inconsistent capitalization. Some words have random letters in the middle capitalized, which may be appropriate for teenagers, but is inexcusable in business. This issue has forced me to avoid using certain category names, which means I cannot use some of the words that most accurately describe the material to which my categories relate.
I am not sure that you are going to accomplish what you set out to accomplish anyway, because a word's meaning varies depending on the context in which it is being used. Terms-of-art vary across industries and disciplines, not to mention in lay language. In other words, the same category name could imply something very different on a lawyer's blog, versus a priest's, versus a poet's, versus a 19-year-old rebel's. If you would ever get to the point of grouping multiple blogs' content together based on category names that they have in common, the mix of "recent posts" would be meaningless.
Frankly speaking, I know a significant number of Quick Blogcast site owners who would be offended if their content would be grouped together with certain other types of content, and who would prefer to have their content hosted somewhere else if they found out that this was a possibility.
It would be nice if the idea of a common namespace could be eliminated, or at least optional. Can you create a work-around so that certain sites could display category names the way their blog authors had intended?
Thank you very much.
Amelia
Amelia,
A three-column layout would be very valuable. Also, please provide a method for disabling autodiscovery - I use an independent feed service.
Thank you,
Douglas Ireland
www.vidopp.com
Douglas,
Thanks for your comments on the templates and about the autodiscovery issue arising from such.
As to autodiscovery I was thinking that we'd be offering the ability for people to control that process for the major services in this area. I see you are using feedburner so in your case we'd make that feed the one that's discovered.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team.
I, too, use feedburner, and would like for that to be the only feed that is autodiscovered. Is it possible for me to do that?
Greetings,
Currently this is not an option but it's on our to do list to add support for people to change their RDF order and/or remove them for other services.
Regards
John
QBC
I'm not seeing those changes. I've reapplied the template, but I still see "View Comments (0)" and "MORE >>" even when there is no more. Maybe I completely missed what you're saying, but not the result I was expecting.
Also, I'd like to display just 10 entries per page, but I don't see how to get to the next page. Is there a way for visitors to go to the next page (entries 11-20)? Thanks.
Firstly I'd like to apologise for the time taken to get back to you on this issue. The short answer is that your existing published template will not be affected unless you choose a new template with a CSS theme.
Presently there's no navigation for earlier pages on outwith those on the sidebar. It would certainly make sense to do so and it's being considered for a future issue.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Likewise, I don't know how to "upgrade" to the new CSS. Your answer here did not respond to Ryan's question about reapplying the template. How do you do this?
Second, my trackbacks on my blog are unusable due to spamming every minute. Do you have a spam filter in place?
Greetings,
I'm sorry I thought I'd posted a link back to the original entry. Presently all the CSS templates are at the start , under design ,templates and are on the first three pages. To republish, and sorry this is a tad messy ,
Go into the design blog dropdown
select another template and it will ask you if you wish to change , ok .
when that template appears click onto the design blog, then chose your original template, modify it to suit and then publish it.
We've seen a marked increase in the spam , and while we're doing a good job of identifying it as such ( which is the spam filter that's marking them as such ) it would be easy for a valid trackback to be lost in the mix. I am thinking that switching the default view from ALL to pending will alleviate the initial issue though preventing them from even appearing would ideally be the goal. I'm going to check that all the anti spam measures we have in place , actually are in place.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Thx John, just to confirm... if I change the template, will all my original blog's content (with links) remain intact? Or will everything start all over again? Sounds like a dumb question, but this is a must-ask...
Greetings Pat,
The only thing that would be an issue at the moment would be the link at the very top of the page that links back to the main page. The current template designer doesn't have the ability to add those links, an oversight that's on our list of upcoming fixes. Apart from that a new template should not jeopardize and of the content or sidebar items / Links within the site other than that which I mentioned. If it does we've still not removed the old templates so a quick switch back is still possible.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
The answers to the previous questions helped me to understand QB much better.
How hard of a task would it be to make our blog titles open up the full version of our blog posts instead of the "more" link?
Is there a way to change the color of the side bar component titles or the links within the blogroll component? I don't use many of the components simply because there seems to be no way to do this.
That is exactly the purpose of this blog: to share knowledge about Quick Blog by archiving previous questions. Glad it helped you out!
The new CSS templates offer exactly this feature you want. Not only are the titles now hyperlinked, but the "MORE >>" link only appears if there's an excerpt. It will require you to switch your template, which means recreating it, but it's really worth it because there's a whole slew of additional features that it'll buy you. (Including feed autodiscovery, table-less HTML, and future customizability.)
There is presently no way to change sidebar colors. May I recommend a switch to a CSS template again? I think you'll see that ability in a future release but only for the CSS-based templates. I can't say for certain, though.
Thanks again, Bill
I looked at the new CSS templates and cannot find one that is what I want. Most seem to have some generic picture that I don't want. Is there anyway to have these templates but make the pix changeable? My main thing is to get a template where the posts don't appear grey but darker or some feature where a preference can be set for the color of the text in posts.
John,
All of the new CSS templates should have a high contrast font, either black or white and not the grey that has haunted us for too long if you find one otherwise please let us know the name the template ( if we've not gotten to it before you have) and we'll amend it.
With regards to the images the generic pictures are nearly all changeable for an image of roughly the same size and can be found in customize blog, then
Regards
John
Quick Blog team.
Okay, I think I did you recommended to get a black font and get rid of the gray font, but it is still gray. Please give me black font!
thanks, julie
Julie,
The old template style is still present on DOUGLASCOUNTYGA.FUNFOODLIFE.INFO so none of the improvements we've made appeared. Please go into design blog, select any CSS template and publish it. The test will now be black or white depending on the template/ color set chosen.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I got the gray font!!! It is generic 2. Please make it black---please!!! It is a true eye strain! Thanks!
Greetings,
The template you are currently on has been replaced by a css based one with the same name. If you go into design blog , customize blog, re add your custom image and then publish the text will default to black.
regards
John
Quick Blog team
OK, managed to incorporate the Family template and found the section for editing the pictures. This is all good. Problem I see now is in the entry section. The entries appear in dark text against a white background (which is good). However, a bit below where the sidebar ends, the white background stops and the entries keep going down except now they are black against a dark blue background which again makes it a bit difficult to read. Is there some setting to change this or is something incorrect? It's almost as if a frame for the sidebar ends with it and the text goes back to full page width.
Greetings,
Currently there's no user setting , other than changing the base template color scheme that could alleviate that. I'll pass this over to the designers as this doesn't seem like an intentional behaviour.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
How about having html title tags that are a concatenation of the blog name and the article title? All my page titles are the blog name, which is
not a good SEO approach
How about having an auto-generated keywords and desc tags. You could take desc from excerpt and keywords from the categories
Would be nice to have a feature to automatically add bookmarkets to each post (e.g. for digg, delicious etc.). Could it be added to the template?
Would be nice to be able to build more complex navigation into the blog. As a very basic addition, would be a link at the bottom of the blog to let users flick through pages of (n) articles at a time, rather that just having a landing page, then the category archives or calendar links.
Greetings,
Thank you for taking the time to suggest ways in which we can improve Quick Blog. In orders. Page name being modified to the title is feasible,
I don't believe that auto keywords can bring anything more to table than them already being present within the article and the benefits to most search engines of then manually pointing them out wouldn't seem all that useful. I'll look into it further to see what I'm missing here.
I agree that we should be including more services such as those mentioned to provide auto generated content within the template/ entry and we're considering this for a future version .
On page navigation of the type mentioned will certainly be easier with a new template system which is being considered.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team
Many thanks for the reply. Perhaps the keywords tag would be of limited appeal, but I think it may help 'minor' search engines.
I had another question: In terms of daily, monthly and category archive pages, it would seem nice to render the page so that each entry appeared as:
Title [Read Article]
Excerpt [some basic text from excerpt field]
Posted by Contributor at 5/14/2007 7:13 AM | View Comments (0) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (0)
At the minute it 'leaves out' the excerpt field. It would be more user friendly if the blog subscriber could read the excerpt of the article on these archive pages, below the link. This would be better for SEO as well, as the search engine would have more text to index rather than just a bunch of links.
Could this be supported - please?
Greetings,
We're taking a look at such , particularly as an option. The view itself is used in more than once place so we'll consider that along with the prior changes / addition of sitemaps in an upcoming release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team
Thanks. What kind of timeline are we looking at for the next release? Would be good to have a basic idea of when the changes might be available.
thanks.
Boy, I wish we could publicly disclose release schedules. But we can't. It's coming really soon and it's a *HUGE* one.
Thanks for your interest, Bill
I understand :-) just very keen to implement some of these changes to try and rescue pages from Google's supplemental index :-(
ps. I moved over to one of the new CSS templates. They are really excellent. Thanks for implementing them...
Thanks,
I hope we can make you as happy with the changes as we have with the CSS templates.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
John, my users have a distinct dislike for the "Enter The Above Security Code" requirement. Also, the restriction of one comment per minute is a drag. My users are a chatty group, and that is killing us.
Is there a way for me to change these settings?
Thanks
AFJ
Greetings,
It's always a pleasure to take comments from a manic mustelid. The human verifier, or captcha, is currently a fixed setting within the blog ,which along with the one minute per comment , to reduce the ability for people to post spam comments. The former is unlikely to vanish in the near future though I will look into the ability to reduce the comment post to something more agreeable to your users.
There are quite a few chat windows or services that can be run inside the sidebar that would give a more real time chat like format that could be worth investigatiing meanwhile.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I upgraded to the new CSS. I had a very difficult time editing the header box in the template. In edit mode, the box appeared blank when I started. I added the title and other information, but when I exited and viewed the blog, it had inserted a name it imported. Plus, it disregarded the font sizing I had done in the editing box. When I returned to the edit box, the imported name did not appear. I had to keep going back and forth in a hit or miss fashion to battle this invisible devil down. I'm still not happy with the result -- it's barely acceptable -- but I don't dare go back in to try to edit because there is an enormous disconnect between the editing box and the final display.
I'd also like to see something done about the autosummary feature. I haven't found any way to control the font in the autosummaries, which convert everything to arial and strip out the italics, etc., from the actual post. Since certain terms in this field are always italicized (e.g., case names), the loss of the italics really detracts from the short summaries. I don't want to go to full post because most of the posts are very long.
Don't know if this is the appropriate place, but since others are posting requests:
1. How about a way to include the TextLinks (textlinks.com) code, perhaps a sidebar item like the one for Google?
2. I'd also like to see 3 column templates (two side bars), as someone requested earlier.
3. This latest version of QB works a little better with Safari (Mac OSX here), but I'm still using Firefox to manage the blog. How about better support for Safari? (I actually post with third party app called Journler)
4. Are there any templates where the side bar is all white? I know that would make it look more Word-pressy, but just a thought. More options for the user.
I've been using QB since Sept 2006, and I just found this blog today.
Glad you guys are here!
-RY
I'm glad that you found the blog, even if it took awhile! I went to textlinks.com and didn't see anything like what you describe and a Google search was quite unhelpful as well. Can you explain what you're wanting in a bit more detail?
As far as templates go, we've discussed the dual sidebar option in the past but it's been rather low priority because there hasn't been much of a clamor for it and it's going to require a lot of work (templates aren't designed to support it, the Manage Sidebar page would have to be completely revamped, the app would have to be extensively reworked to accommodate it). I'm not saying it won't ever happen, just that there's a lot more important areas to address. I'll pass along your desire for some all-white templates. I myself prefer white as a background color, and the lack of such a template has always bothered me.
With the release of Safari for Windows, I can assure you that Safari support has been bumped up as a priority. I don't have anything specific to offer you except that it's on our radar as a company. (Side note: I do all my blogging from OmniWeb, a Safari variant, and it does quite a passable job. I'm commenting from there right now, in fact.)
We're glad you're here! Bill
Thanks for the reply, Bill.
Sorry, the site I was referring to is "www.text-link-ads.com"...They are a company that places advertisements on web sites. Here are their directions to place advertisments on my blog:
1. Create a file named local_71869.xml that is writable by the web server. The file should be blank and it should be located in the same directory as the script below. On unix you would CHMOD 666 on windows you will need to access your custom control panel to set the permissions or contact your hosting company.
2. Copy the code below and paste it into the appropriate pages on http://mangroverootgang.com. Because this site is set for site wide display, you must place the links so that they appear on ALL pages of the site. If you wish to change this inventory to a single page display...
I guess I want to know if there is a way to create the necessary file and upload it so that I can place the ads in my sidebar. Any way to make this happen? Thanks.
-RY
Well, I don't see any reason why you couldn't do what they ask. You can upload files through the Rich Text Editor on the Write Entry page. Once you do that, you can make a Custom Text sidebar item with the code Text Link Ads gives you (you may need to change the path to the file you uploaded to match the location given to you after upload).
If you need any further help, let us know. Bill
I still could not get this to work, I tried to upload my file local_294861.xml, but it did not recognize as a file
Hi Rich,
I have attempted to upload an empty local_294861.xml file as well with the same result. We will look into this issue and track down why Quick Blogcast is not recognizing this empty XML file as a valid file. We will have this fixed as soon as we can. Thanks. -Tim
Very happy with how everything works. Except one thing. I'd like to have the option to add a sidebar on the left of my template as well as one on the right, Google ads and the like on the left - blogroll, archive and the usual info on the right. Is that possible now (if it is I can't work it out)? And if not will it be possible in the future?
john
Greetings John,
Thanks I'm glad you are finding the blog useful, now about making it more useful. Currently the templates are limited, and yes that's the right word,to display on either side. This is certainly a feature that we're interested in looking at for a future edition. As you may have noticed we've replaced all the templates recently which was a precursor to adding such features. So in summation, not today but keep looking out for future updates.
Regards John
Quick Blog Team
Wrote previous comment above, but have been scared of updating the template due to potential problems read about here. Now I notice my old template no longer exists. If I update now, is there a possibility of losing the content and links I have on the blog?
Greetings Pat,
The only items that are at any risk on the updates are those within the header area of the blog, I.e the images. They will still be available though the sizes may have changed slightly and require slight tweaking. None of your blog content in the entries, sidebars are at risk. You do have a link at the top of your page was is currently not available in the new template , though it's in my plans for a future release, it is the one thing that I can guarantee you would lose when migrating.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Hey guys,
just one more request, if that's ok. In the next version, could there be an option where the most recent article/post shows up in full, and the rest of the previous posts are truncated? And then with every new post, that previously full text article article becomes shortened on the main page?
Thanks,
-RY
Greetings Randy,
We can certainly consider allowing this kind of few and then providing the user a means to decide how many they wish to have as a full article above those we show as excerpts. It's an interesting idea and we'll see if we can fit this into future style changes. Thanks for taking the time providing the feedback.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
An extension to that idea would be to have 'collapseable' panes for the entries. I mean, having the excerpt, and a gui widget to select the rest of the article to be viewed, without navigating off the front page. It's probably an AJAX type app, but that would be pretty cool - i.e. the ability to collapse and extend entries on the main page.
Yes exactly what he just said.
Right now I'm stuck manually republishing entries after every post with an excerpt.
http://tabletennis.acreativedesktop.com
Thanks a billion!