Quick Blogcast release. What's new for bloggers.
Bloggers: (new features)
With the release of Blogcast 2.0 Quick Blog users have several new features and many improvements to existing ones to explore. Many of these warrant an entry of their own and I’ll be posting those over the coming days.
Templates:
First up are templates and our ongoing changes to the template system to provide a far greater control over the look of your blog. Striking a balance between full control and usability for those that just want to change a picture or font color hasn’t been easy and we’re still evolving how our template editor functions so while it’s a huge leap forward in terms of what you can control I realize that there’s some areas that we can expand upon in future releases and welcome your feedback regarding the templates. To be able to use our podcast features it’s strongly suggested you change to a new template as some of the features will not function correctly without doing so.
Write Entry Screen:
We’ve added more space, where you need it, vertically, and placed all the controls into an accordion panel alongside the text editor. All of the same features are there, just in a neater, and for most people that never used excerpt, permalinks, or trackbacks, in a less obtrusive cluster. We’ve even included a pod casting solution too.
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.
Podcasts:
Video didn’t kill the radio star but I’m still suspicious of his whereabouts that night the music died . I digress, never mind you don’t need to take sides your Quick Blogcast can handle audio and video , placing them directly into your posts ,as well as syndicate them via RSS allowing you to get involved with pod casting without having to take on another account. All you need is a microphone and our easy to use recorder or your existing mp3, mp4 or Mov files, and before you know it you’re guilty of pod casting: Don’t worry we won’t tell anyone we’ll leave that up to you.
Note: Our legacy HTML templates will not function correctly with our new video/ audio players and it’s strongly recommended that you change to a newer template prior to using these features.
With the release of Blogcast 2.0 Quick Blog users have several new features and many improvements to existing ones to explore. Many of these warrant an entry of their own and I’ll be posting those over the coming days.
Templates:
First up are templates and our ongoing changes to the template system to provide a far greater control over the look of your blog. Striking a balance between full control and usability for those that just want to change a picture or font color hasn’t been easy and we’re still evolving how our template editor functions so while it’s a huge leap forward in terms of what you can control I realize that there’s some areas that we can expand upon in future releases and welcome your feedback regarding the templates. To be able to use our podcast features it’s strongly suggested you change to a new template as some of the features will not function correctly without doing so.
Write Entry Screen:
We’ve added more space, where you need it, vertically, and placed all the controls into an accordion panel alongside the text editor. All of the same features are there, just in a neater, and for most people that never used excerpt, permalinks, or trackbacks, in a less obtrusive cluster. We’ve even included a pod casting solution too.
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.
Podcasts:
Video didn’t kill the radio star but I’m still suspicious of his whereabouts that night the music died . I digress, never mind you don’t need to take sides your Quick Blogcast can handle audio and video , placing them directly into your posts ,as well as syndicate them via RSS allowing you to get involved with pod casting without having to take on another account. All you need is a microphone and our easy to use recorder or your existing mp3, mp4 or Mov files, and before you know it you’re guilty of pod casting: Don’t worry we won’t tell anyone we’ll leave that up to you.
Note: Our legacy HTML templates will not function correctly with our new video/ audio players and it’s strongly recommended that you change to a newer template prior to using these features.
I find the new templates just as difficult to use as the old version. You need to be clearer in you descriptions as to what you're changing. Too many times now I've had a "surprise" and had to start all over again.
Also, the way the header works with the images is just terrible. I've had to totally abandon my logo on my blog because it won't sit properly in the header.
All in all, I'm quite disappointed.
Greetings Sherri,
Thanks for your feedback on the new template editor.
The template editor is still in a state of transition and will be seeing some improvements over the coming releases that will remove much of the ambiguity you have encountered.
There's a real balancing act of giving access to a more capable system The descriptions are indeed cryptic and it's a concern I've raised for resolution in an upcoming edition. My favoured way of handling these is to allow you to click on the area you would like to change, make your setting, and it would update to show you the setting, at the least it should highlight the areas that you would be effecting.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast.
I used to be able to change the header images on my blog, but now I can't unless I choose a new template. None of the new templates are the narrower format that I like.(The same width as this blog) All of my images and content will look stupid if I have to switch to a new template because I've formatted my images to fit perfectly in that size template. Could you guys at least include one or two narrow width templates? If you are going to when will it be?
I've always appreciated the basic and reliable nature of QuickBlog but now I feel like I have been hung out to dry. I can't even edit the template I have anymore.
Thank you in advance for any feedback or information you can provide.
Patrick
strandsurf.com
Greetings Patrick,
The earliest version , for about a week, had the ability to change header images but it was discontinued abot a year ago on most templates. As to narrow templates those we had in preview where, I'm going to go back and take a look at providing some narrow variations on the ones we already have out there , or where possible making width a selection for the user. I'm afraid I don't have a timeline for this but I have many more templates on the way and I'll ensure some of them fulfill that criteria. The images I think would still work on many of our templates but given that it's a one way process you may feel more comfortable with leaving them until we have some other templates in place.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
I'm having a lot of trouble with the new templates in Mozilla Firefox. The sidebar switches to white text on white background intermittently. It looks fine in preview but when I look at the blog it's switched back. It seems to work fine in Explorer. Any ideas?
Greetings,
I've never seen this kind of behaviour occur globally across the templates but it first sounds like a caching issue since it's working in preview but not the visitor site.
One caveat the templates are cached in live and changes to the template / your browsers cache settings can often display the results of the new/ old style. Try CTRL F5 on an template affected by that after five minutes have elapsed. If not let me know the template in use and we'll see if we can cause the same effect.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
I've noticed this problem too in Firefox. It seems that the sidebar resets to a default white color whenever any change is made to the header. The only way around it is to reset the sidebar color to the preferred color before saving changes.
Greetings
We're currently looking at ways to improve the usability / function of that section and should have that updated in a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
My comments of your upgrade:
Not friendly.
I am mad about this product now.
I was a happy customer.
Decrese the blogging desingn options.
Missing first few sentences when publish.
I Do not care about podcasting and worthless templates.
Lot of time wasted.
Dear Pablo,
While we always try to strike a balance between features that a few want versus those that are useful everyday was I thought included in this release. For people with no desire to customize their template, or podcast, these sections were present but shouldn't have caused any negative issues with their being there.
The overwhelming desire for more and more contrallable templates was the topic of 90% of the feedback I received over the last few months and while there's still too many options which don't have an obvious outcome when uses then on reflection it needs more work to be as readily usable.
There's a lot more new features in than those mentioned but the one part I'm interested in solving for you is the "missing first few sentences when publish" please either write me here, or click on the support link and let us know what's not displaying correctly for you in the excerpt and we'll take a look and get it working for you.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
I hate the new templates and I want the old one, why did you get rid of those wondeful ones! I think the new feature is way too difficult..
so until the old templates are available again, I'd have to stay out of onlinequickblog, I'm very dissapointed
Jiro,
Thank you for taking the time ot provide us with feedback on the new template system. These templates I'm afraid are not retroactive. The old templates were all copied over , with minor changes, and while I agree there's more flexibility it may not be as clear as we can make it.
I've just posted a tutorial guide to the templates which I hope will shed some light on the new editor but I am re evaluating the options we have available in reducing the apparent complexity on this screen and hope to amend this in an upcoming release.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team.
What happed to the urls to ping function on the "new blog entry form"?
Erin
Greetings Erin,
The URL's to ping now lives in the sidebar on the Entry screen and is called "outgoing trackbacks" it's the same feature just with another name.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team,
Sigh. My Blog subheader text won't show up on my blog...even when I try to change the font and the color. And, I can't center my Blog Image 4 span and my blog image 4 crops when published. I liked the old format. Frown. EE
Greetings,
The Blog subheader text is currently not a feature of all templates, though I think it should be and we're going to be updating that within a future release to ensure that wherever possible a subheader can be accommodated. Amendments to the image placement including telling you the size of the image to replace / positioning are planned. The old format was certainly easier to amend for sure but was so limited in terms of what could be done. Regardless I'll add your findings to the improvement list. Thank you for providing us with the feedback.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
Hi,
I'm concerned that the Title tag no longer displays at the top of either the IE or Firefox browsers. The Title tag is an important tag in search engine rankings, and obviously also helps to identify the content of the page for the viewer. Is there a remedy to this?
Thanks,
Paul
Greetings Paul,
Thanks for the feedback and question regarding the title tag it's an issue that we're going to have resolved in an upcoming build and I apologize for its omission timebin. The remedy is entirely on our side and you need take no action. Thanks you for bringing this to my attention.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
First I'd like to thank you for adding podcasts, which I intend to use soon.
Now coming to a few suggestions:
1. I would like to include a picture in the excerpt, this is not possible at the moment. I like to show the excerpt on the home page and if someone wants to read the post, he can click more. But without pictures in the excerpt, the homepage looks very bland. To make it appealing, I have no option but to display the complete post on the homepage. You should allow pictures to be added in the excerpt.
2. My subscribers no longer get an e-mail as soon as I make a new post. Now it takes as long as 24 hours for the notification to reach their inbox.
3. I agree with everyone that the template editor is a pain to use. You should make it simpler.
Adding my logo in the header is next to impossible.
5. How about providing advertising opportunities apart from Google Adsense? I should have the choice to place banner ads.
Greetings,
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with this feedback and I'll respond by the numbers below.
1) We're certainly considering this option.
2) The email service should still be issuing posts as you create an entry, the recent blog post I made to Quick Blog appeared about 1 minute after it went live. While we have had queing issues earlier in the week these should not longer be the case.
3) You are correct that the usability leaves an amount to be desired. I'm working on this one and it will address the recent concerns, mails and calls I've had with people on it. Specifically adding images was a concern I had that we didn't get right this time , it added a lot of features people wanted just not in the way they wanted them.
4) Do you have something against the number 4?
5) We do have adsense within the sidebar at present, and they can be manually added to individual entries. An expansion of the services / templates to provide such is on my to do list for a future build.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
You can show a picture on the home page by copying the appropriate part of the HTML code of the article. Be sure that the HTML code you're copying includes a reference to the location of the picture file, and then paste it to the excerpt section, and then save.
I'm so glad I read this post. These issues are exactly what I've been experiencing on m blog.acreativedesktop.com blog.
Because of these challenges I've just stayed clear of updating my headers, footers and images even though I really need to update them since I've had them in place since my blog was created.
You guys are still great and I really love QuickBlog and will continue to support you guys.
Austin
Well, which bloody templates DO actually support the subheaders?
Why can't you communicate all the limitations to us, instead of letting us just guess?
I have wasted so much time!
All of the templates are having the sub headers added back in to. The reason no list was provided is that it would be a continually changing list. As they are finished, they are retested and then released. At the time of my original comment I too would have been just guessing at which ones supported this, then there's which color schemes of which templates show them.
The templates are meant to have sub headers within them and these will be in place sooner , rather than later. I'll post an entry when they are completed as a republish of the template would be necessary for the changes to take effect.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
I am having a problem getting my full blog entry to display. I want to display full blog entries - not excerpts or just headlines. I have full entry checked, yet it only displays the headlines (with the exception of 3 posts which display an excerpt and then the More link - but that's a whole other story). It seems really random. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Any advice?
Greetings Amy,
The blog is currently set in your entrie settings to start excerpting after 100 words unchecking that in the settings / entries menu should resolve the issue. The Full entry box only applies to the blog feed itself. The changes may take a few minutes to appear on the front of your site. None of the prior entries before that box was checked display the same issue which should account for the randomness. Good luck with your book.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
What's the easiest way for an author other than myself to add a posting on my blog?
Paul,
The easiest is to go to manage blogs, authors and create a new account for the poster. If you were going to set up blogging by email for this person it's a necessary step to do anyway. Otherwise you can use the remote blogging through metaweblog to accept posts but you have far less control by doing so.
Regards
John
QBC
Hi, I have the podcast/blogcast combo software. Is there a way to have an image show on top of the podcast? I saw a place in the edit podcast where you can add an image. I did this, but it did not get added into the body of the comment where the picture of the podcast recorder is. I would like to be able to insert an image on top of that ugly podcast picture. Thanks for any info.
Greetings,
If you're referring to the gray rectangle with the play arrow then presently there's not a way to over write that item but it's on the list of features to update in a future release. There are two workarounds meantime , for audio only files, is to encode them in MP3 which has a less obtrusive player. If I"ve not understood you correctly please let me know. The image that's added is used on our large sidebar player / itunes store as well as being embedded in the MP3 files if you use that format,
Regards
John
QBC team
4) Do you have something against the number 4?
Thanks for making me smile.