Quick Blogcast 2.01 released
Greetings
We've recently released version 2.01 of Quick Blogcast to the wild, containing the following improvements and fixes.
Sub headers are back
Firstly, let's get the old business out of the way. All templates now have a working sub-header. This was omitted from most of the 2.0 templates and as promised, has been restored. To enact this fix please republish your template and allow a few minutes for your blog site to update.
CSS editor/ designer improvements
We have also improved the page designer as well as added a CSS editor for those that have requested that feature. This is not the final word on the template designer but rather addresses several omissions that we felt reduced the usability to a less than desirable level. We'll be putting out more information on how to use the CSS editor and just how far you can now take the customization of your blogcast.
New Templates
An additional twenty-four templates are included.
Some fixes to small annoyances such as:
- Long titles causing issues on the dashboard page
- Adding in per show images for podcasts
- Modifying the podcast settings page
- Improved in line flash player behavior
- Fixed issue related to feeds that have a DTD within them
And many other items that we hope were too small to be noticed prior to their revision.
Is there any way to reset my statistics? I would like to be able to do this.
Greetings,
Sadly there's no way to reset the stats though I have received more than one request on this and would like to see it appear in a future version . When we have it though it will be quite clear on Are you sure, are you really sure... by by stats
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
Is there any way to eliminate the TrackBacks section between the post and the comments? Does anybody really know what this is for or how to use it?
Greetings,
The current answer is not yet but we have plans to remove that section for anyone that turns off trackbacks on their blog/ post. Trackbacks are one of those things that, like email before the spammers, used to work well for their intended purpose. Basically it's one blogger saying to another I've referenced your post over here on my blog, be so kind as to link back to me. Ideally if the topics match and the discussion is carried forward it's a beautiful thing, sadly most trackbacks now are used to spam links to any and all blogs hoping they'll increase the number of sites linking to them , thus get a better search engine rating. Sadly self defeating. Ok that's a basic run through what they are meant to do and why they aren't doing it as well as they could be.
Regards
John
QBC team.
The trackback and commenting section take up almost 2in. of screen space on my monitor and I have comments and trackbacks disabled.
Being able to get rid of all the '....are disabled for this post' message would be great. Hopefully your plans haven't changed and you are still going to create a way for us to customize that.
Can you also create the option for us to remove the 'download' link? We should be able to control what we share right?
The download link is shown for every podcast on the front page so if I have 20 podcasts showing they can all be downloaded with 1 page view. I'd like for visitors to have to view the podcast/entry in order to download.
Thanks in advance.
Hi nukemdomis,
For your first request, customizing the comments/trackbacks closed message, I will work with our team to come up with a solution that either allows you to hide or customize this message so it does not take up so much space.
For your second request, disabling the download link on podcasts, I will also work with our team to provide a solution where you have the option to show/hide the download link for your podcasts. If we do hide the download link, the blog visitor can still play the podcasts on the home page. To avoid this, I suggest you use the excerpt option so only the first few sentences of your entry show on the home page, and the visitor has to click the "more >>" link to actually view your entry to play the podcast. This solution would also work for not showing the download link on the home page.
There are two ways to excerpt your entries:
1. Go to Manage Blog --> Settings on the main menu. Click on the "Entries" tab. The 3rd option down is "Enable automatic excerpting". Check this box. Then the 4th option will allow you to set the automatic excerpting size. NOTE: This will only work for entries going forward.
2. Manually excerpt your entries on the Add/Edit entry page (Manage Entries --> New Entry). There is an accordion on the left side of the entry editor. If you click the "Excerpt" section, the accordion will open to this section. Now you can highlight the portion of your entry you want to excerpt and then click the "Excerpt" button inside the accordion section. This will pull your highlighted text into the excerpt and then you can save the entry.
The 2nd option will work better for you since you want to make sure your excerpt does not include the actual podcast, and you may have entries that you have already posted that you want to excerpt. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks.
Hello,
I just changed my blog's template from the original template to the CSS one. Are there any existing CSS templates that are properly viewed in Internet Explorer? If not, do you know of any patch or code that would make the body of the blog appear properly in IE?
If not, is there any way to revert to the original (non-CSS) template that renders properly?
Thank You!
Greetings,
Firstly I apologize for the delay in response as I was out of the office for the past two weeks. All of our templates should be correctly rendered within IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari. If you are still experiencing issues with a template , or a set of templates, give me the details via our support system and we'll have those corrected asap. All of our templates are currently using CSS and there's no alternate method currently available
Regards
John
QBC Team.
How do I switch to the CSS blog template?
Greetings Michael,
The good news is that you are already using a CSS based template. While there are a few people with non css templates still using them if you have changed yours anytime in the last year you'd have one.
What you may be asking is how to customize the template that you have? What we did that was new to us was to give the blog owner the ability to style their site to match their tastes. So given that you are already on one that's the easy part over with
Regards
John
QBC team
Is there a way to remove the advertising header when using the GoDaddy Quick Blogcast?
Greetings,
Yes, there is. Upgrading to the paid version of Blogcast would remove the banner soon after. No only does the banner go away but you gain access to our vlogging feature as well as gaining more space and bandwidth.
Regards
John
QBC team
I tried the godaddy blog a year ago and found the blog screen layout to be cheap and small in width. Nothing like the horizontal width of this quick blogging. Your blog page samples show the same overly short width as a year ago.
Are there any plans to improve the appearence qaulity by making the fee based blogs the horizontal width as this quick blogging?
Greetings,
In the last two years we've updated our template system twice specifically for that issues. While we have some narrow templates left they are there as a choice and not the default. Any template older than a year needs to be republished to see the effect of the new system.
E.g the one we are on is Wavepod and there are many similar templates that have a width of around 900 and have been adding new ones on a monthly basis. Additionally there is now access to the CSS markup which allows further customization opportunities with regards the design for those with an interest in creating their own or modifying one of ours from scratch.
Regards
John
QBC Team