Quick Blogcast 2.1 release. Vlogging
Greetings
The Blogcast Odometer has rolled over to 2.1 and it’s come back from the shop with more features, including a new photo service and the power to vlog (no, it’s not a typo, nor is the keyboard Transylvanian). Vlogging is an easy way to add video to your entries. But first.
Have you seen mah bucket?
We’ve added Photobucket to the list of supported services that let you easily retrieve your content while creating an entry. You add this under Manage Blog > Services.
Once set up, you can click on the 
within the New entry page and then select photobucket from services. Et voila , your public pictures appear for easy addition to your blog.
Video Blogging, (aka vlogging)
But, you say, just go along with it, it’s easier this way. “I can already blog within the application, by using a client such as Scribefire, post direct from my Flickr account, or a slough of other services with the remote blogging feature. I can podcast or I can moblog via the email service, and yet there’s more to do?”
No, there’s not more to do but there is more that you could do; should you want to. After all, there’s no right way to blog. Although there are innumerable wrong ways. Where possible, we’ll include tools that demonstrate the capabilities of the Blogcast to an entirely new audience. For instance, when we added podcast abilities, we offered the chance to explore a new area and get your feet wet, while keeping your credit card dry.
What is it?
It’s an easy way to record, encode, and upload video files to your blog. Using your webcam or practically any video file your system can play, we encode your monster files into something compact and ideally suited for the web. Then we upload it.
Why do I want it?
There are so many reasons. Let’s start with the most important. It’s free with your account…err… I mean Quality. Most services that allow you to upload your video files encode them for you on their servers (That take up resources). So, for the most part, a one-size-suits-all tradeoff has to be made regarding the file size and quality.
We’re doing something a little different. All the encoding occurs on your own system. Not only eliminating a long upload time, but more importantly leaving the choice of how good it looks up to you.
How do I get it?
All paid versions of Quick Blogcast have this feature. It can be located under Manage Entries > Add Video. Then you click the Add Video button under new entries or click 
on the New Entry page, which lets you add a previously saved video.
And?
There will be an in depth post along shortly; explaining in detail how to use it. Meanwhile, let us know how you’re using these new features, or if there’s something else you’d like to see within the program,
When will java script and HTML insert be part of Quick BlogCast? I want to add Google Adsense ads within each blog entry. If this can be done on website tonight, using script inserts, it should be easy to add to Quick BlogCast. Please advise.
Greetings Mark,
There's two ways we thought about this. One was to add a button on the entry page to paste in the code at that point. The other way was to have a recurring html / js block occur in every post. It's not as easy as WST as blogs are consumed by feed and email which requires that we'd have to keep them separate. Currently adsense blocks are on our roadmap to include per post but there's a chance it could be included in one of ways mentioned above.
Regards
John
QBC
Any progress on this? I would like to be able to add google adsense to each blog entry?
Hi Jim,
We do have an item in to add this to an upcoming release. We hope to have this added in the very near future. Please keep an eye out on this blog as we will post a entry once we do release this feature. We will also add it to the "New Features" link in the upper right hand corner of our application. Thanks.
Before I get my hopes up, does Photobucket apply to the older templates as well as the new ones? Also, I love your new colors. Are there shoes to match?
Greetings,
The good news is that there's no reason why the add from Photobucket feature wouldn't work on the legacy templates. Most of our new features won't. All we're doing is making it easy to add an image link so the templates should be able to handle it. If there's anything you need to assist you change to a new template please let us know since we believe the new ones can do everything that the old ones could. There are a few cases where the image sizes have changed but we can get your old template really close. Thanks for the idea on the new shoes
Regards
John
QBC team
Hi John -
Hope you are well and Happy Holidays.
I am wondering if you can publish or if there is published information related to the stats on the blogcasts. I am getting inconsistent information from support and about 2 weeks ago the stats didn't update for almost 1 week. (There is a ticket on my account which is now resolved.) However, I still see inconsistencies on when the actual stats are updated.
The Referrers link has not been working for the last 3 days. I just reported that today.
These stats are starting to get critical for me because of the traffic the site is generating but also because I would like to use the stats for press kit and marketing materials.
Any help you can give me would be GREATLY appreciated.
thanks,
Francisco
Greetings, Francisco.
Presently there's an issue when displaying stats including printed articles and referrers. We're looking into this and will restore this as soon as possible. During this time none of the stats are being lost, they are just not displaying correctly. I''d already passed on your report to the team.
John
QBC team
Thank you John -
One last question. In the Browser Statistics section there is one for iTunes. What does that mean exactly? Is it the number of times a podcast file has been accessed via iTunes? Or the number of times that someone browsed my site THROUGH iTunes?
I spoke with someone in support and they said it was the way that people view my website or blog. That didn't make sense to me.
Can you help me understand the mechanism or the logic of the iTunes stats?
thanks,
Francisco
Greetings Francisco,
The stats within blogcast are broken into two sections which I'll admit are not clearly defined. Stats relevant to the podcast are the number of download requests that come from plays on the site , are downloaded from the site and requested from the feed. I'm looking at surfacing more of this information in a future release.
The referrer / browser stats come from requests to your podcast site.So if a user is listening to your show within iTunes and clicks on the link back to your site it's counted as a request to view your site.
Regards
John
QBC team
Hey everyone, I have also started my own quick blogcast site going and I just wanted to say that I am really liking the user-friendly software that it comes with, the only thing I would include which probably a lot of people are looking for is a way to insert Google Ads in between entries/posts. Right now as far as I can tell you can only put them on the sidebar which is ok but eventually as your site expands you would like to mix it up and put some more ads strategically.
Does anyone have any idea when this could be included in a future release?
Thanks so much, great blog.
Check mine at:
http://allfreemac.com
Alex
Greetings Alex,
It's on our to do list , more as a general ability to place any kind of script per post, but mostly we added this for the same type of request you have. Presently you can do this per post manually, time consuming but . Write the entry, change into html mode, drop in the ad and then back to html and save. We'll obviously be making it far easier than that in an upcoming release but we don't have a public release date for such a feature.
Regards
John
QBC team.