A System Update was performed on the BlogHarbor network today. We're very happy to announce a major new feature of the system which we will be adding to throughout the year, and pleased to report that a number of bugs were fixed in this update.

Multilingual Capabilities
BlogHarbor now allows for blog publishers and readers to set the user interface for a blog to alternate languages. Both blogs and the control panels can now be defined to use the following languages:

• English - United States
• English - Canada
• English - United Kingdom
• Spanish - European

Additional languages will be added in future updates.

• Publishers control the default language of a blog for unauthenticated users (users who have not logged in) from the Language Preferences setting at Settings & Security > Publishing Defaults > Advanced.
• Readers who have authenticated themselves at your blog can choose to see the blog user interface in their own language, by setting the Language Preference of their Reader Account. Readers can login to their Reader Account from our Login page and access Address Book > My Profile to set their own personal Language Preferences. This preference will then be used when they are logged in to any BlogHarbor weblog.

This new preference does not translate the content of your blog, but it displays certain system generated messages using the publisher or reader's preferred language. Using this new feature, a publisher can create a blog with a default user interface in Spanish, while users who are more comfortable viewing the interface in English can authenticate themselves by logging in to the blog allowing them to view the interface in their language.

For example, if a reader sets Spanish as their preferred language and authenticates at a blog set to an English interface, instead of seeing a component labeled Recent Photos that user would see Fotos recientes. Instead of seeing the Logout button, they would see the Cierre de sesión button. The Main Page would Página principal, and so on. The default format for numbers, currency, date, and time will also reflect a user's language preference.

Spell Checker
A language menu will now appear in the spell checker dialog box allowing you to select the language that should be used when spelling is checked. The default dictionary is based on your Language Preference. The following dictionaries are available:

• English (U.S.)
• English (U.K)
• English (Canadian)
• Spanish (European)
• Danish
• German
• French
• Italian
• Dutch
• Norwegian
• Portuguese

Time Zone Settings
An update was made which ensures that the Time Zone set in the General Settings page will be properly reflected in the default time zone set in the Post Article page.

Rich Text Editor
The Rich Text Editor was modified to expand to fill more of the available window size, making it easier to create articles when using a computer with a larger display.

Increased Site Stats Accuracy
A problem was indentified in the algorithm used to compute Distinct Hosts, a metric which allows you to approximate the number of visitors to your site, which has been causing us to overcount the number of Distinct Hosts. This algorithm has been fixed, and as a result some publishers will see a decrease in the number of Distinct Hosts going forward. This fix is not retroactive, so past stats will not be updated.

Additionally, the method by which XML requests and HTML requests are tallied was revised. Our method of counting the XML requests ignored certain instances of custom and secure XML files and thus the number of XML requests was underreported. Also, the algorithm which computed the number of HTML requests improperly counted some files without an extension as HTML files. Therefore some publishers may see a small increase in the number of XML requests and a decrease in the number of HTML requests as these metrics are more accurately calculated going forward.

Feedback
Questions or comments about any of these features? Please join us in the community forums for quality support for your BlogHarbor weblog.

We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:

• 1/14/2006 (Sat.), 11:00 PM - 4:00 AM EST

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.

What is this maintenance for?
This upgrade will promote important bug fixes and security updates, and continue optimization work on our database systems.

Our apologies in advance for the length of this window, but this maintenance is necessary in order to improve the performance and stability of our network.

In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we are scheduling a maintenance window for the following period:

• 11/23/2005 (Wed.), 12:00 AM - 4:00 AM EST

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.

What is this maintenance for?
This maintenance will allow us to update the hardware on our primary database servers and will result in a net doubling of processing power on those servers. We expect that this upgrade will immediately solve some performance issues we have been experiencing this week.

While we are announcing that there may be up to 4 hours of downtime as a result of this upgrade, our tests show that it is possible that the upgrade will be completed earlier than the duration of this window, in which case we will return the system to operational status as soon as possible. In other words, we hope that we can finish in less than the time scheduled but we ask that you anticipate that your blog will be unavailable for as long as four hours.

This hardware upgrade continues our performance initiative aimed at enhancing the overall stability, scalability, and availability of our network, which we first discussed in a September announcement. This maintenance window will bring us another step closer to our goal of making BlogHarbor the best possible home for your weblog.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance window, but we feel that this server upgrade is necessary to immediately improve the reliability of our system.

As always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider, and for your continued support of our service.

This previously announced maintenance window has been cancelled and will be rescheduled. We will post an updated announcement when we have determined the new date for this maintenance.

We will be performing a major maintenance on our network during the following period:

• 11/12/2005 (Sat.), 10:00 PM - 8:00 AM EST

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as a major maintenance is performed on our servers.

What is this maintenance for?
The BlogHarbor service uses a central database to store the content and structure of your weblog. Our service debuted two years ago in November 2003, and the database software in use on our service has not been updated since that time. There have been significant strides made in database software in the past two years, and the performance, security, scalability, and reliability of our service will greatly benefit from an update to the current version of the software in use on our database servers. This maintenance will allow us to upgrade our database servers to the new software version.

Unfortunately, our tests show that in order to ensure that the upgrade is performed properly, up to 10 hours may be required. We sincerely wish that we could make this update happen faster, but the length of this window will allow us to ensure that a reliable backup of the current system is performed prior to the conversion, and that a thorough test of the upgraded system is performed once the upgrade is complete.

While the benefits of the database upgrade may not be immediately evident when our system comes back online on Sunday morning, over the coming weeks and months many elements of our blogging platform will be revised to take advantage of certain features of the new database software which were not previously available to us. We expect to see performance efficiencies in both the display of your blog and access to the control panel, as well as an increase in general availability.

This software upgrade continues our performance initiative aimed at enhancing the overall stability, scalability, and availability of our network, which we first discussed in a September announcement. This maintenance window will bring us one step closer to our goal of making BlogHarbor the best possible home for your weblog.

We apologize in advance for the length of this major maintenance, but it is necessary for us to perform the maintenance at this time in order to continue providing you with a reliable blog hosting platform.

As always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider, and for your continued support of our service.

We're pleased to announce that Zoundry Blog Writer, a blogging editor which makes it easy to compose articles for your blog, is offering enhanced services for BlogHarbor users.

The Zoundry Blog Writer is a rich WYSIWYG blogging editor that's as easy to use as a word processor. With just a few clicks of a mouse instead of complex HTML coding, you can do things like drag and drop images, create block quotes, and format links to open in a new window.

Zoundry Blog Writer also allows you to place affiliate links in your blog and earn money when readers click through and buy at selected merchants, and all BlogHarbor users are now being offered special preview access to the The Zoundry Service, your one-stop product search engine and master affiliate. Now you don't have to go from merchant to merchant to sign up for their affiliate programs, search through their catalogs, and learn how to create links. Zoundry conveniently manages your memberships, reports, and commissions for all the merchants in the Zoundry system.

Click here to learn more and download this free posting editor from Zoundry for Windows 2000 and XP, and be sure to check out Zoundry's special User Guide for BlogHarbor users complete with information on how to request your special access to the The Zoundry Service.

Update: This maintenance has been extended from the 2 hours originally scheduled to 5 hours in order to install additional anti-spam measures. We hope the long term benefits of these anti-spam measures will outweigh the inconvenience of a longer maintenance window.

We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:

• 9/27/2005 (Tue.), 10:00 PM - 3:00 AM EDT

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.

What is this maintenance for?
This upgrade will promote key bug fixes, and continue optimization work on our database systems in order to increase the performance and stability of our network.

Thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider, and for your continued support of our service.

A number of blogs hosted on our service were subjected to comment spam attacks last night and this morning. All of these blogs allowed Anonymous Comments. Our staff is currently in the process of removing the large majority of these spams on your behalf.

The best way to prevent comment spam is to disallow Anonymous Comments. Your blog will always be more susceptible to automated comment spam unless you require your readers to log in when they comment.

By requiring your users to sign in before commenting, we can help you even if you do get comment spam, since we can remove the user account which sent the spam, which will remove all objects associated with the user account.

To disable anonymous commenting, login to your blog control panel and click Settings & Security > Publishing Defaults > Advanced. Look for the row that shows "Anonymous Comments" and you can disallow Anonymous Reader comments by unchecking that box and clicking Save Settings at the bottom of the page. Your readers will now need to sign up for a Reader Account if they wish to post, but you will rarely see automated comment spam.

We are hard at working providing you with additional protections and options with respect to commenting, but at this time we must stress that disallowing Anonymous Comments is your best option.

Thanks again for hosting your blog with BlogHarbor, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this issue.

As previously announced, we will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:

• 9/17/2005 (Sat.), 11:00 PM - 4:00 AM EDT

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed. Please note that the window has been extended for an additional hour, as our tests show that there is a possibility that the maintenance may go slightly longer than we'd previously estimated.

What is this maintenance for?
Last month, we performed 2 maintenance upgrades which were successful in eliminating some of the immediate problems which have affected posting and commenting to the blogs. Last week, we also performed a maintenance which had a postive effect on the availability of the control panel.

The maintenance window for 9/17/2005 will allow us to make structural changes to our database designed to increase its efficiency. We'd previously expected to be able to upgrade our database software during this upgrade, but tests showed that performing this upgrade simultaneously with the database changes would result in an excessively long maintenance window. Therefore, we've split the upgrade which was to be performed on 9/17 into two parts, and we will perform the second part on a future date to be announced.

Performance is Top Priority
Our development focus is now on ensuring the highest performance of our service. We have internally reorganized our development team and are working with database experts in order to enhance the stability, scalability, and availability of our network.

Over the next several months, we will be strengthening our system by:

• Deploying additional hardware throughout our network
• Implementing additional load testing systems to ensure that upgrades will perform properly upon deployment
• Enhancing our Quality Assurance environment
• Upgrading database servers and software
• Performing additional database restructuring

In order to implement these changes designed to provide you with a superior hosting service, it will be necessary to perform a series of upgrades over the coming months. This maintenance window on 9/17 will bring us closer to our goal, but it will be one step of many steps intended to make our system the best possible home for your weblog. We will do our best to inform you in advance of any maintenance which will affect the availability of your weblog.

Thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider, and for your continued support of our service.

In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we are scheduling maintenance windows for the following periods:

• 9/9/2005 (Fri.), 11:00 PM - 3:00 AM EDT
• 9/17/2005 (Sat.), 11:00 PM - 3:00 AM EDT

During these periods, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.

What is this maintenance for?
We've identified several issues which have been causing problems as of late when posting or commenting to blogs on our network, problems for which we apologize.

Last month, we performed 2 maintenance upgrades which were the first two parts of a four part approach we are implementing in order to increase the efficiency of our network. The first two parts of the upgrade were successful in eliminating some of the immediate problems which have affected posting and commenting to the blogs. The final elements of our upgrade, which we will be performing tonight and next week, involve more complex structural changes to our database and have thus required more intensive testing, hence the delay in performing these upgrades.

The first of these maintenance windows will be performed tonight, 9/9/2005 from 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM EDT. It is likely that the downtime will not last the complete duration of this window, but we are announcing this time period in the event that additional time is required.

We apologize for the short notice for tonight's maintenance window, but we feel that it is necessary to immediately improve the reliability of our system by performing this maintenance.

Thank you for your continued support of the BlogHarbor weblog service.

In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we are scheduling maintenance windows for the following periods:

• 8/23/2005 (Tue.), 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
• 8/26/2005 (Fri.), 12:00 AM - 2:00 AM EDT

During these periods, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.

What is this maintenance for?
We've identified several issues which have been causing problems as of late when posting or commenting to blogs on our network, problems for which we apologize.

These problems are caused for the most part due to issues with the way our database queries were constructed, and the way our database is structured. We've identified several scenarios in which database queries to display and update certain weblogs are consuming excessive resources. These queries hold up other queries, such as ones which are intended to insert comments or articles into the database. These delays cascade, until the servers are no longer able to handle additional requests.

In order to eliminate the "bottlenecks" which are causing these issues, we will be implementing a software upgrade tomorrow evening which will optimize our database queries. In the maintenance scheduled for the early morning hours on Thursday, our database itself will be optimized and restructured in order to facilitate faster searching and updating. Simultaneously, we will update our software to take advantage of the restructured database, and also will add some measures which will allow us more flexibility in spam protection and other abuse prevention at the network level.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance window, but we feel that it is necessary to immediately improve the reliability of our system by performing this maintenance.

Thank you for your continued support.

We're pleased to announce that 10 new themes or color schemes have been added to the set of default templates, bringing the total number of available color schemes to 32.

These 10 new color schemes are all tuned to look great under both Mac and Windows platforms and have been tested in a variety of web browsers.

It's easy to change your color scheme, check out the user manual to learn how.

Comments or feedback on these new themes?
Join us in our community forums and let us know what you think!

A System Update was performed on the BlogHarbor network today. A number of bugs were fixed, and some great features were added. Here's a rundown of some of the major changes introduced today:

Sticky Posts

Ever wanted to add an article to your blog which would always appear at the top of a category or the top of your Main Page? That's a Sticky Post! We've made it easy to mark a post as sticky. Read our user manual page and learn how make your articles sticky.

Spell Checking

A spell checker has been integrated into the Rich Text Editor. The user manual page on the spell checker is here.

Posting to the Future

One feature you asked us for was the ability to "post to the future"; to create an article and set it to appear on your blog from a certain day and time. Well, Posting to the Future is now here: learn how to specify the date and time your post will be published.

Prohibit hotlinking

To control your bandwidth usage, you can now prohibit other websites from hotlinking your files. Hotlinking, which we refer to as "sourcing of files" or "file sourcing," is when another website loads your images or files on their site. Your bandwidth is used when that site's visitors load their page and see images hosted from your blog; enabling this feature prevents other sites from sourcing your files. Learn how to manage file sourcing.

No Follow

Support for No Follow has been added for Trackbacks and Comments. No Follow is technique created by Google to ensure that spammers do not receive any benefit in search engine rankings as a result of being linked to from your blog. By enabling this feature on your weblog, all links in Trackbacks and Comments will automatically receive the No Follow tag. Learn how to enable No the Follow setting on your blog.

Delete and Block Trackbacks

It's now possible for you to delete incoming trackbacks in batches, and also to block problem Trackbacks from recurring, allowing you to better handle trackback abuse. Learn more about managing trackbacks.

Feedback
Questions or comments about any of these features? Please join us in the community forums for quality support for your BlogHarbor weblog.

In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we are scheduling a maintenance window for tomorrow evening 6/23/2005. This maintenance window is scheduled for 11 PM to 2 AM EDT.

During this time, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed. We do anticipate that the services will be offline for less than the full duration of this window, but there is the possibility that services will be unavailable for the complete duration of the window. We will bring the weblogs and the control panel back online independently in order to minimize the total downtime.

What is this maintenance for?
On the evening of 6/19/2005, we attempted to perform an optimization on our primary databases which would decrease the time necessary to access the data, helping to reduce the timeout errors you may have been experiencing recently when attempting to post to your weblog. Unfortunately, that optimization took longer than expected and was not completed within the time we had scheduled. Therefore, we've scheduled this maintenance window to complete those optimizations.

We expect that this maintenance will further improve the performance of our service and eliminate the majority of intermittent issues which have been causing posting problems as of late. An additional hardware upgrade planned for the next 30 days will further reduce these errors.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance window, but we feel that it is necessary to immediately improve the reliability of our system by performing this maintenance. Thank you for your continued support.

In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we are scheduling a maintenance window for tomorrow evening 6/19/2005. This maintenance window is scheduled for 11 PM to 4 AM EDT.

During this time, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed. We do anticipate that the services will be offline for less than the full duration of this window, but there is the possibility that services will be unavailable for the complete duration of the window.

What is this maintenance for?
Last weekend, we added additional hardware and moved our primary databases to faster hardware. Now it is necessary to optimize the data on those primary databases in order to decrease the time necessary to access the data. We expect that this will further reduce timeout errors you may have been experiencing recently when attempting to post to your weblog. An additional hardware upgrade planned for the next 30 days will further reduce these errors.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance window, and thank you for your continued support.

In order to immediately improve the performance and reliability of our system, BlogHarbor has planned two maintenance windows for our service.

• A maintenance window for Thursday, June 9, 2005 has been scheduled for the BlogHarbor service. This maintenance window will start at 9 PM EDT and last until 10 PM EDT. Both weblogs and the BlogHarbor control panel will be unavailable during this maintenance window. This maintenance will allow us to install additional hardware and database servers to the system.
• An additional maintenance window is also scheduled for Saturday, June 11, 2005 during which the new hardware will be deployed. This window will start at 9 AM EDT and last until 12 PM EDT. During this window, both weblogs and the BlogHarbor control panel will be unavailable as our new hardware is brought online and integrated into the system.

We expect these upgrades to bring you a faster, more reliable, and more robust service. Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience these maintenance windows will cause, and thank you for your continued support of the BlogHarbor service.

Our statistics processing system will be undergoing an optimization process over the next 24 hours in order to improve overall system performance. This will result in a delay of the processing of the statistics for June 1 until the evening of June 2nd. No data will be lost due to this processing delay.

We sincerely regret this inconvenience, and thank you for your continued support of the BlogHarbor service.

UPDATE: This optimization process is taking longer than anticipated, and it will likely be until Friday June 3 that the process is complete. Again, there will be no information lost as a result of this optimization process.


UPDATE: The process was completed late Friday evening.

A maintenance window for Thursday, May 26, 2005 has been scheduled for the BlogHarbor service. This maintenance window will start at 9 PM EDT and last until 10 PM EDT.

During this period, both weblogs and the BlogHarbor control panel will be unavailable.

Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience this will cause, and thank you for your continued support of our service.

An upgrade will be performed on our system software at 8:00 AM EDT on April 28. This upgrade will result in the both weblogs and the control panel becoming unavailable for approximately one hour. It will not be possible to access, edit or post to your weblog during this update.

This system upgrade will help provide several important changes to our service. Enhanced reporting tools will be available which will help blog owners analyze their site traffic, and additional controls for preventing bandwidth abuse and trackback spam will be added.

We hope that this update will allow you to manage your blog more efficiently and to provide you with more protection against abuse. Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the necessity of downtime during this system update, and thank you for your continued support of our service.