BlogHarbor.Com Demo

Feature Summary

john — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:41:00 -0500

All BlogHarbor weblogs are fully featured, the only differences in our weblog plans are disk space and bandwidth. Here is a summary of some of the top features of the BlogHarbor service:

Photo Albums	Easily upload and manage your digital images. With automatic thumbnail generation and resizing and up to 2 GB of disk space, BlogHarbor Photo Albums are the best way to share your digital images with family and friends.
Domain Name Mapping	BlogHarbor makes it easy to use your own domain name for your weblog address. You can even add business-class email for your BlogHarbor-hosted domain name.
Category support	Arrange your articles and photos by category, you can choose to let articles "bubble up" from a sub-category and appear on the Main Page, or your articles can appear only in their own category.
Import/Export	Import articles, categories, and comments from Movable Type/Typepad and Blogger weblogs, or export your weblog articles as a compressed XML archive.
Mobile Blogging	Post articles or photos by email or from your mobile phone! Snap a photo from your cameraphone and have it appear on the web in seconds!
Multilingual Support	BlogHarbor supports international character sets, allowing you to publish your weblog in any language.
Polls and Surveys	Polls and surveys are a great way to add interactivity to your weblog.
Slideshows	This new optional feature for Photo Albums layouts which will display a Slideshow of all of the photos in that album. See our demo weblog for an example of the Slideshow feature.
Web Stats	BlogHarbor weblogs feature advanced Web Stats providing you with detailed information about visitors to your weblog, how they found you, and what they are reading on your weblog.
RSS	Syndicate your site using the RSS format. BlogHarbor even includes support for category-based RSS by generating a separate RSS feed for each Category. Essentially, this means that every BlogHarbor site provides a nearly unlimited number of weblogs...
Secure RSS	Syndication with authentication: your users can use their RSS newsreader to browse and access password-protected headlines on your site. Your BlogHarbor weblog generates RSS feeds dynamically, sending out one RSS feed for a public user and another separate RSS feed for an authenticated user with special access privileges!
Add RSS Headlines to your Weblog	Display RSS headlines from other weblogs and websites on your blog.
Multiple Authors	BlogHarbor weblogs support Multiple Authors: allow other authors the ability to post articles to your blog, or only to specific categories. Create a group weblog!
Automatically Ping Weblogs.com/Blo.gs	Let the 'blogosphere' know you've updated your weblog by notifying the Weblogs.com, Blo.gs, Blogrolling.com, or Technorati services. BlogHarbor can notify these services automatically whenever you update your weblog.
Media Review Templates	Easy to use templates for posting your Book, Music, and Movie Reviews.
Movable Type/Blogger API Standard-compliant	BlogHarbor weblogs support the Movable Type/Blogger API, which allows you to post to your BlogHarbor weblog using RSS tools such as w.bloggar, Newzcrawler, or NetNewswire. These tools allow advanced bloggers increased flexibility when posting articles. They can allow you to create articles while you are not connected to the Internet, and save them locally so that you can post them the next time you are connected.
File Manager	Upload Word files, PDF files, ZIP files, any type of file. You're not limited to uploading images! The File Manager allows you to upload files to your weblog using your web browser.
FTP Access	In addition to the web-based File Manager, you can upload files to your weblog storage area via FTP.
Security	Protect your privacy by restricting access to areas of your weblog. Allow only users of your choosing to access restricted areas of your weblog. BlogHarbor's advanced security model allows you to grant permissions to Users and Groups of users.
Trackbacks	See who's linking to your articles, and notify other weblogs when you're linking to them! Your articles will all have a Trackback URL which allows other bloggers to notify your site when they link to you. And you can enter a Trackback URL when you write an article on your site referring to an article another blogger has written - and your Trackback will appear on their article!
Comments	Allow visitors to post comments to your weblog, either anonymously or after providing a username and password. Tired of comment spam? Then you can require authentication before permitting your readers to comment on your articles.
Look and Feel	Customize the look of your blog using built-in themes. Advanced web designers can modify CSS stylesheets and HTML templates to make your weblog truly unique.
Search engine is built-in	There's no need to configure or install any CGI software to allow your readers to search your site.
Interactive Forms	Create interactive forms for your readers and receive the results of the HTML form submission by email.
Disk Space	Get ready for this - you'll get 1 GB - that's 1000 MB - with our Standard Account and a whopping 2 GB with the Plus Account! That's a lot of space to store your digital images!
Online Now	Sign up now, your weblog will be online immediately! Although your Free Trial is limited to 100 MB disk space, all of the features listed here are available even to Free Trial weblogs! Get started right away!

System Maintenance 2/23/2008

john — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:17:00 -0500

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

2008-02-23 (Sat.), 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM EDT
(2008-02-24 0200 - 0300 UTC)

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will experience intermittent network outages.

Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.

Emergency System Maintenance 9/15/2007

john — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:12:00 -0400

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

2007-09-15 (Sat.), 04:00 AM - 10:00 AM EDT
(2007-09-15 0800 - 1400 UTC)

As you are surely aware, we continue to experience intermittent performance degradations which affect your ability to access your blog, and many of you are experiencing difficulties accessing the control panel.

Tucows, our vendor for the Blogware system upon which our service is based, performed an emergency maintenance last week to address some of the recent performance issues. However, the problems were not solved and these issue have continued.

Tucows has just informed us that in response to the continued performance degradations, they will be conducting an emergency maintenance tomorrow morning Saturday Sep. 15 at 4 AM EDT (Saturday, Sep. 15, 2007 at 08:00 UTC) in order to install additional hardware. Software code adjustments will also be made on during this window which are expected to reduce the length of time required for some database queries which are slowing the system down. They have advised us that the maintenance will require approximately 6 hours.

We sincerely apologize for these problems and for the inconvenience they have caused you, and will continue to work towards bringing the system back to the performance levels you previously enjoyed.

Emergency System Maintenance 9/8/2007

john — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:18:00 -0400

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

2007-09-08 (Sat.), 04:00 AM - 10:00 AM EDT
(2007-09-08 0800 - 1400 UTC)

Tucows, our vendor for the Blogware system upon which our service is based, performed an emergency maintenance window this morning to address some of the recent performance issues, and notified us that they would continue to "very closely monitor and work to improve the speed" of Blogware.

Tonight, in response to the continued performance degradations, Tucows has informed us that they will be conducting an emergency maintenance window tomorrow morning Saturday Sep. 8 at 4 AM EDT (Saturday, Sep. 8, 2007 at 08:00 UTC) in order to "conduct full database maintenance to improve overall Blogware performance." They have advised us that the maintenance will require approximately 6 hours.

We sincerely apologize for these problems and for the inconvenience they have caused you, and will continue to work towards bringing the system back to the performance levels you previously enjoyed.

System Maintenance 4/7/2007

john — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:20:00 -0400

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

2007-04-07 (Sat.), 10:00 PM - 7:30 AM EDT
(2007-04-08 0200 - 1130 UTC)

During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as we upgrade our system.

What is this maintenance for?
All servers will be moved to a new data center in order to increase the reliability, redundancy and overall network availability of our service.

Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and as always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.

Easy to use, stylish templates

john — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:52:00 -0500

Easy to use, stylish ready-made templates are available for you to use on your BlogHarbor weblog. For your reference, screenshots of the 36 templates currently available are available.

Hosting Plans Updated

john — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:56:00 -0500

We're very excited to tell you about the changes we've made to our hosting plans today. We've greatly simplified our hosting plans, and added significant value by increasing capacity and reducing prices. A complete list of our plans and pricing is available here.

The Standard plan gets much more capacity: disk space was doubled from 1 to 2 GB and monthly bandwidth jumped from 2 GB to 5 GB. The price remains the same, just $8.95/month. Current Extra plan users will notice that your plan has now become the Standard plan, so you'll see a $3 decrease in your monthly hosting fee from next month!
The Plus plan pricing remains at $14.95, but disk space is increased from 2 GB to an incredible 10 GB, and monthly transfer quadruples from 10 GB all the way to 40 GB! If you were on the Pro plan before, your account has been moved to the new Plus plan. You'll immediately see a doubling of monthly bandwidth, and a reduced monthly price starting in February. Power plan users will also move to the new Plus plan, and see a dramatic reduction in their monthly hosting fees next month as well.
Temporary bandwidth pricing was also reduced by 50%.

And Then There Were Two

Bottom line - our hosting plans now have more power and cost less. Most of our customers will be happy with the Standard plan, and for those of you with more bandwidth or disk space needs, the Plus plan now offers 4X the bandwidth at no extra cost.

	Standard Plan	Plus Plan
Disk Space	2 GB	10 GB
Bandwidth	5 GB	40 GB
Pricing	$8.95/month	$14.95/month

Feedback

Thank you for using our BlogHarbor full service hosted weblogging platform. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or feedback regarding these changes.

Recent Changes and New Features

john — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 01:46:00 -0500

Lots of changes and updates recently here at BlogHarbor - here's the rundown on some of the things we've been up to.

Hot and Fresh

Two new items were added to the home page today at www.blogharbor.com: Fresh Posts, a list of recently posted articles and photos across all blogs, and Hot Topics, a list of recently commented on posts throughout our weblog network.

We hope you find these lists a useful–and fun–way to see what topics bloggers and readers are talking about. The lists will be updated every 5 minutes and will only include upgraded blogs, trial blogs will not appear on these lists.

Search All BlogHarbor Blogs

Also we're happy to announce that we've deployed a search engine which allows you to search our entire network of weblogs. We used Google's Custom Search Engine service to build this feature and the results are lightning fast, timely, and precise.

Check out our list of Recently Updated BlogHarbor Weblogs and you'll be able to see at a glance which weblogs have been updated, search our blog network, or subscribe to an RSS feed listing updated blogs.

Search All Support Resources

We've got a lot of support resources to help you: an extensive User Manual, a set of How To reference guides, and our Community Forums have over 5,000 posts. Sometimes it can be difficult to find an answer you're looking for because you're not sure of the best place to look for it.

Today we also implented a search engine based on Google technology which allows you to search all of our support resources at once, providing you with a great starting off point when you need help building or customizing your weblog. With just one click, you'll have access to related pages for your search term from our manuals, our How To guides, and all of the thousands of posts on our forums. Try out the new search engine from our Help page.

Reader Account Signup Integration

Our most recent System Update enhances your blog by allowing your readers to signup for a user account without leaving your blog (previously the reader account signup process led to a BlogHarbor-branded page).

Readers who are logged in will also notice that the header link in your blog which used to be labeled Subscribe is now labeled My Preferences, reflecting the fact that in addition to managing their subscriptions, your readers can now manage many of their basic reader account functions right from your blog site (some advanced reader account management still takes place in a BlogHarbor-branded preferences page).

The My Preferences page now allows a reader to update their Name, email address, Display Name, Language Preference (English, French, or Spanish), or password right within your blog's preferences page. Readers can now also permanently delete their account from this page.

Testimonials

A testimonials box has been aded to the sidebar of our home page. We hope this will help visitors to choose us as their preferred blog hosting provider, but we also hope it will help to send new readers to your blogs.

If you're interested in having your testimonial appear on our home page, please post your testimonial to this forum thread. Include your real name if you want it to appear, and the URL of your weblog if you would like us to link your name to your site.

Feedback

Please post your feedback, questions, or comments about these changes to our Community Forums. Thank you for your continued support of our service!

How to Configure Google Docs & Spreadsheets to Post to your Blog

john — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 10:36:00 -0400

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a new service for Google account holders and Gmail users. Derived from Google's acquisition of the Writely service earlier this year, this service allows users to create word processing and spreadsheet documents within a web browser, so they can accessed from anywhere. These types of web-based applications are often referred to as "Office 2.0" applications, implying an evolution of the standard desktop-based Office software. Google describes their service on the docs.google.com home page:

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers. You can, for example, coordinate your student group's homework assignments, access your family to-do list from work or home, or collaborate with remote colleagues on a new business plan.

What's exciting about Google Docs & Spreadsheets (let's refer to it as GDS for the rest of this article) is that it also provides you the ability to post your documents directly to your weblog. It even can update your blog post when you update its original GDS document!

Google has made it easy to configure GDS to post to BlogHarbor weblogs by including BlogHarbor in the default list of blog services (thank you Google!), so all you need to know to configure GDS to post to your BlogHarbor weblog is your username and password.

Here's a walk through of the steps to configure posting to a BlogHarbor blog from an existing Google Docs & Spreadsheets account:

Step 1 - Begin Blog Setup
Choose a document to edit, then click the Publish tab at the top right of your GDS control panel:

Click on the set your blog site settings link just above the Post to Blog button.

Step 2 - Enter your BlogHarbor Settings
A dialog box will appear over current screen:

Check the Hosted Provider checkbox at the top of the menu, then choose BlogHarbor from the Provider dropdown menu. Next enter your BlogHarbor User Name and Password:

Step 3 - Test your Configuration
That should be all the information GDS needs to post to your BlogHarbor weblog. Click the Test button and you should see a dialog appear like this:

Now you're ready to post to your BlogHarbor weblog using Google Docs & Spreadsheets!

Tips and Tricks

Google Docs & Spreadsheets allows you to use Tags to cagegorize documents. When you publish a document to your blog, Google will automatically check to see if your blog has any Categories with the same label as your Tag, and if so, post your article to that Category.

So if your blog has a category named Trivia, and you tag your GDS doc with the Trivia label, when posting the document to your blog it will automatically be placed into your blog's Trivia category.
GDS can output a list of documents you create as an RSS feed. Use an RSS Headline Component to add a dynamically updated list of your GDS docs to your blog's sidebar!

We welcome your tips, questions or comments about using the Google Docs & Spreadsheets service to post to your BlogHarbor weblog; please post them to our BlogHarbor Community Forums.

System Templates Updated

john — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:13:00 -0400

Changes were made to our commenting system during System Update 2006-06-29 aimed at increasing performance and improving the security of the system against comment spam.

We try to avoid making changes to the system that would require modification of your custom templates, unfortunately it was necessary to update the default base, article, photo, movie_review, music_review, and book_review templates in order to implement this updated commenting system. If you have customized any of these templates, it will be necessary to roll our updates back into your customized template in order to re-enable commenting on your blog. This page will explain how to add these changes into your custom templates. If you have not already customized your templates, then you can ignore these instructions; your blog will receive the updated system templates automatically.

As a result of this revision to the commenting system, the comment form (and Comment Verification image known as a CAPTCHA) does not display immediately when your blog article loads, the comment box will appear only when your visitor clicks on the Post a Comment link. Not only will this change reduce the amount of comment spam targeted at your blog, but it also will increase the speed at which your article pages load.

We apologize for the necessity of this change and for the lack of advanced notice.

Updating your Article Templates

Access your blog's control panel and go to Look & Feel > Templates. Click on Edit in the article row. Look for the following code in your custom template:

{{if allow_comments}} {{if can_post}} <div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment"><%= gettext("Post a comment") %></a></div> {{/if}}  {{/if}} 

It might look like this, depending on when you originally made your customization:

{{if allow_comments}} {{if can_post}} <div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment">Post a comment</a></div> {{/if}}  {{/if}} 

Change that code to the following:

{{if allow_comments}} <div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment" onclick="return reveal_post_comment_inline(true, false);"><%= gettext("Post a comment") %></a></div> {{/if}} 

Click on Update Live Template. Your article template should now be updated with the most recent code. If you have made customizations to your photo, movie_review, music_review, or book_review templates, repeat this step for each of your customized templates.

Updating your Base Template

Access your blog's control panel and go to Look & Feel > Templates. Click on Edit in the base row. Look for the following lines near the top of your base template:

{{include name="javascript.html"}}

If it exists, delete it. Your template may or may not contain this line depending on when you customized your template. If you find it, remove it, but if you don't see it there's nothing wrong.

Next, look for the following line:

</head>

and right above it, enter the following:

{{include name="utils.js"}} <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> </script>

Click on Update Live Template. Your base template will now be updated with the most recent code, and comment functionality should now be restored.

Need some help?

If you have customized your templates and want us to roll the new changes into your existing article or body templates, please contact us; we'd be happy to make these changes for you.

Again, if you have never customized your blog templates, then it is not necessary for you to make any changes to your blog templates, as these changes have automatically been integrated into the default templates.

Our apologies to all of our users for the necessity of these changes, we hope that the new commenting system will meet its goals of decreasing comment spam and increasing the speed of your blog.