feedback blog for alpha stage

Hi

We just performed an update of our blogr service, in order to fix a number of issues, that kept bugging our users:

• Updated the Story Editor (tinyMCE) to the latest Version, so that inserting of YouTube-videos should be no longer a problem
• Fixed the editing and deletion of multiple Media-Files
• Tags are now shared for Stories and Media
• Added a shared TagCloud (see here for example)
• Enhanced User-Interface for Comments

If you started to use a custom layout, you may have expirienced, that the sidebar is rendered below the content, and not where it should be: beside the content.

To fix this we will add the following rule to the base.css in the next days.

#content { float: left; }
#sidebar { float: right; }
body { text-align: center; }
#container { margin: 0 auto; text-align: left; }

we also fixed the default layout of the blog title in the banner:

#banner-header {
  font-size: 2em;
  font-weight: normal;
  margin: 0.3em 0.2em;
}

you may copy these two rulesets to your custom stylesheet to test it with your own design. 

"Spread the word" - that's how it works! We got some international coverage in well known blogs: Martin Varsavsky wrote about blogr.es in his spanish blog, but others as Genbeta and Microsiervos gave us some credit. If you are looking for some screenshots, have a look at econectados.com 

French bloggers are talking about it: have a look it at netvizz or this blogging e-zine. I am sure, there is more feedback in other languages (like the one in this Guardian Blog), so you are welcome to add further links below or drop us a mail: blogr [at] knallgrau.at. Or even better, post it in your own blog or send the links above to your mates. Thnx!

We just launched french, spanish, finish! and german versions of blogr. So from now on blogr will speak your language and the people around you using blogr will too.

Each country runs on a seperate installation, will have it's own info blog, forum, support and portal.

All user names are unique across all installations. This means if you already created an account at blogr.com and want to move to one of the local versions please write us an email. We will delete your name (and space) from the blogr.com installation, so you can create an account with your name on one of the local portals.

Sorry for the inconvenience. We will try to support you as good as we can to also transfer your content. Just write us an email.

The single most requested feature is "customizing the design".

To shorten the waiting time until the full functionality is available we started providing two more very simple layouts. The well known "Kubrick" design from Michael Heilemann and a very simple (yet grey) SimpleGrey. Currently you will miss the ability to change any pictures used in the template or colors.

to the public alpha of blogr.com

Because of the many requests we got after the article in derstandard, we decided to open the service for public alpha testing. So that's what you are propably doing right now.

Many things are still a little buggy (just noticed that 'available tags' are broken ) and some parts of the service are not even online yet (for example podcasting). We still hope that you get a first picture and we would be happy about every feedback we can get. Just use this blog called "feedback-alpha" or write us an email to blogr AT knallgrau DOT at

Just made an update on the server to reflect the latest development bugfixes in CVS. We are in the last round before we remove the need to log in to access the alpha testing area.

What is included

• Total rework of HTML/CSS structure for site layouts
  some layouts just made out of pure CSS are on their way to show the power of this move.
• Videos are now transcoded into flash, and we extract preview images and metadata - this makes navigation throughj videos a lot easier and better looking
• Improved resizer on photo list pages (smoother and faster)
• Better looking paginator (this is the thing at the end of endless list, that is saying Page 1 | 2 | 3 ...)
• AJAX inline editing for tags, titles and descriptions for photos and videos
• Improved details page for images
• too many smaller fixes to count 

What's next

• remove stuff that can't be easily fixed (day pages, podcasts)
• remove stuff that just seems too much (files section)
  
• add some layouts
• add an easy way to switch between layouts
• work on admin center
  

help us to get rid of the last bugs - and stay tuned

From today on you when you are writing a new blog posting, you will notice a "Suggested Tags" list additional to the existing "Available Tags".

What is this?

Tags are a useful way to organize your blog entries. They just work like categories, but are more flexible and: easier to create. To make the task of tagging even easier we added a feature called "Suggested Tags".

Most of the time tags you would use are already part of the text you are writting, and it's just too much extra work to type those words again into the "Tags" field. Suggested Tags will analyse the text of your blog posting and extract the most useful terms. So all you have to do is to click on one of the suggested tags to add them to your blog posting.

How does it work?

To make this wonder work, we are using the REST-API of tagthe.net, a project some very talented people at knallgrau are working on.

Happy Tagging!

- matthias

p.s. This feature is brought to you by michi - great job and thanks!

Just made another update here.

New features include:

• improved detail informations on image view page
  
• added an image details page with exif data and more
• some minor improvements to media lists and views
• AND: drumroll!
  dynamic list resizing for photocast (photo list)

please give it a try, and like always: feedback is welcomed.

p.s.
The last video update wasn't perfect enough. The problem is that the support for Windows Media Player on Firefox is realy bad. We are investigating for a "better" solution, until we are switching to Flash Video.

- matthias

Hi Testers. In the past days there occured some updates on blogr.

• Improvement of regsitration form
• A more readable Catcha Image
• Better layout for photos and blog entries
• Improved photo index page
  (half way done)
• Ajax login on comments
• EditInPlace fo image titles and descriptions
  

You will see more changes in the next couple of days.

- matthias