The itch to write

Blog.com will be offline for half an hour starting at 18h30UTC (that's 13h30 in New York, 10h30 in Settle or 01h30 in Beijing). We will be adding a new server to the mix, and this involves finally moving the last couple of file datasets to the central storage. We promise to be quick.

Update: The maintenance was completed with no hickups. The service is back online. Blog search caches will take a few hours to catch up, so expect search not to work for up to six hours. Thanks for your patience

As you may have noticed we now support more files than images. You can now upload to your posts:

• Documents (pdf documents, word documents, powerpoint presentations and excel sheets).
• Music files (mp3).
• Video files (avi, mpeg, wmv, mov).
• Flash files (swf).
• Zip files with any of the other files.

Check our sidebar to see that you can also create a playlist from your previously uploaded mp3 files.
For more information about file uploads please check our Knowledgebase.

... or the blog.com tower of babel. Try out the new blog.com application, babel, and help us get a perfect translation of blog.com to your native language.

We regularly receive requests for localized versions of blog.com. Suprisingly, we also regularly receive offers for help translating blog.com. This is fantastic:

1. There are no better translators than native speakers of any given language.
2. It provides us with the ability to have blog.com translated into about every language out there
   
3. Definitely proves we have the best users in the world (all over the world, by the way).

Our best answer to this suprise is to empower every blog.com author to help with translation, with a new application in our suite. You don't need any approval from us. If you have the desire to help, head over to http://babel.blog.com/ sign in with your blog.com account, and translate away. The application allows you to either translate new strings, or review work from others -- including translations we have already outsourced.

We give away premium blog.com accounts for relevant work in translation. If you think you are entitled to one, post a message to our support team.

Note that we will also keep going on with the paid translation effort, integrated with public work created in babel. If the quality of work provided via babel is good enough, we may start posting paid work orders here for translators to pick up.

At last, I can say we are stable after the upgrade. We took the upgrade opportunity to upgrade tinymce, the rich html text editor you find in the edit post/new post pages. It turns out we hit a couple of nasty tinymce bugs, which affected both font tag cleanup and processing of HTML markup generated by Microsoft Word.

Both bugs should be fixed by now. Previous entries copy-pasted from Microsoft Word will not correct themselves, though. If possible, repaste the text from word and it should be ok. If it can't be done, please open a ticket with the support guys (http://support.blog.com/). They'll correct the entry for you.

I'll post a bit later on the new features. For now, an appetizer. Please grab yourself a good set of earphones or loudspeakers, to 'see' engine technology in all its glory: