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:

We’ll be launching a somewhat large software update by 10h00UTC (5h00EST, 03h00MST). Expect a downtime of about 2 hours, as database servers will have to be taken offline. We’ll then post about new features that’ll be available!

Update: The launch is delayed to 16h00UTC(11h00EST,09h00MST)

Now you can leave your avatar when you do a comment in a blog at Blog.com.
You just need to be logged in.

Hope you like it!

We’ll be launching a software update by 16h00UTC/GMT (11h00EST, 09h00MST, 00h00WST). Expect a downtime of about 2 hours, as database servers will have to be taken offline.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Note: We pushed the update time six hours later.

As you can see in the blog’s sidebar we have a new item, the Slideshow!

To add a slideshow to your blog’s sidebar just go here (also a new page) and choose the slideshow item. After this just choose an album and it’s done!

Hope you like it!

The last release of Blog.com published a new service: Blog.com Cobranded. We now started a closed beta for it.

If you run a site and estimate that you can gather over 20 blog authors to your blogging service, you qualify for the beta. Drop us a note via the support system, and we’ll send instructions on how to start your very own blogging service.

Blog.com Cobranded allows any webmaster to run a blogging service on top of Blog.com’s infrastructure. This is a complement to our existing ASP model, and allows small to mid-sized portals to add blogging services to their portfolio.

Blog.com cobranded is a hosted solution that can be implemented in minutes. We offer it for free to all sites that qualify and you can even earn additional revenue: the ad inventory generated from cobranded ‘powered by blog.com’ blogs will be shared.

So who can qualify for this beta?

If you run an afinity community site - sports fan site; association site, alumni site, city site, etc. - you qualify. Together we can offer your visitors a blog service under their preferred domain. For example, if your site is mygolfsite.com, mycity.com or myassociation.com and you have a visitor called John, then you can choose to allow him to register a blog at http://john.mygolfsite.com, http://john.mycity.com or http://john.myassociation.com.

This beta is open to all so please forward this opportunity to anyone you think might be interested. Just suggest they visit our support system and start a conversation

Happy blogging!

Both the database upgrade and software release have been executed with no problems. As of now, we’re back under normal load. Thanks for your patience.

Blog.com will be down for about three hours, from 15h00 GMT, for a database upgrade. We’ll be upgrading the database servers to postgresql v8.2. Unfortunately this requires a dump and restore of the data, so the database must be stopped.

The good news is that we’ll take the opportunity brought by the database being down, and launch the next major release of blog.com. Details after we’re online.

Please excuse us for the interruption of service.

We recently launched post tagging. I’ve been keeping an eye on how people are using tags and tag clouds, and I think I can help you get the most out of the new feature. How should you tag your posts?

1. Tag with multiple tags. Assume you’ll be looking for a post and you will not remember which tags it has. If you tag with most characteristics of the post, it’ll be easier to find in the future. Example: Imagine you had a holiday with your friends in Tignes. Go crazy on the tags: tignes, ski, snowboard, snow, ross, rachel, chandler, phoebe, holiday.
2. Use short tag names. You don’t need to include several concepts on one tag. Spread them out. Instead of “ski holiday on tignes”, use “ski, holiday, tignes”. In the near future we’ll allow you to combine tags when searching for posts.
3. Use tags common to other blog authors on the internet. If you are responding to someone’s post or writing about something that’s spreading through the net, tag with the same tags. Look at the original post for the tags, or follow what’s being talked about in technorati.
4. Every so often — say, every few months — take a look at your tags page (only when you are logged in). Merge tags that are similar, by renaming the duplicate tag to the new name. Imagine you have “holiday” and “holidays”. Rename “holiday” to “holidays”.

Happy Blogging!

If you want to do a post with a video from YouTube like this excellent one,

just follow the instructions in our Knowledgebase.