The mo'Times

Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Large news updated

Breaking news:

I spoke too early, believing that the update was imminent. This morning, however, I spoke to the head technical fellow, who informed me that it will be at least one more week, if not two, due to the fact that there are complications with another site that will be sharing the same code base/platform as Motime. Until that is resolved, we are on hold. We've waited this long, so I guess we can wait a bit longer. Me and my big mouth.
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Dear Mo'timers one and all,

It has been a long time in coming -- I'm happy to be able to announce that Mo'time is about to benefit from a major upgrade, going online later this week or, OK, could be, like, the beginning of next week.

I'll give you this little overview, so that you're not caught unawares or disoriented too much.

First of all, the basic structure of the navigation will not change radically. There are just 2 elements that will be in different locations: (1) The home page control panel box that is currently on the left hand side, will move to the right side and (2) the third level of tabs/buttons across the top of the pages will no longer be under the second level, but moved to a vertical menu to the right side of the page. That's it.

The most obvious changes that you will notice will be the graphic look and feel of the site. Everything is a bit softer and rounder, so to speak, hopefully it will grow on you. Most of the functions and menu hierarchies will remain unchanged so that you should not find yourself disoriented. The layout was redesigned to be easier on the eyes and to be more flexible for future improvements and developments. I'll post a preview screenshot tomorrow, hopefully.

As far as new functions and features, most of them were implemented to bring Mo'time in line with features that have since become de facto standards on blogging and social network sites and to prepare the platform for future enhancements:

1) Import your mailing list from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc. in order to be able to invite your friends aboard the Mo'time via a simple email request.

2) A series of new blog templates! For those of you that like to customize your blogs, we have separated the HTML from the CSS in order to make it easier to understand and edit your blog's layout.

3) Ever hear of the term "trackback"? Well, if not, it is a mechanism by which any citation of your post on another blog, regardless of the site or platform, is now tracked and automatically linked in your comments section.

4) If you have uploaded any pictures or other files, you may already know that they are grouped on your "media blog", visible at http://www.motime.com/xxxx. Visitors can comment on each picture and now those comments are subject to your moderation via your control panel.

5) Do you have a problem with "spam" comments? You can turn on the "captcha" feature to oblige commenters to insert the randomly generated letters into the corresponding field before the comment will be published. This will make sure that automatic and machine generated comments will not get published, and those spammers that comment "by hand" will be forced to slow down in order to fill in that field everytime.

6) Do you have a problem with bothersome commenters? You can turn on the moderation feature which places all comments in a queue for your approval next time you come online. The cool thing about this feature is that you can choose to give a free pass to your friends list and/or registered Mo'time users, placing only anonymous comments in the moderation queue.

7) We recommend changing your blog template to one of the new ones, since the code is cleaner, faster and includes all the features built-in to the system. If you choose to use your existing template, and you want to take advantage of the "tag cloud" feature, you must insert the new BlogTag in your template: <$BlogTags$ format="cloud">

8) We have implemented something called the Metablog API. Huh? This means that you will be able to post to your blog without actually having the site opened at the time, using plug-ins in your browser or desktop or mobile applications that "talk" directly to your blog. For Firefox users, ScribeFire is the plug-in of choice, allowing to post to your blog from your browser when you're on another site. I'll explain this further after the launch.

9) For last I saved the only real problem that this change will bring... the sitewide Search function will not work at all for the first few weeks as the entire search engine code needs to be completely rewritten from line 1. This is a complicated function, so we ask for your patience for this feature.

It is possible that there are other small changes that I've left out. As soon as I realize that I've forgotten something, I'll post about it here. As usual, do not hesitate to send me a Mo'mail or post a question on the help blog with any questions, bug reports, complaints or suggestions.

Talk to you soon...