Blogivists HQ

One of our big goals for 2010 is to become more than a blogging platform. Of course, the blogs will always be the core part of the Blogivists family, but we want to expand out and be able to offer a lot more to our user base.

We’ve recently coded in a community feature that allows any user to create a community through the backend, we’ve added internal instant messaging systems, we made it possible for any user to start an internal discussion forum, we’ve expanded our themes to include premium themes, and now we’re adding one of the coolest features we’ve ever had… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s obvious that a lot of changes are happening around Blogivists.com. We’ve upgraded our software, coded in a ton of new features, cleaned up the old themes and upgraded the existing themes.

We’re also building a new support system that we hope will help deal with any major issues as they arise. This new system will be in place by New Years Day of 2010.

One of the new functions we haven’t talked much about is our upcoming premium services. As you might imagine, running this website is not cheap for us, but we work hard to keep it free for you. Of course, we can’t do this forever without building in alternatives that can bring in revenue needed to operate the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to show your latest tweets in your blog sidebar? Thanks to a new simple widget we’ve installed, making it happen couldn’t be easier. (we’re using it on this blog to the right)

To add your tweets, just go to Appearance>>widgets>> add the Twitter for Wordpress widget and change the settings. Click the save button and tweet away!

-Eric Odom

Earlier this year we had two excellent anti-spam plugins running. Unfortunately, they both became unstable and began causing problems for the site.

But, I think we might have found another good combination. We’re going to try using a marriage of the two following plugins to cut back on comment spam.

1) Akismet
This is probably the most famous anti-spam plugin for Wordpress. To get it working on your site, you’ll need to go to Plugins>Installed> and activiate Akismet. Then, you’ll need to get an API key for Wordpress and enter it into the plugin configuration field.

2) Cookies for Comments
This plugin is automatically installed on your blog. It essentially identifies fake visitors and passes their data directly to the spam folder.

We’ll run these two plugins for a couple of weeks and see if they help. If not, we’ll try a different route.

Thanks for hanging in there!

-Eric Odom

Firestats was “so so,” but it didn’t quite do the trick and was a bit outdated. Because of this, we’ve gone ahead and installed Statpress on all Blogivists Blogs.

To view your statpress results and options, simply login to your blog’s dashboard and look at the lower left in the dashboard sidebar. Expand the Statpress window and choose overview for the stats, options for the options menu.

You can still use your own stat tracker, of course, but this one is readily available in the dashboard and easy to read.

Enjoy!

-Eric Odom