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…

…Live Tweet Streams.

Have you seen those cool live “tweet streams” that show constantly updating tweets around a user or topic? A year ago they required knowledge of code to set one up, but now thanks to Blogivists, you can set one up in less than 5 minutes.

Check out our demo of how it looks here.

Getting Started

To set up a tweet stream, go set up a new blog (and new user account if you don’t already have one). Once you’ve set up your new blog, log in and go to Appearance>>Themes and choose “LiveTwit Premium.”

Activate LiveTwit Premium and then look under the Appearance menu for the theme settings/options. There you sill see options for your new Tweet Stream. Fill in the blanks, check or uncheck the options you want/don’t want, click the button to save the settings and then go promote your Tweet Stream

Enjoy!

-Eric Odom

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.

Our new premium services, most of which will not be here until 2010, will add a ton of value to the community, and will also help solve our revenue problems.

Of course, Blogivists.com will ALWAYS be free to use for our bloggers. There will always be a handful of Basic Themes available with no strings attached and no hosting costs whatsoever. In fact, all Basic themes you can access now will always be available for free.

But going in to 2010, we’ll be offering some premium themes for the community to use for free as well. These themes, however, have a small catch. In order to use the theme, you simply agree to let us display relevant, free-market friendly ads at the bottom of each post.

This means it will cost nothing for you to choose one of our premium themes, but we will publish small ads on the post pages. These ads will ONLY be displayed on premium themes and never on basic themes.

The first of these premium themes is now available and is called wpBurn. You can access the theme by visiting your Appearance tab and scrolling to the theme in the list. Give it a test, try it out and see if you like it.

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

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

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