Blogivists HQ

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 »

OK, I admit… I’m kind of excited about this poll. Not just because the poll is about the upgraded software we’re running, but also because I get to announce a new global plugin that will help you host polls on your blog as well.

That’s right… we now have the PollDaddy Plugin running on all Blogivists blogs. What this means is that once you set up a free Poll Daddy account, you’ll be able to easily post Poll Daddy polls in your blog posts.

Instructions:
Once you set up your free Poll Daddy account, find the button that allows you to create a new poll. Poll Daddy will walk you through the simple steps and options on setting up your poll. Once you save all of the settings for the poll, you’ll be taken to a page with some code for the poll.

Ignore the code that you’re presented with, and in the right sidebar you’ll see a box for “Wordpress Blogs”. Click on that box.

The next page presents you with three options. You want the option that says “I host my own WordPress blog (version 2.5 or higher)”. When you click that option, you’ll be given a short strip of code. Copy that and paste it into your blog post.

Save… publish… and vote!

With that said… please vote in this poll.

[polldaddy poll="1343719"]

Good news!!!

Last night we upgraded our software from Wordpress MU 2.6.5 to Wordpress MU 2.7 and we think everything went through smoothly. You’ll notice a LOT of changes in the way the backend looks and feels, so you may want to take some time to surf around and get comfortable with the new system.

Now that the software is completely upgraded, we’ll be able to go in and do a final clean up of plugins and themes.

This means you’ll begin to see a lot of new plugins and themes in the coming weeks.

Thanks for hanging in there with us during these changes!

-Eric Odom

One of the major problems with the server switch is that we were using an old, outdated version of a couple spam preventing Wordpress plugins. While these plugins were doing their job of not sending us emails, a lot of spam comments still made it to moderation cue. (I know this because I had to clean out about 35 pages of spam on my own blog).

So, instead of trying to overwrite the plugins with a new version, I decided to overhaul the spam blocking system. I took out the old spam filters and implementing a new set of features. These are very aggressive spam blocking measures that I hope will cut back on the spam we say day in and day out.

The spam fighting hacks have three major components.

1) Captcha – Anyone not logged in is now required to fill in the Captcha word in order to even submit the comment. Now, I understand this can be annoying for people who are not registered members of our community, but it’s far more annoying weeding through 35 pages of comment spam, so I think the benefit outweighs the negatives.

2) Trackback Database – If the spammer does somehow get past the Captcha, or if they set up an account to spam us without us catching it, they’ll have to hope their URL’s have not been checked into the trackback database we use. This is not just a database we use; Rather, it’s a database that thousands of Wordpress users chack against and report to. So if a spammer’s URL has been flagged before, it’s going to get blocked out and the comment will be marked as spam.

3) Comment Links – It’s perfectly OK to have a link or two in a comment. Heck, I do it all the time. But it becomes questionable to have more than two links in a comment, and from now on we’re watching for this. Our system checks for comments that are heavy on the links as they come in, and if they have more than two links, they get bypassed.

We’re working on a few more options to help combat the spam, but I think these three will help dramatically decrease the amount of spam we’re dealing with right now.

Stay tuned for more updates on this!

-Eric Odom

…it’s just a (somewhat) tedious process.

If you use Internet Explorer, you are probably aware that video does not show up properly on your blog. Even if you don’t use it though, your readers using IE still can’t see the embedded video.

After weeks and weeks of intensive troubleshooting, The Blogivists Team has figured out how to make video appear on the Internet Explorer browser. Finally!

So let’s begin…

On step 5 of the original tutorial, I mention that one can revert back to the “Visual” viewer after embedding in “HTML”. While, of course, you have the ability to do so, you should not. Not if you want your readers using Internet Explorer to be able to see your video.

For some reason, Internet Explorer will not display video properly if, after embedding video, you switch back to the “Visual” viewer. The very act, that of switching viewers, corrupts the code for Internet Explorer. So instead of seeing video, anyone using Internet Explorer sees a blank, white box. Strange, I know.

Note: this is not a problem for anyone using Firefox (or any other browser, besides IE). These people will see video properly no matter how the author embeds code. However, given that a large percentage of the population still uses IE, it’s probably smart to always make adding-video your last step.

Here’s the step by step:

• Complete all work on your post.
• Embed the video and then click “Save” or “Publish”.
  
• If for any reason you need to go back and edit features of an old post, copy first and then cut the video code, re-pasting it into its previous position after all editing work is complete.

There you go! Here’s a video tutorial to demonstrate getting past the IE conundrum: