EntropiaPlanets - Improved blogs!

At EntropiaPlanets, we strive to offer new functionality on a regular basis.

Today, we are proud to announce a new and improved blogging system. The old system we used worked fine for us, but recently a newer add-on became available that we feel offers some exciting new functionality that the other one lacked.

The best part about the new blog is that we automatically could import the existing old blogs, and thus seamlessly switch over to the new system without any loss of data.

You might have noticed that some users now have a little B-icon next to their name, which indicates these brave men and women started a blog on EntropiaPlanets:

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To check their blog, simply click on the icon and you will be taken straight to their blogs.

Here are some of the advantages of the newer system over the old one:

* RSS feed - When you blog on EP using the new blogging system, an RSS feed will be available for your blog, so your friends can automatically subscribe to it and always be up-to-date with your latest entries.

* Categories - Tag your blogs to categorize them, thus making it easier for readers to find related content:

Where to add a category when posting a new blog entry:

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Creating a new category:

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The field from the first category-image now showing available categories that can be used for this post:

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The entry showing the categories:


Clicking on a category reveals all entries that have been marked with that category:


On the overview of my blog, the categories now show in the sidebar:


* Blog roll - The blog roll is integrated with the friends list of the forum, this makes it easy to see the blogs written by people on your friend list:

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Which shows me the following blog roll when I check my own blog:

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* Embedding pictures, videos and smilies in comments - The old blog system did not support adding pictures, videos or smilies in the comments to a blog post. The new system does support this.

* Private blogs - You can choose to make your entire blog private, which allows only your followers (or even just yourself) to see it.

* Scheduled entries - Write something now, publish it whenever you are ready. You can choose to not have your blogpost published until a specific point in the future:

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As explained in the text in the screen shot above, the sidebar will show the scheduled entries:

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* WebFonts - If you want to use a specific font that your own computer does not support, you still can due to the usage of WebFonts of the system.

* Customizable blogs - You can completely tweak the system to look like you want. Adding background images, and different colors is a breeze.

To do so, simply click on the "Customize layout" link. This will show the different parts of the page that you can customize by means of an icon. The layout for it is intuitive, allowing you to add your personal touch to your blog.

If you want to have some inspiration, check out this StarCraft themed blog, or a Halloween theme.


I intend the customization system to be a premium-members only feature, but to celebrate the release of the new blogs, I'll allow everyone to play with the system for a few weeks for free, before restricting the functionality to only the premium members.


Lastly, there will be a future update, which I am sure you will love when it comes around. I highly recommend everyone to give the new system a go and create some blog posts. You never know if it might pay off at some point...

Feedback, as always, is most welcome :-) Please enjoy the new blogs!

 

I'll see if it's possible to offer a blog owner the ability to pick whether or not the entries can be commented on, and how the entries ought to be sorted. I think having those two added, along with the other stuff discussed here would mean we'd have a solution that would solve all issues mentioned in this thread so far :)

 

It was a permissions issue. You ought to be able to edit now, though.