That's right we've uploaded the first version of our MMORPG.com member galleries! You can now upload your own images to your gallery space then post them in forums across the web! Plus our forum and blog editors have a new addition that allows you to insert images from your galleries directly into your forum or blog post with a simple interface!
Here are a couple pics from my test gallery:
It's been in the wings for a long time now with other projects and priorities pushing it around but Skywisenight and I finally got around to wrapping this thing up! It's an exciting change from our old list in that this one is fully customizable. You can choose how you want to view the data and build your own custom lists.
MMORPG.com members can also save their custom gamelists, up to 5 of them in fact. So head over to the new gamelist and check it out. We've added more data fields to it and made it ALOT more useable than the old list ever was.
Let me or Skywise know of any issues that pop up or any other sweet ideas you might have for the gamelist area!
Just a heads up to all bloggers I've setup pings to the major blog aggregator sites to alert them when new entries are created on your blog! The sites I currently have setup to receive pings are:
As I come across more aggregators I'll add them to the ping code. This should help get our blogs more exposure around the internet which is always a good thing! Another small item I updated was injecting each blogs RSS link into the browser so it can be picked up by the users browser and added to a users subscribed RSS feeds easier than before. This new feature goes hand in hand with the RSS feed link already present on each blog.
Just a heads up to all of the bloggers that this afternoon the contributor functionality went live! What does this mean? Well you can now invite up to 5 MMORPG.com registered users to join you in having access to posting in your blog!
To access this new functionality go to your blog and click on the "Manage" link to the right of the "Owner" text in the left menu of your blog. You'll then be whisked away to a page where you can add / delete contributors to your blog.
We really hope to see some cool blogs result from this. So what's next on the plate of todo's for the blogging system? Well I'm currently working on a ping functionality to hit the major blog aggregators out there(technorati,weblogs etc) when a blog is updated so it can be indexed and be seen by a much larger audience then just the traffic surfing through MMORPG.com
As always I look forward to suggestions / comments about the blogs and am always looking for new cool features to implement!
Well you requested fuller functionality for blog comments and now you've got it! We trimmed down our text editor and stuck it in place of the old text area. This is nice because it gives the users some formatting options such as bold, italic text, ordered, unordered lists and text colors!
We've also implemented spell check into the editors not only for blogs but for the forums as well! So now there's no excuse for any mispellings AT ALL lol...
Anyway enjoy and keep the suggestions flowing!
Today we updated the blogs home page to be more organized. The old blogs page was a little busy with all of the blog stats listed on it. So we broke it out into 3 areas:
Anyway we hope you find the new blogs page to be of better use than the last one and as always I welcome any comments or suggestions!
As I'm sure some of you may have noticed MMORPG.com was down for a few hours today. For the 5th time in just over a year since we've been running it our quad processor database server crashed and lost the site data. This means we had to restore from backups created at 3am early this morning forcing us to lose about 10 hours of data. We lost a few blog posts, lots of forums posts and user signups not to mention game ratings and game hypes and other miscellaneous data entered here by users.
Well 5 times is 5 times too many and we've decided to look for some new hardware to run MMORPG.com's database on. For now the database is running on a temporary server until we get the new hardware installed and running. So there might be some site slowness over the next week while we get it sorted out.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users and especially the ones that take the time to express themselves in the forums and here in the blogs. We're dedicated to fixing this issue for good and preventing these losses of data from occurring again.
That's right, RSS feeds are here! Each individual's blog has an RSS feed available and there is also a global feed that stays up to date with the 30 latests blog entries created at MMORPG.com.
This is really going to help blog users gain more and more exposure for the effort they put into blogging here at the site. Again if there are any comments or suggestions about this new feature I'd love to hear them.
So what's up next? Well currently there is no way to view or search all of the blogs here at MMORPG.com. So the next feature will be a page listing all of the blogs here for users to browse through. Any thoughts on this feature are appreciated too!
Well the blogs launch went off great with only a couple glitches showing through. Since the dust is settling now and there's a bunch of really good blogging starting up we're directing our attention to further enhancements to the system.
The first order of business is to expose the contributor functionality to the blog owners. What does this mean? Well the owner of a blog will be able to invite up to 5 of their closest friends or whoever to collaborate with on their blog.
After contributors is implemented the user galleries will be given focus and completed. A seperate new feature for users, the galleries will be implemented into the blogging system so users can easily include images from their personal gallery into the blogs without having to use an image uploader service like photobucket.
I'd be very interested in hearing from the users blogging about any features you'd like to see implemented or comments on the system in general.
Hello everyone and welcome to the new user blogs here at MMORPG.com. That's right, if you a free account here on the site you now can create your own MMO blog and keep your friends, fellow players or whoever up to date with your MMO opinions, observations or anything else life or game related.
To get started using the blogs please visit the blogs home page here and click on the "Start blogging on MMORPG.com now!" link. You'll be prompted for a couple pieces of information and once you are finished your MMORPG.com blog will be setup and ready for you to start posting in!
In the near future we'll be tying new features coming down the development pipeline into the blogs such as user image galleries and other exciting features. Also the site staff will be opening blogs for the shows we visit to keep site users more up to date on happenings right from the show floors!
So get your blog setup today and start playing around with it. Please leave any comments here including suggestions for new enhancements or whatever. This is version 1.0 and there are a lot of features to be added!
If you don't have a MMORPG.com account and would like to setup a blog click here to register then return to the blogs home page once you've activated your account to get started!
