blogHi! development

adsense rotation algorithm

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:20:18 +0000

We have just implemented a rotation algorithm for the google adsense box. Until now, you had these options within the google adsense module:

make it go away, by saving "clean" in the google admin panel.
leaving the box empty, and letting blogHi profit from the traffic that your blog generates.
filling the box with your own adsense id. Here we implemented a small change:

At a random rate of 1/5, or 20%, instead of the google_ad_client that is set by you, the blogHi's google_ad_client will appear. This move comes in on a global scale, and also affects the adsense box present in the post. Therefore, as a compensation, this box no longer runs the blogHi adwords code, but also your own.

Please let us know if you experience problems with this change,
yours blogHi.com

running server upgrade

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:09:08 +0000

The hardware upgrade is about to be performed. The steps are as follows:

current server is made "read only" (no more new posts, comments, settings etc).
latest data is copied over to the new server.
the domain name bloghi.com points over to the new server
the new server is opened to the public

These are the upgrade steps, and we will inform you as we progress.

interruptions of servuce because of server upgrade

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:31:42 +0000

We had a temporary problem this morning with the domain name transfer, which is solved for the main domain, we're working on restoring the blogs now.
We plan to run a server upgrade later on today, and there might be small interruptions of service. We have to transfer data to the new machine, then restore the services one by one. The total delay should be less than 15 minutes.

youtube and google video integration

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 12:43:46 +0000

As recently requested, you have now the ability to integrate videos from youtube and google video into your posts.

Youtube integration: Just place an opening bracket, then youtube=, then the youtube URL (the one from the browser address), then a closing bracket into your post editor. (see the example below the video box)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHztbHP6oNo]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHztbHP6oNo]

and google video: Just place an opening bracket, then googlevideo=, then the google video URL (the one from the browser address), then a closing bracket into your post editor. (see the example below the video box)

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=953248532858975298]

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=953248532858975298]

Because of flash integration, the posts containing these videos might load a bit slower. The integration is compatible with wordpress.com's youtube and google video, therefore your eventual transition there will remain easy . Please let us know if you experience problems with this integration.

yours,
blogHi.com

blogHi doesn't close anymore!

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 08:00:02 +0000

I made some posts announcing a possible closure of blogHi in November, then declared for sure that blogHi will close. Meanwhile, your community support encouraged me, and I also received some private buying offers. This led me thinking that it would be possible and more than welcomed for you that somebody else owns blogHi and takes this platform further.

In about 20 days blogHi will therefore just change ownership and I'm now looking for a suitable future owner via a sitepoint auction. Therefore blogHi is here to stay, and your blogs are safe here, and I am sorry about the trouble that I took you through.

yours,
blogHi.com

migration guide to a WordPress blog

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:41:53 +0000

Update: blogHi stays open. However this feature remains implemented; if you ever need it.

Since we are about to close in less than three months, here is a guide in migrating your blog to a WordPress blog.

1. Open a WordPress blog, either via the popular wordpress.com, or via a hosted solution.
2. Go to your blogHi control panel, into the Syndication section, there you will notice a new column called WordPress XML Feed. You can either open the document (it is a XML file) and then save it, or chose to save it locally to your hard-disk (via right clicking on the link then chosing Save). Downloading this file can take a long time, since this is a full backup of your blog and comments.
3. Go to Manage/Import section in your fresh new wordpress blog, and select the local file that you just downloaded. Importing it will also take a while if you used to run a big blog, so please be patient.

Your wonderful blogging skills and the WordPress blog hosting will make a great combination!

04-Nov-2006 - blogHi.com deadline

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 11:21:48 +0000

Dear blogHi community,

This post is about an imminent closure of blogHi, please read it.

I have just received an e-mail from a new user, trying to explain something that puzzles most blog hosting websites out there: why most people abandon their blog in the first days after opening it:

“My opinion most people abandon the blog before they use it is simply because they can't figure out what how to operate it.. I am ome of rhem...” (thank you, Frank for your message!)

This led me thinking how much would blogHi benefit from a clean and simple wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki), and how much sense would it make to create one. Then I thought again that I won't probably have the time to install this wiki, and more important maintain it. And this is a real pity. In fact there are so many things that the community could benefit from, and it's a real pity that I am not doing anything about it. All in all this is a lack of service to you, the blogHi community, and it's not something that I am proud of.

some monetary aspects now:

On the 4th of November, blogHi will be 2 years old. It has operational costs of around $300 per month. Until now, the website operational costs were covered in the range of 40-50% by adsense, and the rest comes from my personal pocket (in the hope that the website will become profitable). If by that date I still won't be able to cover the operational costs of the website, the website will have to be shut down.

I'm also considering selling the whole website, but I have no time to launch in complex blogexplosion-like sales. I'm open to ideas here. Actually, I am open to any kind of ideas. To be honest, I hate as much as you do the deadline-tone of this post.

If you want to host your blog somewhere else, please use the RSS feeds to move your blog away. If you need some special construct to transfer your posts and
comments, please contact us.

It has been great to have you guys here! Thank you for chosing blogHi!

Calin
blogHi.com

deleted comment posts

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:26:43 +0000

During one of our rutine SPAM comments check, we accidentally removed some legitimate comments from the blogs hosted with us. We are working on restoring these comments back to life from our daily backups. If however some comments are still not present after our restore procedures, this means they are lost (they came in after the daily backup was done). In such a case, restoring these comments is impossible.

If this is the case, we're sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused to you.

yours,
blogHi.com

ban comments by IP address

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:57:16 +0000

Banning by IP address:

A new commenting feature awaits you in your blog control panel: A banned IP addresses field allows you to ban multiple persons that left comments in your blog from further commenting. You can get to this field by either visiting your posts edit section, then click on the link to the comments to a certain post, and then click on the ban list, as you can see in the image. Another way is to visit your comments control panel, and edit the IP addresses field by yourself. Your new comment e-mail notifications already contain an anonymized comment author IP address that you can use for the banning list.

If you prefer to control the IPs manually, please place there comma separated IP addresses, in the format: 111.222.333.444, or 111.222.333.XXX, or just 111.222.333

server downtime

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 10:55:08 +0000

We had some server ups and downs this morning for about 12 hours, these issues are solved now.

system stability issues

Tue, 02 May 2006 09:57:01 +0000

As you all know we have experienced repeated downtimes latelly, and they are mostly related to current hardware limits and buggy database queries. During the last weeks we gathered knowledge why these downtimes occured, and hopefully we have found the right fixes. Thank you for your patience

your blogHi.com

tags cloud

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 13:56:13 +0000

You can use post tags for a while now to mark relevant tags and keywords related to your posts. Once you start assigning tags, they pile up a categorization structure for your blog; which in time helps eventual visitors classify your blog in an instant. These tags are also present in your RSS feed; which means increased chances to be found using keyword searches. We launched a new blog feature called tags cloud; here is the detailed wikipedia explanation. The more tags you assign to your posts, the more proeminent this tag will be in your blog tags cloud.

If you use a customized blog menu template, in order to enable this feature you should add this code to your template:

An example can be found here. This is enabled by default, but (as always) you can remove it anytime from your blog menu template.

new adsense placement towards website costs.

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:54:11 +0000

Your blogs become more and more popular each day. This is great news for you, but for us, as the blog hosting company powering your blogs, this means more and more traffic directed to our servers. You might have noticed that we've been playing around with the latest comments module, enabling and disabling it in order to enhance overall performance.

There's a new adsense placement test; inside the post. Since our small company goes in minus every month (expenses exceed revenues); please allow this new placement. We hope that it will make a difference. Also, please consider donating to us in order to keep this free blog hosting service operational.

Yours,
blogHi.com

cute, easy to use poll boxes in your posts

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:27:44 +0000

You can create polls for your blog. In your post management too, near the smileys icon, there's a new dPoll icon; once clicked, it leads you through a light one-time registration process by dPolls.com; and then lets you easily paste nice looking polls directly in your post. If you copy the dPolls.com code; you can also paste it in your blog menu template.

Polls quick summary:

Create polls for your blog in less than 3 minutes!
Get opinions from your blog readers about any subject you wish to.
Keep the users in your blog, with refresh-free, Ajax powered poll box.
Use an integrated 4 step quick and easy poll creation wizard.
Do daily polls, weekly polls,monthly polls or even longer.
You can choose to include the poll in dPolls polls repository, and get opinions from dPolls site users too.

A few tips:

Click on a poll question to get the poll details and statistics page.
Hover your mouse over a question or answer to make it scroll sideways automaticly if its too long.
If the poll has more than 4 answers, use the right scroll arrows to see the other answers.
Hover your mouse over the answers results bars to see how many people voted for each answer.
Check out the poll's page for related polls and maintenance options.

enjoy!
yours, blogHi.com

threaded comments

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:19:51 +0000

Since commenting seems to be a popular feature used by your blog visitory; there's a new enhancement to it: threaded comments. Near each comment there's a new link which says (Reply); once clicked, the visitor will be able to reply to that particular comment from the comments list.

Then, by the time the comments are displayed, if there are replies to certain comments, these replies are displayed below the comment they replied to; so that one can easier follow comment threads. The display hierarchy is a tree style; this tree is also present in the Reply to selection box.

As I read this brief introduction; it sounds really complicated. The feature itself should be pretty self-explanatory though.

new blog feature: trackback pings

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:47:15 +0000

We implemented the trackback feature (wiki, help) to your blogs. It is enabled by default, but can be taken off anytime under your blog comments management module. Put in simple words, this feature allows automatic comment posting from other blogs that reference your posts.

The trackback feature closes itself after one week after a post has been published; therefore it's biased towards fresh content. There's also some pretty extensive checks involved; also anti-spam protection. Let us know your eventual problems with it.

splog reports queue

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 10:03:05 +0000

This is just to announce the newest splogs removal queue; a webpage where you can check the current status of the blogs that were identified as SPAM blogs. The blogs that have more votes against them are in colored rows; therefore one can easily spot the ones that were rejected by most blogHi members. As soon as your splog report is approved; the spam blog is frozen. You can ask for removal privileges by contacting us.

Merry x-mas from the entire blogHi team.

members can report spam blogs

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:14:13 +0000

We were recently flooded with SPAM blogs; from China and all around. It's a shame so many so called search engine optimization companies employ such dirty web techniques. These splogs (wikipedia: splog) affect not only the image of our small but fast growing blog hosting website, but also the blogging experience of older blogHi members. Therefore, at the request of a few helpful members, we roll out a new members-only feature on blogHi: the possibility to report SPAM blogs.

Down the blogHi directory, or in the latest posts list, you will notice a small green link titled report. If you click on it, you are presented with a report page. At your wish, you can detail the reasons you find this blog doesn't deserve to be alive, and then click "Report Blog" to have your report sent to us. We monitor the reports queue, and react whenever you use this form.

If your report is accepted, your action improves your member karma, which will most likely be used as a criteria to sort member blogs. We thank Mark for the idea, and all other members for all their help.

cheap spam around

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 07:32:11 +0000

The cheap spammer infecting blogs here with advertisment for "Buy WoW Gold" will have his blog deleted. As well all the spamming comments he spread around will be wiped out. Please let us know if you encounter such behaviour in the future.
Updated: we deleted that person's account and blog. Any blogHi user that tries to spread spam into other blogs will suffer the same consequences.

a few site updates

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:00:38 +0000

We introduced a spell checked button in the toolbar; hopefully we will make less typing mistakes . Unfortunatelly the spell check works only with Internet Explorer, but it's implemented with an open source speller, and the library could be ported to other browsers in the future. There are also a few smileys packages there. Let us know if you need some more of these.
On the comments level, we also introduced an opt-in checkbox for users outside of blogHi, as well as an opt-out for blogHi members. We created this in order to avoid eventual SPAM complaints, since e-mail is such a sensitive issue.