New Features: Domain Mapping
It hasn’t been officially released until now, but we have enabled domain mapping for all blogs right now for free! If you have a domain registered and want it tied to your blog, please feel free to follow the directions on the “Domain Mapping” page in your administration!
Domain mapping is the ability to take your favorite name and map it to your blog. For instance, in my example here, I have registered the domain http://trentadams.com and want it for my end blog URL. My blog is http://trent.onvertigo.com. I followed the directions in the admin and changed the DNS for my domain name to this server. Then I added the domain in the simple procedure in the admin and voila! All requests now hit http://trentadams.com
Best bet would be to try it out! As I mentioned before, this is currently a free service and we encourage people to use it! It is easier to have your blog mapped to a domain in case you ever decide to move your blog or just want to make sure that you have a constant name for google to find you! Have fun!
Onvertigo Media
We are getting closer to the official release of Onvertigo Media which will be the new video and audio site for our members. I have it working right now on a software called PHP Motion which allows you to have a video site much like YouTube. It is really cool! After testing it out more, getting it integrated with the users of Onvertigo Bloggers and a few cosmetic changes, we will be beta testing with a few users! Contact me if you are interested!
Here are a couple of screenshots for an idea of what it is like!
Global Posts and Tags
We are happy to launch our new global posts blog! This blog will showcase all the posts from the community and used as a great way to showcase what everyone is posting on their blogs! It will be populated as people blog! It is based on the great plugin from Donncha and is a wonderful way to have all the posts from our public blogs in one place.
This blog is not archiving what has already been blogged previous, but all posts from here on out will be! Should be fun! It also provides a place to search all content from all blogs and have global tags to look at!
Speed Up Browsing Of This Site
One of the changes that is now with Onvertigo Bloggers is the adaptation of “Google Gears” in the administration area. Not sure what that is? It really is a simple thing for you as a blogger here. There are quite a few “files” that are loaded when you are viewing the administration of your site and what “Google Gears” does is allow you to download copies of those files to your computer so that it loads much faster.
So how to I do it? Simple as clicking the “Turbo” button in the top right hand corner of your administration area (dashboard):
It really is that simple! A note though, this is not wise to use on a computer that is either shared or public, but if it is your own home computer, it is a nice addition!
No Adverts For Friends Or Members
I have to admit it, I am not really a fan of advertisements when I am reading blogs. It is frustrating to see flashing ads and images all over the page when really all you want to do is read the content. The service is still not open to the public and we wanted to look at ways to keep the service free. One of these ways was simple text based google ads on the sites (small ads). The other way was just eating the server costs ourselves. After speaking with the current members, we have come up with a nice compromise.
As of a couple of days ago, all blogs will have ads displayed on them, but they are only content related and small. The bonus though is also the following:
- Ads are not displayed to anyone that is logged in to the service ever. If you are reading other blogs on the service and logged in, you will never see an ad on a post.
- Regular readers of your blog are also considered and if someone visits your blog often they will also never see an advertisement. This is a way not to upset your regular traffic and works extremely well.
- Most advertisements are served up for traffic from search engines and the “occasional” visitor to your sites.
After speaking with some great friends about these rules, they have found great success and is something that is accepted by their members. We are also going to be offering the ability for members to “opt out” of having advertisements served on their choice of blog for a small nominal fee. This will be introduced in a upcoming (soon) announcement on this blog!
Of course, we are keeping with our existing premium services offered to our members for their additional functionality. If we end up in a situation where the service is running fine without the advertisements, we might retire them after covering all our costs. It will depend on how we go in the future 