Sorry for the long radio silence; we've been busy trying to get the BlogMatrix Platform in the can, which has included literally hundreds of install-and-test cycles. As we prepped the package, it became evident that one critically important part of the picture was missing: some form of social networking, particularly the ability to arbitrarily form groups, aggregate posts, add "friendships" (though we're not sold on this word), etc.. Fortunately, most of the pieces for this are were around, just a reasonable amount of polishing and testing was needed.

So, hoping for a September grand opening, we're making August "at-least-a-post-a-day" month, we're we'll talk about what we're doing and how it all fits into the structure of an Enterprise 2.0 organization.

We successfully upgraded the software to it's latest version this morning. This is mainly UI tweaks and performance enhancements -- if there's any issues, please contact us ASAP.

In case you haven't noticed, BlogMatrix has a template system so if you don't like the "System" look and feel, you can easily install your own from the admin page. What's our template language? Simple: we use Blogger's "classic" templates. You can see the manual for these here. If you're migrating from a blogger account (or just have one) you can grab it from over there and install here.

Important: we don't work with new template language. If the file begins with '<?xml', it's no good to us (yet).

Hint: we're working on extending the Blogger template model to be more flexible for our needs. One good trick is this...

<Blogger n="50">

... which increases the number of entries shown from the default 20 to 50 (or whatever)

We'll probably be removing some functionality from the templates in the near future too. In particular, we're definitely removing "views" and we may be removing the ability to use the System 'frame' with your own template.

This is going to be my SOP for the rest of the year:

Aside from the lack of start-up capital, one of the most frustrating elements of the tech community is the total lack of self-promotion. Instead of yelling about the great things they’re developing and how they’re going to kick some serious ass, too many Canadian tech entrepreneurs quietly toil away and then wonder why no one (investors, media, employees) aren’t beating a path to their doors.

We've done another refresh this morning, probably our last major blast for 2006.

• posting entries should be faster, as we download a lot less information to your browser
• we've added numerous IE bug fixes and improvements (or rather, less visual effects on IE)
• when posting, tags are select via a drop-down list
• we've added a number of new structured data types, which you can see on the right (when posting). The utility of these will be revealed in the new year but feel free to play with them now.
• we haven't managed to fix the wrong Unapproved Comment/Draft Post count. Back to the drawing board...

Merry Christmas to everyone (and/or your holiday of choice)!

Shire News Network, one of our podcasters has been nominated as Weblog Awards Finalist. Click on the image to give them a vote!

We've done another code update this morning. This includes a number of bug fixes, plus adds a "Cancel" button on the post page and makes the admin page utilize the full width of the page. If there's any issues, please tell us!

Note that tags are now comma separated (as opposed to space). If things are acting funny, you may have to click the "Reload" button on your browser to get the latest updates.

• the site should look a lot better under Internet Explorer now
• you should start seeing the "Quotas and Payment" information in the next day or two, and we'll probably start billing next week

The PC Advisor reports that Google plans to extend its search results to give Google Base (read more) results also:

Google plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season.

[...] When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, according to Bear Stearns & Co analysts.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service.

That is, if your company places information about "widgets for sale" into Google Base (with price, picture and description information), people searching for "widgets" on Google will be given the option of seeing the "for sale" results.

The Read/Write web believes this will pose a problem for microformats; I'm not so sure -- microformats are a way of specifying structured data elements in a web page in a formal and open way. Google Base is a proprietary database run by Google Corp -- if you can create the data to go in the latter, you should have no trouble publishing it for the former.

Nothing major to report. We're making incremental changes almost everyday and if you see any problems or have issues to report, please send them to us. Note that e'll be finalizing and releasing podcasting pricing next week and will start billing first week of October.

Python 2.5 is now available. Lots of neat things I'd like to use (especially try/except/finally and with).

We'll probably roll over BlogMatrix (Python 2.4) in about 6-9 months, once the libraries catch up and stabilize.

Brady at O'Reilly Radar writes:

GeoPress is a plugin that makes it easy to embed locations and maps in a WordPress blog - without having to code! It was previewed last week at FOSS4G and v1.0 was released today at EuroOSCON in Brussels.

As evidenced by the remarkable adoption of geocoding in Flickr (over 4 million photos have been geo-tagged in just over 3 weeks) people want to add this data to their content. GeoPress enables that for a WordPress blog. It allows the user to easily add maps and geo-coded locations to their posts. Blog posts can also be organized by location. Embedded locations and addresses are inserted as microformats and are syndicated out in GeoRSS 1.0 (which was finalized and released last week at FOSS4G).

Yeah, yeah -- we've been showing this for half a year :-)

Here are BlogMatrix's current plans for OpenID:

• we're going to do something eventually, probably by year-end
• accounts will be created in the "normal way"; there will be a settings page for OpenID
• once you've setup your OpenID information, you'll bypass the BlogMatrix login stage. You will still, however, be logging into a "normal" BlogMatrix account
• the login page will have a little OpenID icon in the User ID field, for those in the know
• we're probably not going to be an identity server
• we may or may not do something about transfering identity information; I don't like what OpenID has done and I think microformats can handle it better

Prompted by a Chris Messina post, I decided to do a little investigation into OpenID (wikipedia). I'll be doing this a series of posts over the next couple of days. Adding OpenID is an immediate priority for us (see Ross Rader for the though pattern involved) but as time becomes available I could see this being added.

You can follow all my posts on this subject at this page or this RSS feed.

Welcome to the end of summer! A few quick updates:

• We now have an MP3 Player Gadget -- have a quick look on our home page in the sidebar if you want to see it in action. If you'd like to add it to your weblog:
• go to My Account
• scroll down till you see Sidebar Gadgets
• select MP3 Podcast Player
• press Save Gagdet
• if you'd like to  see it at the top of your sidebar:
• go to My Account
• select List/Edit Gadgets
• click the top option
• We've made this new look work much better on Internet Exporer
  
• We've made a number of performance improvements; there should be fewer sudden slowdown periods

Things have been chugging along fairly well; the webserver machine isn't quite as fast as we'd like so we have an extra 1Gb of memory on order. Other than that, we've got something like a real front page up now -- more to come there soon and we've been making minor UI tweaks here and there.

There's a few more updates this morning:

• We've added a "Text Gadget", so you can add your own arbitrary text to the sidebar. If you go to your admin page and then to your Profile, you will get instructions use this.
• You can now control your comments (from your Profile). Your options are:
• accept all comments, display immediately
• accept all comments, but they must be approved before posting
• don't accept comments
• On a technical note, we've upgraded to mod_python 3.2.10 and we're using FileSession to manage sessions (which should cut a few tenths of seconds of page loading time).

Things are still stabilizing but looking good. Of particular note:

• stats are still being loaded from the old blogmatrix.com, so your subscription counts etc. will be temporarily low
• we had a problem with RSS feeds when filenames had a space in them; this is fixed
• more comment control features are on the way
  

Once again, don't hesitate to email us if you notice anything wrong or missing.

Welcome to the new "V10" look of blogmatrix.com. We just made the transition yesterday afternoon, so here's a few tips and pointers:

• You are not being charged right now for using our service; we'll have more announcements about this in the near future but until post move jitters are finished, enjoy!
• If there's something missing that you expected to see, contact us ASAP; we'll get it fixed up
• We've changed the way URLs look; unfortunately, this means that some of your listeners/viewers may get duplicate downloads. This is a one time thing and we couldn't find a way around it.
• Do you like the new look? Hate it? Comments? Tell us.