We will be doing our first major upgrade of 2007 at some point in the next three days. Nothing will be served until fully cooked.

Part of the upgrade may be a slightly more conservative look.

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.
  

We've added two new bundles (groups of structured data extensions) to v10 -- Person and Phone Numbers. The Person bundle allows you to add a Person -- a name and a company, and probably a job title in the future -- to an entry. The Phone Numbers bundle uses a single extension that lets you add one or more phone numbers, of varying types (work, home, cell, fax, etc.) to an entry.

Both of these bundles are "hcard aware", that is, they will create good looking hCard microformats when added to a post.

We really need to add a "fn" extension, to allow complicated editing of a person's name. Right now it's just an unstructured text field, which really isn't good enough. 

You can see a demo of an entry with Person, Address and Phone Numbers bundles added here.

A few notable differences between Firefox and Internet Explorer (v7 beta) for this website:

• There's supposed to be a diagram in this post (works on IE, not FF)
• The sidebar is supposed to have little dividing lines, not huge white bars (works on FF, not IE)

We're planning to go "really" live soon, so no rest for the weary.

Here's a pretty cool widget:

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.

Since we've already got the concept of a "Calendar of Events" (example), look forward to an implementation here on BlogMatrix soon!

In case you're wondering, the icons you're seeing here are called Silk and can be previewed here. We'll work out a better attribution page once we've got the v10 look and feel a little more stable.

There's also a super cool set of countries of the world icons from the same team. We don't have a user for these yet but I'm probably going to invent one just because.

If you've checked in here in the last couple of days, you'll have noticed a fairly unstable site. Sorry about that! We're busy upgrading to the V10 look and feel, which we've just received from our pals at Epiculture. 

On the plus side, V10 rocks. You're (probably) seeing the Blue version of the look & feel. We've also got Orange and Green versions, and once we get things nicely stabilized, we'll add a few more (which users can select from).

The "onamine" logo you're seeing at the top is for a different project -- we're just using that as a placeholder until we get our new logo straightened out.