BleedYellow Provides New Features for 173 Bloggers
Or " Here are some new features provided by Lotus Connections 2.0"... I think it's pretty awesome that there are 173 blogs hosted here - though most of you need to post a little more frequently!! But for those of you who stay on top of blogging, Connections 2.0 has a lot of nice updates to the Blogs service. The lists below are not exhaustive, but represent many of the new features.
Blogs Home - this feature has been significantly enhanced with extra views and a cleaner presentation of the data.
- Defaults to the most recent entries, but you can sort with various criteria - title, recommendations, comments, visits.
- Display summary (just title) or detail (first ~250 characters of body).
- On the left, you can also browse to All Blogs and My Recommendations.
- Blog Subscriptions - hover over these to either subscribe to Entries or Comments in your browser or by adding them to a Community.
- On the right are links to Featured Blog Entries, Most Recommended, Most Commented, and Most Visited.
Blog Authoring
- If you are a member of a multi-authored blog, you may choose which blog to post to more easily.
- Going into html editing mode, you may embed content from online services, such as YouTube.
- Preview the post before publishing it.
- Embedding images is now much simpler with a "wizard" instead of just entering a URL (to your own upload directory, usually). This will allow you upload directly from your computer, recent photos, or a URL. You may also choose the layout and size of the image and make the settings default. To me, this is very reminiscent of the Blogger upload functionality.
Commenting
- Comments are now in ascending order (like all good blogs should be)! This was one of the biggest complaints from the community and one of the first "issues" we noticed when setting up the site back in December.
- Much-improved comment previewing system. This was also a big complaint because you would have to go "back" in the browser in order to modify what you were previewing. Now, it is all inline.
- Have you ever wanted to cross-post a comment to your own blog? This is now possible using the "Add this comment to my own blog" option!
Etc...
- At the bottom of each blog post is a "Notify Others" option which allows you to select other registered BleedYellow users to send a link to the post you're currently viewing.
- Also at the bottom of each post is a "Flag as inappropriate"
- PlanetLotus "support". There were some formatting issues that prevented direct Connections 1.0.2 feeds from being used at PlanetLotus (you could use FeedBurner, though, which is probably a better idea - allowing you to track subscribers). This has been corrected with Connections 2.0. For the feed you submit to PlanetLotus, you need to use the following format: http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/roller-ui/rendering/feed/lotusnut/entries/rss (the default link is "/atom" at the end - Yancy Lent has found that /rss will work with the PlanetLotus feed system!! Thanks Yancy!
Funny story - after compiling this list I decided to see if there is a similar list in the InfoCenter, and there is. I believe I actually caught everything except for the AutoSave feature (which I have set for 3 minutes).
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BleedYellow Provides New Features for 173 Bloggers
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1 Karl-Henry Martinsson Permalink Is there a way to allow comments by visitors that do not have a BleedYellow account? That is one of the biggest concerns I have, that only BleedYellow members can comment, not all readers.
2 Chris Whisonant Permalink No this isn't possible. As you know, the Connections product is really intended to be a product implemented inside of a corporation. But some type of anonymous commenting system would probably be pretty nice.