Bloggers,
You may have noticed some missing portions of pages, not pages at all, or other problems on our blogs over the past few days. The problem has arrisen due to the limited space we have available.
Currently, we have 150 mb of space. As the number of bloggers have grown and the size of their blogs have grown, the space we have has gotten rather full.
This morning, in order to fix the disappearing content problem, I upped Ben's Friends capacity to 200 mb. Please continue to be thrifty with the amount and size of photos you upload (those are the general culprit). I know MT makes it wonderfully easy to upload any size photo, but the larger the photo the more space it takes up.
In a larger effort to remedy this situation, I would like to offer two solutions.
The first, is donations. Ben's Friends runs on BigBlueHat's servers and consequently takes up space that would otherwise be used for clients. Many of you have expressed a willingness to help curb the cost of the server space and time that goes into making Ben's Friends the best little blogging community we know. ;) If you are interested (please don't feel obligated), we will be taking donations in the near future. I will post more information once we have the PayPal account setup.
The second, is a file manager. There is one now that's in use by a very few people. If you upload lots of pictures and have wanted to remove old ones, or accidental ones but not known how, the file manager should solve your problems.
Because of the time it takes to set up File Manager accounts I won't be able to set everyone up all at once. I'll need you to comment on this post to let me know you're interested in getting access. Once setup you'll be able to add, delete, and move files within your blog directory. Please be adviced that moving, deleting, or renaming files will likely break your MT post that references that file. Be sure to keep that in mind when making changes.
I want to keep Ben's Friends free for those who are of the same mind and who are interested in getting started in blogging. BBH will be offering full fledged blogging services in the future for those in need of something larger.
Thank you for being understanding and patient with our limitations. We hope that we can continue to improve Ben's Friends to provide the best possible blogging community for our users.
P.S.: Another thing to ponder, if we could raise enough money through donations, we might consider (as a group) the possibility of purchasing the $99.95 Unlimited Personal Edition of MT 3.1. We could upgrade from our existing platform, have more features, and keep the community running smoothly. It's not a must, but something to consider. Thanks for your time.
For those of you who are itching to add a "currently reading" list to your side bar, but haven't had time to read the documentation, here is a cut and paste example:
<div class="sidetitle">Currently Reading</div>
<div class="side">
<MTList name="books">
1590521471
1581344988
0684823853
</MTList>
<MTListLoop name="books">
<MTwair imagesize="s">
<a href="<$MTwairURL$>"><img src="<$MTwairImage$>" border="1" title="<$MTwairName$>, by <$MTwairAuthor$>" alt="<$MTwairName$>, by <$MTwairAuthor$>" /></a>
</MTwair>
</MTListLoop>
</div>
You could also replace the ASIN with an MTInclude statement like this one:
<$MTInclude file="reading.inc"$>
That way you can create an Index Template called "reading.inc" to keep the list of books in. that can be helpful in someways and a pain in others. Ideally if you did that, you would have some other outside way of populating that list. For most people, though, including the numbers within the template is fine.
Please comment here if you have any trouble or questions.
I've been thinking about blogging more than I've been doing it. My thoughts have lead me to find more ways to equip our little group to blog more effectively.
There are some new features that have been in testing on my blog and on a resident beta tester's. Between the two of us, we've gotten most of the things working efficiently.
There are basically five new plugins available.
The first is a spam blocking system. You'll notice an extra line about that when you receive a comment notification. Just follow the instructions in the e-mail and you'll be good to go.
The second is called MTMacro. Just like macros in other applications, this little set of template tags lets you define reusable bits of code that will run on your entries. For example, on my blog I've been posting about books and plays I've read and movies I've watched. The entries look like nice little cover images with the title and current Amazon price underneath. In reality, there's really only one small bit of markup that looks like this:
<book_info asin="#####">Book Title</book_info>
Any time I put that markup in an entry it is replaced by a the book's information from Amazon. Finding and replacing the markup is done by MTMacro. The actual generation of the content is done by the next new feature here.
NOTE: You have to have this macro set up in a Template Module. If you want the code for this, please let me know. I'll likely post it on my blog after the first request (if not before).
The second to last feature is similar to MTAmazon, but with fewer features. It's called, MTWair (Wair = What am I reading). If you search for MTWair on Google you'll find that Jbo (our beta testor) has gotten it working on his blog and also has example code.
The last, but certainly not least: MTList. This plugin works great with the MTWair plugin. Rather than creating a seperate MTWair tag group for every book you've read, you can create an MTList, wrap one MTWair tag group with an MTListLoop tag, and output a seperate MTWair book for each loop. I'll post example code for this one soon, Lord willing.
So, that's the skinny on the new features here at Ben's Friends. Sorry, there aren't more code samples. If I had been keeping up with blogging as well as adding features, there wouldn't be this wonderful backlog of blogs needing to be written. Oh well, still learning discipline.
Enjoy the toys. :)