As some of you may know, Howard Dean and folks are allowing real live bloggers on to the floor of this years Democratic National Convention (DNC). There will be one blogger per state or territory.
Today, Howard Dean announced who those blogs would be. Turns out, 21 of them run SoapBlox!
Click below the fold to see the complete list, with the SoapBlox's in bold.
Congrats to all of you SoapBlox owners! You make me proud.
Now the real question is: are the SoapBlox blogs from states that matter?
Once you log in, check out the current "thumbs up/thumbs down" rating system.
We'll also be allowing a radio button rating system a la Daily Kos, as well as continuing to provide the drop-down version. I plan on adding a "star-based" rating system for comments as well. What's cool about some of this is that while I'll give you "stars", you could theoretically just swap out the images and use whatever you'd like.
I posted a version of this at Daily Kos a couple weeks back, and now I'll do it here. This is still beta testing and an experiment in business model
With SoapBlox Lite you'll get a blog with front page diaries, a "user diary" section and a "recommended diary" section just like Daily Kos.
You'll get Ajax-based comments and comment ratings, nested comments, and a WYSIWYG editor for diaries and comments. You'll have a fully functional tagging for post organization. You'll have polls for your diaries and RSS feeds for you, your SoapBlox Lite, and every single user that joins.
You'll get a 'your name'.soapblox.net URL.
All of this is provided to you for FREE in exchange for a banner ad across the top of your SoapBlox Lite.
We're looking for some folks to help us beta test our software and set up process. If you'd like to take the plunge, please visit the following site to sign up:
Unlike the normal SoapBlox, SoapBlox Lite does not include an events calendar, quick hits, and some other more advanced functionality. It includes the core functionality you need to have a successful online community with user diaries, nested comments, and comment ratings.
We're not exactly sure how many of these sites we be beta testing. This is an experiment in a business model to see if there's demand out there for more online communities. I'm thinking for sure we'll do 10. Heck, we might go up to 30. It all depends!
All current customers should have received this email.
SoapBlox - Changes in Terms of Service and Plans
With the coming New Year, SoapBlox is also changing. Starting January 1, 2008 we'll be modifying our basic hosting plan to offset increased costs, we’ll actually be enforcing our bandwidth and disk space policies, and there will be an official Terms of Service.
Painstaking work has been done to develop our new pricing policies and terms of service in attempts to meet the needs of all our customers.
2. Creation of "temporary"/preview Layouts - Drawing on my gained experience from the Media Module, we'll be creating a way for you to change the look and feel of your SoapBlox without changing the live site. Then, when everything is done, you'll click a button, and you site will change.
3. Ability to create "template", one-off pages pages - Right now, we have static diaries. We're going to take this to a whole new level now, giving you the ability to create completely stand alone pages that could have none of the typical layouts of a SoapBlox page.
4. Allow editing and adding of polls after a diary has been published. Folks of been clamoring for this one for a while, so we'll get it done.
5. Open sourcing once the next version is deployed to all sites. - Yes, that's right. SoapBlox is going Open Source! We'll have a version of SoapBlox available soon for you to download. Imagine: non-SoapBlox Network, Inc. run SoapBloxes!
Other ideas
- Linking events and diary entries
- More URL re-write work
- Integrating SoapBlox with JSPWiki
Note
The other big thing that will be happening is a change in our hosting pricing policy. Starting Jan 1st, 2008, the hosting plan we've all come to know and love is going away. I've been busting my brain trying to come up with a fair way to deal with what is now the second price increase to our server costs. I'll have the results of that emailed to all customers soon.
Talk to me
So... let me know what you want. Your ideas are always the best.
All sites are now running an updated version of SoapBlox that fixes these bugs:
- SPAM will be killed on the registration page, adding a captcha on the email process.
- typing html in to the WYSIWYG editor will function correctly again. (for both comments and diaries)
- draft diaries will be published at the time the are moved to public, instead of the time they were first created.
- the problem with ajax comments not retaining auto-formatting has been solved. This was caused when a user has WYSIWYG as their diary editor, but AJAX comments on.
- The problem with the calendar not working right is fixed. Very silly problem.
- There is a bug where if you have non-ajax comments on and your default is WYSIWYG, switch to AUTO_FORMAT causes weird behavior. This is now fixed.
- Problems with the Comment Display Manager not showing all the comments in Flat mode has been fixed.
ALL sites are running this code!
As always let me know of issues. There's still the <li> issue. We're going to try and relax the parser for those. and possible "p" tags.
Bronco Bill said some Bad HTML got through his parser, I'll research that one too.
- there's some issue with the non-default comment display preferences. All the comments do not appear.
- there seems to be some issue with the parser doing [] links. If you get the dreaded aa> error, please come to this thread and post a comment with the link causing the problem (if you can single it out).
- the calendar is having issues saving changes to events, and displaying them if you don't have the calendar blox on the your page.
- Using WYSIWYG and YouTube Embeds seems to cause problems.
- Adding a CAPTCHA image on user registration requiring an email address. You can actually have a CAPTCHA on this page NOW if you go to "Admin > Manage Settings" and check the "Allow Registration w/o Email" box. If Spam is getting you, do this.
Please let me know if you are having any other issues. An emergency fix will go out as soon as possible--no later than this weekend.
Right now none of the changes are in code you can touch. The update should be painless and invisible to you.
