The Official GeekMix Blog

Surveys!

You can now add surveys to your blog! Log in, go to one of your blogs and you'll see a link that says "Administer Surveys". You can define any number of surveys, and choose which one is active on the blog. The surveys appear at the top of the right column on every page of your blog.

Login issues fixed

We just fixed some issues with logins that were occasionally preventing logins and/or logouts.

Blogs & HTML

Couple of new features in the blogs. You can now specify HTML code to include in both the <HEAD> section of each blog page and a footer which appears below the content of each page. This can be used for including such things as tracking code for web-based traffic monitors (I use Google Analytics and it works great for this, they give you code to put in the <HEAD> section)

Woohoo, calendars!

As you might notice on the right side of the screen is our new calendar widget. It shows dates in bold that have blog entries. Clicking on those dates show the blog entries for that date.

Some new blog features

A few new things with regards to the blogs...

The name of the blog now appears in the banner, replacing "GeekMix.com", and you can now specify a tagline which also appears in the banner. One quick step away from being able to offer custom banner designs that users can select for their blog
When viewing a blog, the Home Page, About and Contact buttons go to the blog's home page, about page, and a blog-specific contact page now instead of the generic geekmix.com pages. You can specify the About page text when editing the blog settings.

Get yer news!

Yes, we now have news. As a registered user, you can add news links, rate them, and add them to your own link collection with the click of a button. They're on their own news page, as well as on your user home page when you login.

Links!

You can now create collections of links, and add links to your collections. Collections and links can be set with the usual security (visible to anyone, logged in users only, friends only, you only) and links can be tagged. All public links will also be used in figuring out the popularity ratings for links to go on the new popularity page too (see the little surfing icon over to the right).

The popularity page shows the most popular links and blogs.

Lots of changes...

-All registered users can now create up to 3 blogs

-Blogs use the URL format: http://blogname.geekmix.com now, and you can select (and change) the blogname portion to whatever you like

-A temporary side-effect of the different URL for blogs is that you now get logged out when switching between the main GeekMix site and your blogs. That will be fixed soon.

-A bunch of bug fixes

Introducing Tags

Ok, tags are now live. Give them a try. Basically, when you post something to your blog, there's a textbox to type in tags. Once you have a few tags on your posts, if you click the little down arrow next to the textbox it will show a "tag cloud", with your more frequently used tags in larger text. Clicking on them puts them into the textbox automatically.

Also, your tag cloud shows up on your blog home page. Clicking on a tag there will show just the posts tagged with that tag.

Alerts are now live!

See that light-blue box at the top right? That's the alert area. When one of your friends logs on, it will tell you. It will also tell you when someone wants to chat with your, and will relay other small messages to you while you're on this site. Cool, eh?