Blogs

Configure

Changing Your Blog Name or Catchphrase

Your blog name is the title that displays in the text banner for the blog pages. It also shows as the title for your blog in recently updated directories, if you choose to make your blog public.

Your blog description or catchphrase is a short description about the blog and displays under the blog name in the page banner.

The blog name and description can be changed at any time. On your Blogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the blog you wish to edit. This opens the Blog Basics page where the blog name and description are entered.

Enter the new blog name and/or description and click “Save Changes”. After saving, publish your pages to see the update on your site. A Publish button appears at the top of the page after clicking the button to save. Publish all files and click View Blog to view your weblog in a new browser window.

If you are using a banner image by Setting Your Template Style, the image will display on the blog instead of the weblog name and description.

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Changing Your Blog Folder Name

Your blog folder name is the name of the folder in which your blog files are kept on the server. This folder name is appended to your Friendster Blogs web address and is used when you or your readers would like to visit this blog.

On your Blogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the blog you wish to edit. This opens the Blog Basics page where the blog folder name is set.

Edit the folder name and click “Save Changes”. After saving, publish your pages to see the update on your site. A Publish button appears at the top of the page after clicking the button to save. Publish all files and click View Blog to view your weblog in a new browser window.

Also see: Setting Your Home Blog

IMPORTANT: Once you create your blog we recommend that you do not change the folder name. If you do so after your blog is created, links to your blog will be broken. Additionally, if you have uploaded any images, the paths will be broken and the images will not display. We provide this option for users who feel that it is crucial that they are able to change the path but also understand the consequences.

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Configuring Your Blog Archives

Archives are the pages where your posts are stored. A post is archived immediately as it is created, and then you select how many archives to display on the main index page for the weblog with the “Number of posts” (or days) setting when Setting Your Blog Post Options.

Archiving preference customization is only available to paid members of Friendster Blogs. Archives can be displayed and organized by date (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) or by content (Individual, Category):

Daily: Works best with shorter posts or with many posts during the course of a day.
Individual: Works best with longer, essay-style posts. This archive type is required if you have comments enabled.
Weekly: Works best if you vary between long and short posts and have a relatively steady amount of posts. This is optimal for 15 to 30 posts during the course of a week.
Category: Ideal for categorized posts or weblogs that are organized into topics.
Monthly: Works best with shorter posts and can accommodate 30-50 posts during the course of a month.

On your Weblogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the weblog you wish to configure archives for, then click the Archiving link. This opens the Archiving setup page where the archive types are chosen. You can select no archiving, a single type of archive or multiple types.

Select the type(s) you would like to use by checking or unchecking the boxes and click “Save Changes”. Publish the weblog to see the update on your site.

Note: If you wish to have comments enabled on your weblog (meaning that your readers will be able to post comments in response to your weblog posts), be sure to select “Individual” as one of your archiving options.

Display links to your archives in your sidebar by checking the “Archive Links” box when Setting Your Template Content.

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Using Categories With Your Blog

Categories can be used to organize your weblog posts for easier reference, archiving and display. Using categories is optional.

In order to display categories on your weblog, you must enable category archiving. Enable category archiving by Configuring Your Blog Archives. Customizing your blog archiving preferences are only available to paid members of Friendster Blogs.

To assign a post to a category, see Basic Post Fields.

On your Weblogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the weblog you wish to edit categories on, then click the Categories link to open the setup page for Categories.

Default Categories

When you create a new weblog, a default set of categories is provided to get you started:

Books 	
Current Affairs 	
Film 	
Food and Drink 	
Games 	
Music 	
Religion 	
Science 	
Sports 	
Television 	
Travel 	
Web/Tech 	
Weblogs

To enable a default category, click the checkbox next to the category name and press “Save Changes”.

To disable a default category, uncheck the box next to the category name and press “Save Changes”. Disabled categories do not appear in the Category drop-down menu on the Compose a New Post/Edit Post page.

Custom Categories

To add a new category to your weblog, simply type in the new category name in one of the blank fields for Custom Categories and press “Save Changes”.

If you wish to change the name of a custom category, type the new name in the field of the category name you want to replace, and press “Save Changes”.

To remove a custom category, click the Delete button next to the category name.

The custom categories you have set will appear in the Category menu on the Edit Post page.

You can also add a custom category from the Category menu on the Edit Post page. From the menu, select “Add a new Category”. A popup will appear where you can type the name of the new category and press the Add button. The category will be saved, and your post will be assigned to the category.

Displaying Categories on Your Blog

Basic Templates

Categories are displayed on a blog as a list in the sidebar or in the post footer by setting it for display in the weblog content.

On your Blogs tab, click the Edit Design shortcut for the blog where you would like to add the list of categories, then click the Content link to enter the content setup area for the currently selected template set.

Display a list of the categories in your blog sidebar:

Show a listing of your category names (the ones that have posts assigned to them) by displaying the “Categories” option in your template set. If category archiving is enabled for the blog, the category names will also link to the archive page for that category.

Check the “Categories” box in the Your Sidebar Content section and press Save Changes. A list of your categories will now be displayed in your blog sidebar.

Display the category name in the footer after each post:

Show the category or categories that a post is assigned to by selecting a post footer that displays the category name.

Check the box for the “Weblog Post Footer” option and use the drop-down menu to select a footer that has Category in it. Press Save Changes and each of your posts will now have the category or categories displayed after it (in the post footer) on your blog.

Advanced Templates

Categories are displayed on a blog using advanced templates with the Category Tags (advanced templates do not have a Content link on the Design tab).

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Setting Your Blog Publicity

In the Publicity setup for your blog, you answer a couple of questions about what you would like to do when you update the blog. These options are only available to paid Friendster Blog members.

On your Blogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the blog you wish to edit, then click the Publicity & Syndication link to open the Publicity setup page.

Would you like your blog to be public?

Public means that your blog can be indexed by search engines.

Setting a weblog as “No” for publicity means that code will be added to prevent Google and other search engines from indexing the pages. To update the archive pages with this code, publish all files for the blog with the Publish button on the Design tab for the weblog. Note: Setting a weblog as “No” for publicity does not password protect the site. Password protection is configured by Setting Up Password Protection.

Would you like to notify third-party services when you update your weblog?

This means that whenever you save a new post, another website will automatically be contacted and told that you have updated your site. Then, you’ll appear in the site listing, driving more traffic to your blog While this is great for publicity, this process sometimes slows down the speed in which your post is saved. If you notice saving taking a long time, you may wish to turn off this notification.

You can choose to update blo.gs and weblogs.com. The next time you post to your blog, pings will be sent to the services you have selected. At the current time, it is not possible to add any other sites that you wish to ping.

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Syndicating Your Blog

Visitors to your site can subscribe to your syndicated site feed (your RSS feed) in a desktop or web-based news aggregator. This allows your visitors to automatically know when you’ve updated your site and to read your content in a variety of different applications.

On your Blogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the weblog you wish to edit, then click the Publicity & Syndication link to open the Syndication setup page. Cusotmizing blog syndication preferences is only available to paid Friendster Blogs members. Free (ad-supported) members have syndication for their blog automatically turned on.

Select whether you wish to provide excerpts or a full post. Most blog readers who use aggregators or news readers appreciate the option of being able to read an entire post in the tool itself. If you select excerpts only, the reader will have to view the rest of your post in the standard web browser.

Atom

See AtomEnabled for information on Atom.

The Atom feed for the weblog is located:

http://example.blogs.friendster.com/blog/atom.xml

RSS

The RSS feed for the weblog is located:

http://example.blogs.friendster.com/blog/index.rdf

You can display a link for your RSS feed on your site by Setting Your Template Content and selecting the “Syndicate Link” for display. This link can then be dragged and dropped into a news reader to subscribe to the feed.

The templates for your weblog also have the auto-discovery code included, so if the news reader supports auto-discovery, the link to the feed will be picked up automatically.

Friendster Blogs and Aggregators

An aggregator or news reader is an application (desktop, web-based, plugin) that allows you to subscribe to “feeds” of weblogs and news sites. Usually, these applications are scheduled to check and see if any of the sites you have subscribed to have been updated and if they have, the new version of the site (usually a post) will appear for you to read. Aggregators are great because they blog weblog updates to you, instead of you having to actively look to see if your favorite reads have been updated.

There are a number of popular aggregator clients that run as desktop applications. On Windows, one of the more popular desktop clients is FeedDemon (feeddemon.com), which makes it easy to add feeds and view them in a newspaper-style view or as individual entries. A similar view that can be integrated directly into Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) is available with the NewsGator (newsgator.com) plug-in. NewsGator can also be configured to allow posting directly to Friendster Blogs from within Outlook.

On the Macintosh, most users prefer NetNewsWire (ranchero.com) as their desktop aggregator, and NetNewsWire Pro adds the ability to post to Friendster Blogs directly from within the application.

In general, any desktop or web-based aggregator which reads RSS feeds is appropriate for use with Friendster Blogs, and we recommend trying a few to find out which aggregator client best complements the way you work with Friendster Blogs.

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Setting Your Weblog Post Options

The post options set the configuration for the display of your weblog posts.

On your Weblogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the weblog you wish to edit, then click the Display link to open the Display Options setup page.

After making changes to the display options, press “Save Changes”. To see these changes reflected on your public site, use the publish button that appears after saving.

Number of posts to display on front page of your weblog: Select the number of posts to display on the front page of your weblog.; You can select to display by number of days, or number of posts. If you select days, then only posts that are dated within that number of days will display on your weblog main index. Selecting the number of posts will always display that number of posts.
Order of posts displayed: Select whether you want your posts displayed with the oldest posts first (ascending order) the newest posts first (descending order).
Format for date display: Select the format in which you would like dates on your weblog displayed.
Format for time display: Select the format in which you would like times on your weblog displayed.
Language for display: Select the language in which you would like dates and headers on your weblog displayed.
Default Text Formatting for new posts: Specifies the default Text Formatting option when creating a new post.
Number of words in excerpt: If you choose to syndicate your site and use excerpts only, this setting controls the number of words provided in excerpts.
Default Posting Status: Specifies the default Posting Status when creating a new post.

The options displayed are already set to the default values that usually work best for most weblogs. Unless you specifically want to edit an option, you are not required to change any of the values.

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Setting Your Weblog Comment Options

The comment options set the default behavior for comments.

On your Weblogs tab, click the Edit Configuration link for the weblog you wish to edit, then click the Display link to open the Display Options setup page.

In the Comment Options section, you can set the default for the “Accept Comments” setting on new posts, and enable/disable email notifies when a new comment is posted to your weblog, as well as set options for the displaying the comments:

Allow Comments default: Specifies the default Allow Comments setting when creating a new entry.
Order of comments displayed: Select whether you want visitor’s comments displayed with oldest comments first (ascending order) or newest comments first (descending order).
Text Formatting for comments: Specifies the Text Formatting option to use for formatting visitor comments.
Email new comments?: Would you liked to be notified via email when someone posts comments to your site?
Allow HTML in comments?: Should visitors be able to include HTML in their comments? If not, all HTML entered will be stripped out.
Auto-link URLs?: If enabled, all web URLs will be transformed into links to that web URL. NOTE: if you have enabled Allow HTML in comments, this option is ignored.

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Setting Your Weblog TrackBack Options

The TrackBack options set the default behavior for TrackBacks. Also see: What is TrackBack?

On your Weblogs tab, click Edit Configuration for the weblog you wish to configure, then click the Display link to open the Display Options.

In the TrackBack Options section, you can set the default for the “Accept TrackBacks” setting on new posts, and enable/disable email notifies when your weblog receives a new TrackBack ping:

Allow TrackBack Pings on by default?: If enabled, new posts will automatically be set with the “Accept TrackBacks” box checked.
Email new TrackBack pings?: If enabled, you will be notified via email when someone sends a TrackBack ping to your site.

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