Site Upgraded! - Group Blogs, Personlization, Social Bookmarking, Tags, Privacy etc!

Dear IL’ites,

It gives me great pleasure to bring several new features to our site. Please read below to understand these features, play with them and share your feedback in this thread!

Taking our Blogs to the next level!

We now have more than 100 bloggers and 1500 blog posts. We hope that these new features enables our existing bloggers to widen their readership and bring new bloggers to our site!

1. Group Blogs – Members can now join together and start a group blog. That way, they can provide fresh and varied content to readers and also share the load of keeping the blog up to date. Existing bloggers can use this feature to invite other members to write a guest blog post and spice things up!
2. Blog Customization - To a very big extent, bloggers can now customize how their blog looks. They can change colors, fonts, background pictures, layouts and more!
3. Blogroll & Custom Blocks – Bloggers can add a custom block to the blog side bar. How bloggers use this is entirely up to their imagination. Bloggers can use this as a blog roll, links to their best content, links to finest blogs of IL, links to their forum contributions etc.
4. Custom Pages – Similar to custom blocks, bloggers can now add custom pages to their blog. This can show up either in the left side bar or on the top of the blog. Bloggers can use this to write a neat “About Me” page or a “heart-to-heart” appeal to readers to leave comments or whatever.
5. Tags – Bloggers can now add tags to their blog entries. That tags will show up on the tag cloud and helps readers to find blogs with similar content more easily.
6. Social Bookmarking – Each blog entry is now going to have social bookmarking icons on the top right. This should encourage readers to share blog entries and help drive more visitors to IL blogs. (Bloggers, encourage your readers to do so!)
7. Private Entry Manager – You can now designate certain entries as private, even if you leave your blog as public.

Enhancing Forum Experience

While we made substantial feature introductions to our blog platform, we made some good upgrades that should help forum experience for everyone.

1. Profile Customization – Members should now be able to customize their profile page. Members should be able to change fonts, colors, background pictures etc. Play around with it and make your profile your own!
2. Social Bookmarking – Each thread is now going to have social bookmarking icons on the bottom. This should encourage readers to share interesting discussions and help drive more visitors to our site
3. Tags – Members can now add tags to the threads. This tagging helps members easilu discover related discussions.
4. Private Messages
   1. ..now have quick reply, saving an extra click.
   2. ..can now be sorted by Title, Sender and Date
   3. ..can be filtered by sender, Title, a given date period and whether a message has been read or not
5. Notices are now dismissable – Dismiss a notice after you read it.

We really hope that these new features benefit our community at large. Please get creative and try all these new features and put them to maximum use. If you liked a particular feature, please share it below. If you have any questions on the features, please ask them below. Thank you.

Post reserved for clarifications. Thanks.

Malathy and the team,


Wow. I am gasping after going through all the upgrade, you have outdone yourself.

I still need to find my foot hold in all the new features, but I definitely had to step in to say you people rock.

I know it would not have been a simple task, to put together all the features, and the tests and trials..

Way to go. and looks like there is no limit . I like the blog additional features (though i need to understand them more, quick reply in pm, notice dismissal is great.

Malathy....

Wow.. Let me congratulate you on this innovative idea... All the new features are absolutely great.. I liked the profile customization and the Tagging Feature. This would definitely reduce a lot of search.
I however did not understand about the Notice part. Other than that it is stunning

CutePavi,

The notice dismissal is nothing but you have x button in the notice bars that are prominently displayed when there are some announcements and you can just dismiss them once you have read them. isn't it.

Hi...Just I want to start blogging in IL.I've tried through e-mail,asked question in the Q&A forum.but couldn't get the right path.Please help

hmm, I really appreciate new features. good

Hi IL team,
wow, IL is becoming savvier day by day. I shall have to go thro all these and get my foothold, it looks like I have been brought into my own house with different features. I will have a nice time exploring all these and seeing others use it.
Congratulations to the team for this work!

Dear Indus lady and friends,
I was very happy to see the new features added to the site,particularly the blogs.Iam just waiting to try and customize my blog.I still do not know how to go about it.

I did not understand the tag feature and how I could use it.Please do explain or give a sample .

I have nodoubt tat the site in general and the Blogs page in particular is going to look great!

love
mithila kannan

Dear malathy...
great new features... new look to the profile pages sounds interesting... your team is really rocking... when i saw the message its under upgradation even though we are missing the site we were waiting for the new features thanks for all your efforts...