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Welcome to FourFreedomsBlog ver 3.0
Author: BobR    Date: 08/25/2010 03:03:14

FourFreedoms blog has been up and running for nearly 3 yrs now, and it's been starting to show. The overall look and feel has hardly changed since we started and we felt like it was time for a facelift. It was also time to make some useability adjustments, both for our members and casual visitors.

So - here is a list of the major changes:

Stylistic:
- Removed the various colored rounded-corner panels
- Cleaned up the graphics and menus
- Simplified the menu bar
- Lightened the overall shades of color blog-wide
- Changed the comment/blog edit box from white on dark blue to black on white
- Changed the quote boxes to blend better with the new look & feel

Functional:
- Got rid of unused and little used blog features, such as:
    - Polls
    - Advertisement panel
    - TrackBack panel
    - Forum link
- No more right-side panel, so blog makes better use of screen space
- Hiding/Showing blog and menus no longer refreshes entire screen (settings are saved in the background)
- Moved emoticons and audicons to be directly below edit box, so they are always there if you need them (in both cases, they are still the abreviated list, with the complete list still available via popup).
- Emoticons, Audicons, and edit buttons can all be easily and quickly hidden/shown
- When quoting a comment, it simply pops the quote into the edit box without refreshing the entire screen.
- Login and Search are now simple drop downs.
- Change password is now a popup screen
- Search now incorporates a weighted keyword table derived from the blog and comments, speeding the search process.
- Search results are now displayed in a "google"-type list
- When displaying a search result blog, the "search for" word is highlighted.
- Added user options for hiding YouTubes and Flash videos (for faster page loading), just like the "Hide Pictures" option did (displays them as links). And - it works correctly now.
- Added a security-level setting for blog posts, so they can be set to "members only" when necessary (such as for discussing member meetups, or personal details between members).
- The blog description and Fold are now required fields when creating/saving a new blog post.

We also added the Mission Statement and Rules of Conduct from the old Forum.

We put a lot of work into this to improve your FourFreedoms blog experience, but we're not perfect. These are known bugs that we're still trying to resolve:

- The ordered/unordered lists don't render correctly in blog posts (hence my using dashes for this post)
- In Internet Explorer, if you access the Set User Options screen, you cannot access the Change Password screen (and vice-versa) without refreshing the screen.
- The keywords table is not yet fully populated, so the search will not find newer blogs.
- Sometimes the screen doesn't "accordian" back from the "Share This" blog post drop down (noticed on Safari browser only).

Please let us know if you find other problems. We also plan on adding some other features in the near future, such as:

- Refresh comments without refreshing the entire page
- Edit a comment and save it, or delete a comment and only refresh the comments.
- WYSIWYG editor option for blog posts
- Caching-as-you-edit for blog posts, so you don't lose the whole blog if your browser crashes.

Enjoy!

 

75 comments (Latest Comment: 08/26/2010 03:50:14 by BobR)
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