Crablog

Saturday March 31, 2007 : Can't go a year without any news

We here at crablog (pronounce it however you want) are committed to offering our users a blogging experience of the highest caliber. Even though there has not been a single post to the official crablog blog in almost a year, we have been busy behind the scenes working on other projects not remotely related to crablog because they were more interesting to us at the time. But recently some users have become annoyed by the amount of comment spam they get in their blogs, and they are tired of manually going through the database and removing all of it. Even though it is quick to remove it all, it seems like a fun task to make a complicated method to handle the comment spam automatically. So we give our personal commitment to ourselves (since we are basically the only people who use crablog for blog hosting) to take care of the spam problem. Obviously the CAPTCHA image was not completely working, we will look in to this and other methods of curbing the comment spam. If you are an avid reader and commenter on a blog (one of the few blogs on here, none of which are worth reading), then we please ask that you report any problems you may be encountering when trying to leave comments!

Posted by Paul at 4:21 pm (Permalink)


Sunday August 06, 2006 : Public Directory

Lately there has been quite a bit of spam taking up space in the public directory. To cut down on this, blogs will not show up in the public directory until the email address of the owner has been verified.

Posted by Paul at 11:35 am (Permalink)


Sunday May 28, 2006 : Comment Systems Future

The next step we are taking is integrating the comment system within each blog's skin. Seeing the horrible Crablog header probably scares away some people who want to comment on users blogs. The spam protection will also be improved upon.

Posted by Paul at 2:57 pm (Permalink)


Wednesday March 29, 2006 : Dynamic blog content images

Crablog blog content image

Since the beginning Crablog has had the ability to generate an image with the contents of the blogs most recent post. This is useful for inserting in to many profiles, such as Myspace, where dynamic content can be hard to insert. This is the way it has looked since it was first created; this is the next feature that will be worked on. It needs a fresh and clean look, and some bugs need to be worked out. Look in on your account page soon for information on using this feature.

Posted by Paul at 9:59 am (Permalink)


Saturday February 04, 2006 : Templates

Blog with template example

Users can now change the look and feel of their blog by making new or using existing skins. There is no support or documentation on how to use templates, but a quick tutorial and reference page will be made shortly. Two examples of the new template system can be seen here and here, both of these skins were adapted (easily and quickly) from other major blog template formats.

Posted by Paul at 11:09 am (Permalink)


Monday January 30, 2006 : Something before the weekend

We are doing some final tweaking and then after some testing a new feature will be ready for public use.

Posted by Paul at 11:59 am (Permalink)


Wednesday January 04, 2006 : Post directly to your blog from other websites

A basic posting API (subset of the blogger / metaweblog API) has been implemented. You can now post to your blog using standard blogging clients and other services such as Digg and Flickr. See your account control panel for more information. We will be expanding the API to support more functionality and compatibility soon.

Posted by Paul at 11:32 pm (Permalink)


Sunday January 01, 2006 : Work here continues in to the New Year

As the system is now pretty functional, more focus will be put on usability and design than in the past. Functionality is still the priority though. Stayed tuned here for the latest news and Happy New Year!

Posted by Paul at 3:20 pm (Permalink)


Sunday December 25, 2005 : Comment system and user profile page are up

If you are logged in, then you should see "Comment" links for each post. Click those links to leave comments for that post. Support for private comments and other features may soon follow. The "Edit" links still go nowhere, which will be next on the list. We also created a profile page for each username. Usernames along with user email addresses are the two unique identifiers in the system, and sometimes emails will be hidden from the public to avoid spam or protect privacy. Before for each post or comment, only the name of the user was provided, and the name of users was not unique so spoofing was possible. Now links to each user profile are provided so each post or comment can be tracked back to a given username.

Posted by Paul at 12:32 am (Permalink)


Thursday December 15, 2005 : Improved searching

Now there is better functionality with searching. Added highlighting to the non AJAX page also and fixed the search term highlight function in both to avoid corrupting image tags.

Posted by Paul at 3:13 pm (Permalink)