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)


Friday December 09, 2005 : We now have basic AJAX

Crablog now has basic AJAX functionality. To see an example go here and try to search for "butters" or "Guinness" by typing slowly one letter at a time. Besides the search as you type functionality, we have also made the archive links use AJAX too. No more waiting for each page of every month to download from the webserver when you click. For now, when on any Crablog page, just find "AJAX" on the menu to the left to view that page with these new features.

Posted by Paul at 4:29 pm (Permalink)


Tuesday November 22, 2005 : No more manual password entry

Now you should be able to sign on and post to any of your blogs without having to enter your password manually each time. Currently we are working on making the home, or My Account, page more functional. Check back soon for updates, if we are not sidetracked expect good things soon.

Posted by Paul at 2:32 pm (Permalink)


Tuesday November 15, 2005 : Open for registration

If you feel so inclined, be our guest, here is the link to register. Not just one of our guests, you will probably be the only one.

Posted by Paul at 1:21 pm (Permalink)


Wednesday November 09, 2005 : Internally and soon externally

We are making some good progress overall here. We are in the process of sorting our priorities, making sure the important things happen first. The only problem is actually deciding what the most important stuff is. There is a lot of red tape around here; we can't just implement everything we think of without consulting the people above us. (If you are an insider here that should make a lot of sense)

Posted by Paul at 7:00 pm (Permalink)


Thursday November 03, 2005 : Hundredth post

This post will be the take the number of posts in the system in to the triple digits, but how many digits can we go before it breaks?

Posted by Paul at 11:07 pm (Permalink)


Tuesday November 01, 2005 : November is going to be big

At least for Crablog, November will be a big month. Our goal is to have the comment system up by the end of the month. The secondary goal for this month will also be to have the automatic registration system completed and ready for use (well not that anyone will ACTUALLY use it, but in theory people could if they wanted to, as if there are not enough good blog sites out there to use already, why use this lame one). Wish us luck.

Posted by Paul at 12:54 pm (Permalink)


Thursday October 27, 2005 : Every other popular place has one

All the popular sites have their own blogs. Google has one, so I think it is about time Crablog got one for itself too. It is a very exciting time here at Crablog, many new and revolutionary are just days, or weeks, or months away. I know the posting on here needs to be addressed, and since you don't actually log in. And then we also need to get the comments up and running. And overall it needs a facelift. Too much to do, at least my deadline is whenever I decide it should be. Which is never.

Posted by Paul at 8:37 pm (Permalink)