Friday, November 17, 2006 12:20 PM
Welcome to the new Blawg.
I am excited to be unveiling the first of many planned upgrades and changes for Blawg. The site has been totally overhauled and moved to a new, more stable platform that is faster, cleaner and more robust. More importantly, the platform embraces the best of what's to come in terms of connection, collaboration and communication technologies.
Some important changes to note.
Blawg's central domain is moving from .org to .com. Blawg.com has long redirected to Blawg.org, and now the relationship will simply be reversed. Blawg started at Blawg.org mainly because that was simply the first domain I reserved and started using. However, I have found that many people simply type in "Blawg.com" regardless of what domain variation is central to the site. Indeed, quite a few people simply type in the word they are looking for and append a .com to it, rather than using a search engine. With this in mind, I felt the changeover to the new Blawg platform was the perfect opportunity to make the switch to Blawg.com. So I did it.
Blawg's Blog is moving to a new platform and address. You will find the new Blawg's Blog at http://blog.blawg.com. Again the reason for the change was simply that it was time. I had been limping along with an obselete weblog editor for the past year or so and it was time to upgrade to a system that will allow me to more fully participate in the blawgosphere.
Submitting a new blawg to Blawg's directory will require you to login. I long had a policy of allowing anonymous submissions of new blawgs to Blawg's directory. Unfortunately, over time, this policy proved to be problematic. Spambots and similar programs constantly bombarded the directory with junk entries. Beyond the extra time it takes to clean out the junk entries, legitimate new blawgs were getting lost in the mass of junk. This situation serves no one, so I decided to require a login for new submissions. Rest assured, the information required to login will not be onerous and it will never be shared with third parties. My hope is simply that this extra step will make getting your blawg into the directory more timely and efficient.
You can now customize your blawg listing in the directory. Whether you are adding a new blawg or your blawg is already in the directory, with Blawg's new system, you can customize your listing. You will need to login, and you will need to complete a simple online process for verifying that you are the blawg in question's rightful 'owner.' These steps are again necessary to block nefarious activity, but will also give a blawg's owner access to its listing and how it is described and defined. Moreover, while the customization options are initially fairly basic, I have a long list of interesting features and functions (which I have taken from recommendations and requests for users of Blawg over the last four years) that will be added as options for a blawg listing in the coming months.
Well, that is enough for one post. I have lots more to share and will be doing so in additional posts. For now, welcome to the new Blawg. I hope you like what you see.