NetworkedBlogs Blog

Custom Themes For Facebook Page Tabs

Filed under premium, features

Today we're introducing a few updates related to Blog tabs on Facebook pages: first, we're making it much easier to add a Blog tab to your Facebook page. Rather than the multi-step process that was required before, now you can just go to your blog profile page on NetworkedBlogs and click the new "Add Tab to Facebook Page" menu, and you're set.

The second feature we're announcing today (this one is for for paying customers) is the ability to customize your tab by choosing a theme that fits your content and style. If your use a lot of pictures, then you can choose a style that displays your pictures prominently, and if you prefer a dark theme, we got that too. Also, once you sign up for a paid plan, you can switch back and forth between themes as often you like, and you'll also have access to new themes as we add them.

You can see a custom theme in action on our own NetworkedBlogs page.

Another customization we're offering today is the ability to hide the NetworkedBlogs branding from your tab so your brand gets all the attention. This option is available on the Plus plan. Check out our new features, and if interested, sign up to one of the premium plans to get started.

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Changes to our Payment System

Filed under announcements

As you know, NetworkedBlogs is offered as a free service and will continue to be so. We love helping our users find new readers and get visibility and distribution on social networks. To cover the costs of running the service, we also offer paid plans with extra features. Your payments allow us to keep the site running. Thank you.

Until recently, we used Paypal as our only payment system to handle subscriptions to our PRO and Premium Listing plans. And, while Paypal worked really well, we needed a payment system that's tightly integrated with our application so that when a user signs up or changes a subscription, the updates are reflected in the app immediately. We also wanted to make it easier for our users to check the status of their subscriptions and manage them from one place. So we spent the last few weeks working towards that goal, and I'm happy to announce that we just launched our new payment system, and with it, we also released a new set of premium plans.

The new payment system and plans introduce a lot of improvements. Now it's much easier to sign up, change your plan, cancel, or update the features you use. And we now offer annual plans that come with a good discount off of the monthly price. And, we're also introducing new premium features (such as tab themes, priority support, and custom blog thumbnails) that we'll cover in more detail in the next post.

So how does that affect you?

1. If you're using NetworkedBlogs for free, you're not affected.

2. If you have a subscription to the PRO plan ($4.99/month), then you're not affected. You can keep your subscription through Paypal going and you'll continue to get the same features you signed up for (fast feed updates, faster support, and custom cover images for blog profiles). If you like, though, you can switch to one of the new plans and get more features.

3. If you have a subscription to the Premium Listing plan ($19.99/month), then make sure to read the next section as well. Generally, though, you can also keep the subscription going and continue to get the features you signed up for, except for one: promoting the blog in the directory and search results. Instead of that feature, you'll now get the ability to use custom themes on Facebook pages and you can upload custom thumbnail images (the next section explains why this change). Your plan is now equivalent to the new Plus plan.

Bonus for Users with the Premium Listing Plan

One of the features of the Premium Listing plan was to highlight the blog in the directory and search results. But due to changes triggered by our big update in October, we couldn't offer that option since then, and we might not offer it again for a little while. So we owe you this missing feature for the ...

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New Format for Published Posts to Timeline

Filed under announcements

Happy new year, everyone. We have a lot of new features planned for release in the next few weeks, but today we have a small update to announce. As Facebook opened the new profile Timeline to everyone, we started getting reports from users that once someone switches to the Timeline, all their blog posts disappear from their profile. This seems to affect some users, not everyone. As far as we can tell, it seems to be a Facebook bug, and we're hoping for a fix soon.

In the meantime, while we wait for an official fix, we experimented with a different publishing format with a few beta users in the last couple of weeks and confirmed that it doesn't suffer from the same issue above. So today, in the next couple of hours, we'll be switching to use the new publishing format. This will affect posts published to profiles only. Facebook pages and groups are not affected.

The new format is similar to the current one except for these small differences:

• The "share" option on the new format is much better. When you click "share", it opens a dialogbox from which you share directly without leaving Facebook, instead of taking you to the post age like the current format does.
• The NetworkedBlogs logo doesn't show under each post any more.
• The small link to the blog profile on NetworkedBlogs that used to show under the post summary is removed as well.
• If your post doesn't have an image, we will not use the blog thumbnail image. This is to avoid having an image repeated too many times if many of your posts don't have images. Also, the thumbnails tend to get out of date quickly if you change your blog theme or layout. So we're simplifying things by only publishing an image if the article has one.

This will go live very soon, and you should notice it the next time you write an article and have it published to your timeline (pages and groups are not affected). If you have feedback or questions about this change, please let us know on this thread.

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New Feature: Feed Tester

Filed under features

One of the most common questions we get on a regular basis is: why doesn't NetworkedBlogs pull my posts successfully? And after investigating, we find that most of the errors tend to be simple things like using the wrong feed URL, misconfiguring FeedBurner, missing to enable "full feeds" so that images are included, and so forth. These settings are usually easy to fix if you know where to look. So today we're announcing the new Feed Tester tool that should help with that.

On your blog profile page, you will now see a new menu item, Feed Tester. It runs a lot of tests against your feed and gives you a brief report of the results. Here are some of the errors that Feed Tester can uncover:

• Missing, invalid, or wrong feed URL.
• Blog taking too long to respond (more than 10 seconds).
• Feed with missing posts.
• Feeds that are formatted incorrectly.
• Feeds that don't contain the latest articles.
• Feeds that don't have the post images.

These cases represent almost 90% of all the feed related questions we get on our support site. So we hope this tool will help a lot in finding and solving problems faster for everyone. Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

News Page Available Inside Facebook

Another update we'd like to mention, which we pushed earlier today, is that the News page is now available inside Facebook again. If you usually go to our Website directly, then you will not see anything different. However, if you visit NetworkedBlogs using the bookmark on the left side menu in Facebook, then you'll notice that you can view the News page now without leaving Facebook. We hope this makes it easier to get in, check the latest, and get out easily.

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Summary of Recent Updates

Filed under features

If you've been keeping up, you probably know all about the updates we pushed in the last three weeks and the discussions around them in our forums (links below). But if you haven't visited NetworkedBlogs recently, here is a quick update for you. We also pushed a few small updates today that I summarize at the end.

Why Change?

The original code for NetworkedBlogs was written a long time ago when we had few users. As time passed and the application grew, a lot of changes were made. Also, the platforms we connect with (such as Facebook and Twitter) changed a lot too. The code was extended beyond it's original design to support all these changes, but that came with a price. Fixing errors took a long time, and adding new features was really hard. In order to continue to innovate and be able to fix problems faster, we had to make big changes. And, hence, the recent updates.

This initial release was not intended to add new features, but rather to replicate most of the features we had in the old system and remove features that were rarely used to free up space for new things. We did improve the user interface, though, and tried to make it easier to use and navigate. We also introduced a few bugs as well. Not on purpose, obviously, but as you'd expect with any big update, some errors are bound to slip beyond the best testing effort. In the last two weeks, we fixed most of the errors we found or reported to us, and we're continuing to listen and fix bugs every day. If you're aware of a problem that's unsolved yet, please let us know.

List of Changes:

• Blog profiles have a new design. For example, check out the NetworkedBlogs profile. This follows our previous updates to profile pages and the welcome page.
• If you use our 'Blog' tab on your fan page, you'll notice that it has been updated as well. The update makes it easier to edit and customize the tab without having to navigate to another page. We also removed the syndication settings from the tab because they were confusing. All syndication settings can be managed from the syndication page.
• The blog directory was simplified. Some of the listings such as "popular blogs by region" and "popular blogs by company" were removed because changes in Facebook made it much harder to create proper rankings. Since these lists were rarely used, we prefer to focus our efforts on other features.
• We removed the "friends" menu because the functionality it offered is now provided by the welcome page.
• The blog registration page was improved to make adding or editing blogs easier.
• The part of the app that was served inside Facebook is now on the Website for consistency.
• If you've upgraded your blog to Premium Listing, you'll notice that the highlighting of premium blogs in the directory is gone ...

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More ways to discover blogs: The Welcome Page

Filed under features

Continuing our effort to refresh NetworkedBlogs to be more fun and social, we launched a welcome page last night to help new users get started discovering blogs they might like. It's a simple way to see blogs and other news sources that cover topics you like, and also to see what your friends read and write. Check it out at:

http://w.networkedblogs.com/welcome

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New Profile Pages

Filed under features

Today we're releasing a new user profile page. It's nicer, faster, and more interesting. When checking someone's profile, you can see what they write, read, and a quick bio about them (if they provide one). Check out your profile page here: http://w.networkedblogs.com/user

And, in addition to that, we added hover cards to the news page so you can hover your mouse pointer over a blog name or a user picture and quickly get more information about them without having to visit their page.

This update is part of a series of updates we're planning to launch in the next few weeks to refresh the site and make it more user friendly. We like to hear your feedback about it, so let us know what you think in the comments or on our support forums.

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Freshly Baked News Page

Filed under features

As you might've noticed, over the weekend we launched a new update to our news page. The new page loads faster, looks nicer, and emphasizes the value of your votes on articles. It also paves the way for upcoming updates we're planning to release in the next few weeks.

As part of the update, we removed the small discussion board that we had on the old page because it was used mostly for promotional messages. We're planning a better alternative that we hope would be much nicer and more engaging.

Try the new page and tell us what you think:

http://networkedblogs.com/news

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Home Page Update

Filed under features

Today we're launching an update to our app's home page to reduce the clutter and make it easier to read. If you're used to the old home page, you might feel that the new page is lighter, even a little empty, but we think you'll like it better once you get used to it. This is an experiment and is the first among many new updates to come. Please let us know what you think on this thread:

http://help.networkedblogs.com/entries/421633-hope-page-update-jan-30

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New Support Website

Filed under announcements

We switched our support Website to a new service at: http://help.networkedblogs.com. Please use that site going forward.

We've been using GetSatisfaction to manage our technical support questions for a while now, and it's been a great service. But recently, due to increased growth, we've been having a hard time managing the volume of questions and responding to everyone. In an effort to organize the process and serve you better, we started looking for new solutions. We tested Zendesk for a little while and we're happy with it. So, yesterday, we officially switched to the new site and we'll start answering questions there from now on.

Please be patient with us as we get up to speed with the new system and catch up to the backlog of questions.

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