NetworkedBlogs Blog

Changes to our Payment System

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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

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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 Support Website

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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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Update About Profile Tabs

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We received a lot of questions on our support forum in the last few days about the disappearance of the "Blog" tab from users profiles, so I want to summarize our answers here.

Facebook has decided to remove the tab feature from personal profiles and keep it for fan pages only. Last month, Facebook started showing a message on the tabs themselves explaining that the tabs will be gone, and last week they removed the tabs completely. This change affects all applications on the Facebook platform, including NetworkedBlogs. But it doesn't affect the native Facebook tabs such as Wall, Info, Photos, Questions, ...etc. as those will remain. We're as disappointed as you are for losing that feature, and we'll do our best to offer any new integration options that Facebook makes available in the future.

FAQ

Q: Does that mean that my blog was removed from NetworkedBlogs?

A: No. Your blog is still on NetworkedBlogs. You can find it by going to your profile on NetworkedBlogs and then click on the blog name in the list.

Q: Will my blog continue to syndicate (auto-publish) to my profile wall?

A: Yes, it will. Publishing to your wall is not affected. You can manage that from the syndication page.

Q: How come I still see the "Blog" tab on other places on Facebook?

A: The "Blog" tab continues to work for fan pages. It's removed for personal profiles only.

Q: How can I show my blog on my profile now?

A: I'm afraid I don't have a good answer here. If you enable syndication, though, then your posts will be automatically published to your wall for your friends to see.

Q: Will the tabs be brought back later?

A: It's unlikely. But Facebook is a dynamic environment, and it's possible that they might introduce new features in the future that might be better. We'll wait and see.

Q: What about profile boxes?

A: I'm afraid those were removed back in August.

Q: Will tabs for fan pages be removed next?

A: We hope not. Although, recently, Facebook has been simplifying the platform and removing features, so everything is possible. We simply don't know, and Facebook has not announced anything regarding that.

Q: So what's the best way to show my blog on my profile?

A: If you haven't done so yet, you can enable the syndication feature so that your posts are automatically shared to your wall.

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Facebook Update - Profile Boxes No More

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As you know, the folks at Facebook constantly optimize and update the site to enhance the user experience. We like some of the changes they make, and we don't like others. Today they're making a change that we're not too excited about, but I'm sure they have good reasons. Starting today (or any minute now), Facebook will remove the profile boxes of all applications. So if you have the NetworkedBlogs profile box on your profile, then it will soon be gone. Sorry.

So how do you show my blog on my profile now? The app tab is now the official way. You can add it from your Facebook profile as shown in the image below.

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Announcing the NetworkedBlogs Blog

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Since the early days of NetworkedBlogs, we used our fan page to announce the latest news and updates, but going forward we want to be able to give you more details about new features and to explain it better with images and links and so on. So from now one, we'll announce new features here and then we'll cross link to each post from our fan page and twitter account so follow and fan us there as well.

In this first post, I'll simply give you a summary of the most recent updates we announced in the last few weeks in case you missed them:

• This blog. Yay.
• The ability to remove the NetworkedBlogs bar at the top of your blog posts. We see a lot of sharing and tweeting activity happen because of that bar, but if you don't like it you can now remove it.
• The ability to choose not to include images with every blog post that we publish on your Facebook wall or fan page. Most users prefer to have images, but if you don't like them then you can now remove them.
• The ability to auto-publish to your Facebook groups.
• Auto-publishing to Twitter.
• Redesigned the Syndication page (used to be called the "feed settings" page) to make it easier to manage all your blog syndication settings in one place.

All the above features can be accessed from the Syndication page, so give it a try.

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