Get More Traffic to your Site!

Hi there!

I’m sure that by now, you’ve noticed a few small changes to the i.ph homepage.

To showcase just how easy it is to create your own personalized blog on i.ph, we’ve made a video which I think is quite awesome!

We also moved the recent entries and recent albums list higher up the page so that it’s more visible, making it easier for people to find new updates on i.ph and sending more traffic to your blogs! Yay! Traffic! We then placed the tag clouds at the bottom and made it a little cleaner too. Precise tagging also increases your blog’s findability and leads even more readers to your sites.

We also added a featured blog section which we will rotate every two weeks. Our current featured blog is http://comicology.i.ph who writes about anything and everything related to comicbooks. That blog is also in the running to be one of The Top Ten Emerging Influential Blogs! Pretty cool eh? What’s even cooler is that you’ll be helping us decide which blogs get to be featured! You can send in your nominations to peterjuan@i.ph and yes, of course you can nominate yourself!

Some of you may have also noticed that a full page ad appears occasionally when you or other people visit your blog. The ad stars Ade Magnaye, one of the country’s more famous (or is that infamous?) bloggers who we are happy to announce is now part of the i.ph team. Quick! Go make him uncomfortable by teasing him about it on his i.ph blog! We’re doing a dry run to see if this form of advertising is acceptable to you folks. We feel that a full page ad works better to preserve the design of your blogs because there won’t have to be any permanent ads on your sidebar or blog posts. What do you guys think? You can let us know by discussing it in the forum or by sending us an email . We hope to hear from you soon!

That’s all for know folks! Before we wrap things up I’d like to leave you with another i.ph tip. Did you know that you can add photos to your articles by simply dragging it from any publicly available website and then dropping it in your post editor? Check out how easy it is by watching our short video tutorial.

How to Drag and Drop Photos Directly To Your Post Editor

Now you gotta admit, that’s pretty neat! That’s all for now folks! Until next time, good day and blog on!

Tips and Tricks: Be in Control of Your Privacy

Hi there i.phers!

Got a bit of exciting news for you! While version 3 nears its completion, we have also given more focus on adding community centered features. This will include featured blogs, featured albums, as well different venues for discussion and sharing between i.ph bloggers! These changes will be incorporated into the soon to updated i.ph main page! Watch out for that one!

On a similar note, we have a few tips on how you can better engage your own community of readers! Notifications are always useful to alert your readers when you have something new on your blog but wouldn’t it be even better if you could target specific groups or individuals about a post that’s posted specially AND just for them? Well guess what. Your i.ph blogs can do exactly that and it’s incredibly easy too! Check out these two short tutorial videos to learn how!

You can grant access permissions to anyone, including people who don’t have i.ph accounts! You can also create an unlimited number of privileged access groups as well as assign any individual to as many groups as you want! The best thing is that your private posts remain invisible to people who you did not give access to and are never, NEVER indexed by search engines. Pretty cool eh? So go ahead and try it out!

How to Post to the Future

When most bloggers have to be away from their computers or from the internet for several days, they usually declare a short "blog hiatus" explaining why their blogs will be inactive for an extended period of time. However, that is only one way to go about it. Your I.PH blog actually allows you to "post to the future" or simply put, set a future date for a particular article to be posted. This lets you schedule when certain articles are published on your blog. So let's say you'll be gone for 4 days, you can prepare 4 articles to be published automatically on the days when you'll be away. Neat eh? Here's how you do it:

• Login to your blogs and proceed to write an article as you normally would.
• Click on the little arrow on the right of the ADVANCED SETTINGS bar to access the advanced posting options.

click image to enlarge  

• Set the time and date when you want the article posted on your blog.
• Click Publish.

It's that simple. When the assigned time and date arrives, the article will then appear on your blog. It's a great way to keep your blog regularly updated even when you can't get to a computer or connect to the internet. Just because you're going on vacation doesn't mean your blog has to! 

Add People to your Privileged Groups

I.PH's privacy settings really sets itself apart from the pack because it gives you the ability to add people to your Privileged Group even if they aren't on I.PH. Today, I'm going to show you how. It's really easy!

Login to you I.PH account and click on DASHBOARD on your top bar to enter your control panel. Click on Add People to open the Add Connections Dialog box:

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How to Create Privileged Groups

So now that you know how to make a privileged post, you need to designate who you want to view that post. You could, as I mentioned here, type in individual email addresses of the people you want to give permission to. That works quite well. However, what you really want to be able to do is assign a post to be viewable by certain groups of people. For example, you might want the super fun but slightly naughty article about going out with your friends to be viewable by your barkada but not by your family. Or you might have a special family moment that you'd want to share strictly to members of your family. You might also have an article you want only your officemates to be able to access. The good news is that this is incredibly simple to do on I.PH. You can create different Privileged Groups and the members don't even need to be on I.PH! Here's how:

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How to create a Privileged or Private Post

One of my favorite features on I.PH is the ability to post privately. By making what we call a Privileged Post, I can put up an article on my blog that is only visible to people I choose. What sets I.PH apart is that the people I give permission to view the post, don't even need to have an I.PH account. If i know their email, I can share a private post with them. Your Privileged Posts cannot be seen by anyone who you don't give permission to. They don't even know that such a post exists. All the comments made in a Privileged Post are hidden as well. The whole post is also invisible to search engines so security is ensured.  Pretty neat trick eh?

So how do you create a Privileged Post on your I.PH blog? It's simple really:

• Put the title of your blog, the content and your tags.
• Scroll down a little bit, Below the post window, above the Tags, you'll see the Advanced Settings Header..
• Click on the button on the right side of the Advanced Settings header.

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• This will show you the Restrict Groups Section

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• Select Private to make your post a Privileged Post
• Click on the name of the group that you want to give exclusive access to your post.
• You can also add the email of people who are not in your network on the smaller box to the right. You can add as many email addresses as you want.
• Then after you're done giving permissions, click on Publish. You're Privileged Post will be up on your blog, visible only to the people you chose.

So there. It's really easy. Try it out for yourself. And share with us the real life applications you have for this feature in the I.PH Forums. Tomorrow I'll show you how to create Privileged Groups. Catch you guys again soon!

Widgets and Drag and Drop Sidebar!

Good day dear I.PH users! We are happy to announce that your sidebars are not only working fine again but now sport two new features that we know a lot of you have been waiting for. Yes folks, you can now easily re order the elements in your sidebar through easy drag and drop. Once you've logged in to your account and turn Edit On, you can double click and hold the heading of any sidebar element and move it where you please. No need to enter your dashboard or anything. You do it right there on your main page! 

You now also have the ability to add widgets to your sidebar! After logging in and clicking Edit On, you'll notice on the drop down menu bar a new entry called widgets. We have taken the liberty of including some of the more popular widgets Like Sitemeter, Google Maps, Meebome, MyBlogLog and Flickr, Slideshow for easier installation. Just get your own widget code from the third party provider and copy and paste to the corresponding widget box. To add more widgets, just click on the add link under widgets in the menu bar! Personally I'm really excited about this because this drastically expands the functionalities of our blogs. There are a lot of third party blog add ons out there and there are a lot more popping up regularly so this gives us a lot of new possibilities. Pretty cool don't you think.

Oh and you may have noticed that the google ads on the sidebar disappeared. This doesn't mean that AdSense no longer works on I.PH but rather that we are giving you guys better control. If you want to to enable Google Ads on your blog simply go in to your dashboard and click on Ad Settings on the Account Settings table. You'll be asked for your Google Adsense Client ID so if you don't have one yet sign up for one now! Take note though that for those on free accounts, we will still be implementing the 50/50 revenue sharing model which means that half the time, your ads appear and the other half of the time our ads appear on your blogs.

As promised, we continue to work on improving your blogging experience with I.PH. Your feedback has been very helpful to us and remains most welcome. So please do join the discussions happening over at the I.PH forums. Get to know your fellow I.PH users and keep yourself updated with new developments as well as request for even more features for your blogs.  Blog on!

What’s up with my sidebar?!!!

Hello folks. You may have noticed something odd about your sidebars the past few hours, particularly with custom content boxes. No need to worry. This is not a glitch. We disabled them for now while we integrate the javascript option which will allow you to add more utilities to your blog as well as the ability to re-arrange all the elements of your sidebar using simple drag and drop. Thank you for bearing with us. We expect to have normal operations as well as the new features up and running within the day. We appreciate your understanding. Salamat! Blog on!

New Template Available! More Updates Coming Very Soon!

The very aptly named template, Minimalist is now ready for use. As you might expect, simplicity is at it's core and it sports a very uncluttered look, great for people who want to highlight their writing more than anything else. Here's a preview, just give the pic a click:

Aside forn this new template, we have another one in the works called Dfire and that will be available quite soon as well. Also, please do watch out for some new features that will be implemented in the next few days. Most exciting perhaps and certainly one of the most requested of these that will be online soon is the ability to drag and drop the sidebar elements so you can arrange them any which way you might like. Also, the sidebar will soon be open to external widgets. You can expect to see that up very very soon. We will also be allowing you folks to enable or disable the Google ads that appear in your sidebar. 

We are constantly developing and polishing I.PH to make your blogging experience all the better. Your feedback is very important to us. If you haven't yet, please do sign up for the I.PH forums. Not only can you discuss I.PH and it's features there, you can also join a community of bloggers that is growing steadily in strength everyday. Also, it's actually quite fun and you find new blogs to read and new readers to read your blogs. Cool eh? Hope to see you there! Good day folks. Blog on!

Now For Some Fresh Treats!

Here are some of the latest improvements we've done for i.ph:

• You can now post music coming from your audio gallery aside from just uploading directly to your article.
• You can now use images in your restricted/private galleries for your header and background images.
• Once you log in to your blog, your topbar will now display an alert sign whenever you have unapproved comments or testimonials.
• Auto discovery of all RSS feeds.
• Breadcrumbs will now display the page number.

Swing by the i.ph forums to get a sneak peek at even more enchancements that we're planning to release. Register as a forum member to throw in your suggestions as well. Your ideas help make i.ph better and better.

Yet Another Brand New Template!

Yup. Because we love you guys so much we're giving you another brand spanking new template. Folks, allow me to present to you, Transparency:

The cool thing about this template that some regions are actually well…transparent, allowing more of the back ground image to be visible. I particularly like removing the header image  and just leave the title for a very clean look.  We know that with the coming new year a lot of you are considering a site re design. So check out Transparency. And do watch out for even more templates very soon! 

Video Posting Now Possible! New Template Also Available!

As promised, you can now easily post a video in your article. It supports youtube, google video and metacafe. It's easy too. All you have to do is copy the URL of the video you want to include in your article. Click on "Insert Video" on the upper right hand corner of your post editor and paste the URL in the field provided. Choose the alignment and click on "Insert". It's that simple. And it looks a little something like this:

We look forward to seeing your videos!

And we have more good news. A new template is now available. It's called  Empyrean and it looks like this:

What sets Empyrean apart is that it allows you to customize 3header images. We will have even more templates available for you early in January so do look out for that.

We also made a couple of changes designed to make your blogging experience more enjoyable. For instance, now you can login to your i.ph account using your google  account details. That's one less set of login details to remember. Also, your new albums will now show up to 40 thumbnails as opposed to the original 8, giving you and your readers a better preview of the album contents. We've made tweaks for the post editor to load faster, addressed some of the bugs and enchanced the backend processing as well as the user interface. Like we keep mentioning, we are committed to constantly developing i.ph to make your blogging experience much much better. 

Fresh New Features!!!

It's still a good 19 days before Christmas and although I haven't even started with my own Christmas shopping yet, we here at i.ph are happy to give you an early Christmas present. By next week, you will now be able to insert videos into your post. Check it out:

We've been getting a lot of requests for this feature and now it's almost here. Cool eh?

But we're not done with the gift giving yet. We are also releasing 4 new templates very early in January. But who knows, if you kiddies have been specially good this year, then Santa may just throw them in before the year ends. Here's a sneak peek:

Rest assured that we will continue churning out even more features to further enrich your blogging experience. We still have a lot of exciting things that are currently under development. Of course we are working hard on these things for you guys. We'd really love to hear what else you would like to have on your i.ph blog. Please feel free to join in our i.ph forum where you'll get to talk with me and our chief developers. This is all for now.  We hope you all are enjoying the Christmas season. Happy holidays!!!

I.ph version 2 soft launches

We are very pleased to announce the soft launch of I.ph version 2. Currently, version 2 is available only to new signups but we are planning to migrate all the old accounts to the new platform in a couple of weeks.

Like what we announced before, some of the cool new features you can look forward to include an awesome profile page. The profile page allows you to aggregate all the data you have scattered all over the web into one convenient place. From Social networking sites like Friendster, Myspace, and Multiply to photo hosting sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Fotothing and twenty three; to your YouTube videos and Del.icio.us links.

The blog now also boasts tight AJAX integration which allows you to edit the look of your blog on the fly and rearrange components with utmost ease.

Stay tuned for more updates!     

Hot off the I.ph labs: goodies in development

It’s crazy here in the office as everyone’s psyched  for the upcoming soft launch of I.ph Version 2. We know that we’ve announced this quite some time ago and while we do get a kick out of keeping you guys hanging, we’ll be kind enough to give you a sneak peak at what we have under the veil:

Comprehensive Profile pages:

We’ve put in a lot of work into the profile pages to make it leagues better than the boring, generic profile pages out there. The key here, people, is AJAX integration. What is AJAX? well it’s just a fancy way of saying that pages load faster and you can move around individual components on the page by simply dragging and dropping them. Below is a screenshot of what the profile pages would look like:

Power tip: Invite friends

As an I.ph user you know how fun and easy blogging is. Why not spread the word and tell your friends about it?

With the Invite Friends feature you can do just that. With this feature, getting your friends on board and allowing them to experience the same fun you’re having while blogging with I.ph is as easy as inputting your friends’ email address, composing a customized message or using the default one and sending it.

So spread the word today and help us make the I.ph community grow.

Bringing customer service closer to you with LiveHelp

In our ongoing effort to provide our users with excellent service, we recently launched a livehelp feature for i.ph.

Now, whether you’re a new user who needs help signing up or an existing user who needs assistance with configuring your I.ph blog, you are one mouseclick away from our friendly and efficient customer service team. 

SMS service temporarily disabled

We would like to inform everybody that all SMS services that come with I.ph blogs are temporarily disabled. Although we understand that SMS sending is a great feature to have with our blogs, we cannot test its efficiency on a consistent basis and guarantee its reliability. In our effort to continually provide our users with the highest possible level of service, we have decided to discontinue offering SMS services until such a time when we can guarantee that its efficiency is at par with the level of service we expect to provide all our users.

Thanks for your continued support. 

New features to get excited about!

We are pleased to announce the following new i.PH features:

• Enhanced drafts management
  - i.Panel now features an area for draft entries under i.Blog, for easier access. 
  Also, you can now move your already-published entries back into the
  drafts (simply edit the item and tick the “Move back to drafts” radio button).
• Java uploader for gallery
  - i.Gallery now features a new image uploader, which will compress and
  resize your photos client-side (i.e. even before uploading to  the i.PH gallery
  server), so uploads would be speedier.  You can also drag-and-drop
  your photos into the uploader–quite a nifty feature.  Note that the old image
  uploader and Gallery remote are still available as alternatives, for
  maximum compatibility.
• Template auto-update - No
  longer will i.PH bloggers have to manually update templates. 
  You’ll no longer see the bell icon
  on i.Blog.  Each time there is a new template version (i.e. with
  added features or optimization), all blog templates are automatically
  updated.  We shall make announcements if there are features/plugin
  improvements here, so you’ll have the option to install these.

New template objects!

Get a load of these new template objects:

• Email object - You can display your email address such that it will not be picked up by spammers;
• Blog list - Now there’s no need for your readers to link or memorize each of your blog and sub blog URLs.  This object will automatically generate the list for you.
• RSS and Atom Feed icons - You can now select among five sets of icons with different color and design schemes.

If you’d like to set up these new objects in your blog, simply update
your template.  You shall then see new options at the Calliope
Design Editor sidebar.  It’s all point-and-click from there!

References:

• How do I update/edit templates?
• What are RSS and Atom Feeds?
• How do I set up multiple blogs?