What do you love about i.PH blogs?

Hello there you loyal i.PH-ers!

You know for a fact that we’ve been working on i.PH blogs for a good number of years now. A lot of sweat, blood and tears have been shed to make sure that i.PH blogs runs smoothly and that you get the free best blogging service that lets you blog easily.

Now we’re wondering what it is with i.PH that keeps you blogging with us after all this time. Just leave a comment telling us what it is do you love about i.PH blogs, and why you keep on blogging with us! If you have things you don’t like with i.PH blogs, don’t hesitate to tell us about it as well, it’s cool! Come on, don’t be shy.

Make sure you also tell us how long have you been blogging with i.PH! Don’t forget to leave a link to your blog!

Announcement: Ads on i.PH blogs

Starting next week, we are going to test a new ad system. i.PH users and their visitors will see ads on their blogs for a small fraction of the time they visit an i.PH blog.

This will ensure that we keep running costs to a minimum. This will help keep your i.PH blog free of charge.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us here, on our Twitter account, or via the Helpdesk if you have any feedback. Thank you.

Have you checked the i.PH Forum yet?

Hi there i.PHers!

I’m pretty sure you’re enjoying posting your thoughts online on your free i.ph blog, but you don’t know how to get people to read your posts. Of course, you’ve got these blog posts and to have nobody read them would be a waste. Now if you don’t know where to start making online friends, may I point your way to the i.PH Forum?

Now the i.PH Forum is a great place to start if you want to meet your fellow i.PH bloggers, and I assure you, they’re a very friendly bunch!

And the i.PH people are there as well, so if you have questions about your blog, we’re there to help you out!

So, what are you waiting for? Join the i.PH Forum and meet your fellow i.ph bloggers fast!

Protecting Blogger’s Rights - At What Cost?

We at dotPH believe in the principle of free speech. We want to give people an open forum to voice out their concerns without fear of harrassment or reprisal. This is why i.PH is the first and only anonymous domain in the world.

Now, dotPH is caught in the middle of a lawsuit with a web design company about an i.ph blog. It seems that the company, Versomina Inc., feels that the blog is libelous.The lawsuit has consumed a lot of our time and money so far.  But despite our willingness to fight for free speech, we’re constrained by the fact that the blogger has failed to come forward despite repeated appeals on our part.

So this leaves us in a bit of a quandary here. i.PH is committed to upholding free speech. At the same time, as a responsible service provider, do we defend this person who is seemingly unwilling to show that he even exists? We’re not even sure if he or his grievances are real.

So, we need your input.

What should i.PH do? Do we press on? Or do you think there has to be a corrresponding committment, a responsibility if you will, on the part of the blogger to show the views are legitimate and not just a smear campaign?  Should we set limitations on the freedom that i.PH provides on your blogs? Do we set parameters on what people can say on their blogs, and what should the parameters be? Should i.ph blogs remain anonymous or should we just give up on our grand experiment on free speech? How do we tread the thin line between libel and mere airing of grievances?

As bloggers and responsible netizens, what do you think?

Standing up for Free Speech

Last week i.PH received two demand letters asking us to take down one of our blogs because it allegedly had libelous content.  The companies claiming libel, Stratvisions Inc. and Versomina Inc., threatened legal action against us if we failed to take the site down.

The two demand letters can be seen here:

  
Click on thumbnails to enlarge

Whether they tried to contact the blogger directly to request that the posts be deleted is unclear. But we refuse to take down the blog for a very simple reason — we respect the principle of free speech.

We believe that blogs serve an important purpose in allowing people a venue for expressing their thoughts, ideas and opinions. In the past you had to own a newspaper, radio or TV station to get yourself heard.  This has changed with the advent of the free marketplace of ideas that we know as the Internet We find the threat of legal action against us (and it’s accompanying legal costs) disturbing, to say the least.  But whether or not we agree with what our bloggers have to say, one thing is clear — we respect their right to say it.In fact, i.ph domains are anonymous precisely to promote free speech and encourage people to speak out.  Got a beef against your local politician?  Blog about it.  Know where all the MMDA speed traps are along EDSA? Warn other motorists by posting their locations.  A restaurant served up a cockroach along with your fries?  Upload a photo on to your blog.

Anonymity, and the opportunity to reach a wide audience, gives people a chance to air their truths without fear of harassment and let the public decide. Of course, we are well aware that we have certain responsibilities as a service provider. In this case, if the blog entries are proven to be libelous and there is a court ruling to that effect, we’ll take them down immediately.But until that happens, probably the best thing for all parties involved to do is to air their sides and let their ideas speak for themselves.  Because when all is said and done, the truth shall set you free.

WordCamp Philippines 2008: Awesome!

The first-ever WordCamp in Southeast Asia was held last September 6, 2008 in the College of St. Benilde, and it was a success! Since i.PH runs on WordPress, the i.PH team was there and we were able to talk to some bloggers who were absolutely passionate about WordPress.

Gracing the event was our CEO, Joel Disini, who gave a talk about the future of i.PH and even gave us a sneak peak at some of the new features being developed by the i.PH team, namely Google Gears integration:Imagine being stuck in traffic and inspiration strikes. You don’t have an internet connection with you, but you just have to write about it soon or else you’ll lose the chance. Well, with i.PH and Google Gears, you can take blogging offline. Just enable offline mode in i.PH, and you can write about anything, anytime, anywhere and upload it whenever you can! With i.PH, you can take blogging offline! How’s that for awesomeness?

Remember, everything that you love about i.PH, the easy customizible layouts, the drag-and-drop interface, the advanced privacy features, have all been built on the powerful WordPress platform! Imagine what more we can do with WordPress in the future!

Finally, i.PH would like to congratulate the Mindano Bloggers for organizing the successful WordCamp!

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!

Be the first to see I.PH Version 3!

It is unfortunate but some of the participants for today's FGD are feeling under the weather and won't be able to make it.  Because of this, we have re scheduled it for Monday, Dec. 17, 2007. We meet at our office, 27F Jollibee Plaza here in Ortigas Center  at 7:30 in the evening. We hope more of you can join us. Have a good day!

Edited: Dec 12, 2007, 2:15PM 

—oooOooo— 

Hello folks! As most of you already know, we've been really busy working on Version 3 of I.PH. We've added a lot of new features as well as improved on the existing ones. Now we would like YOU to have a hand in developing your blogging platform of choice.

We will be conducting a focused group discussion next week, tentatively set for Wednesday, here at our brand spanking new office in Jollibee Plaza, Ortigas Center, Pasig City. We would like to invite you to be a participant and be one of the first to preview I.PH Version 3. More importantly, you will have the chance to directly influence the development of I.PH. Your bright idea might just be the next big thing for I.PH. Now how cool is that?

If you would like to attend our focused group discussion, leave a comment here or shoot me an email through peterjuan@i.ph. Send me a contact number and I'll be sure to call you as soon as I can.

We'll be talking over coffee and snacks and afterwards, we can even play a few sets of table tennis. Then if you're up to it, we can go out for drinks and plan a post Christmas party for I.PH users and forum I.PH regulars. I hope to hear from you guys soon! Blog on!

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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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!

Google Ads SOON!

Great news folks! We are moving closer to helping you guys make money out of your blogs using google adsense. In a few days, you will notice google ads on your blogs as we enter into the dry run phase of this particular feature. We would really appreciate your feedback regarding this. We want to make the ads as effective but as unobtrusive as possible.

Shortly after our dry run, we will allow users with their own google adsense accounts to activate it on their blogs. Those of you with free i.ph accounts will enjoy a 50/50 split with i.ph, meaning that half of the time your blog will display ads from your adsense account, and half the time, from ours. Users with paid premium accounts have the benefit of displaying ads exclusively from their adsense. They may also opt to remove ads altogether. The final phase will attempt to include other ad networks aside from adsense. Cool eh? Let us know what you think. Join the discussion here!

I.PH is having an Eye Ball!

Yep. You read that right. After many attempts and false starts, I.PH will finally have its first ever Eye Ball next Saturday the 31st of March. If you're an I.PH User, then you are cordially invited to join in the fun. So do check out the details here. See you there!!!

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!!!

What people are saying about i.PH

Part of the i.PH blogger program, which we wrote about in a previous article, bloggers, both i.PH and non-i.PH alike, were invited to write about the service on their respective blogs.

For more information on the program, and links to the bloggers’ entries, please visit the i.PH Blogger Program Weblog at http://bloggerprogram.i.ph.

Earning from the i.PH Blogger Program

i.PH has recently come up with a blogger program, in which we
invite a handful of bloggers to blog about i.PH in exchange for a nominal
compensation.

We basically operate on a full-disclosure arrangement because, well, we
feel that it’s the honorable thing to do.  Hence we are posting
updates here, both to inform bloggers, i.PH and non-i.PH alike, who may
wish to join.

The initial run is for four weeks (one month). 
So far, we have two active bloggers who have agreed to participate:

• Ka Edong of Technobiography, and
• Earthangel of Elegantly Wasted.

If you are interested, please send an email to jangelo@domains.ph so we
can evaluate your blog.  We are currently only accommodating
active and regular bloggers who have a reasonably good following (i.e.,
blogging for at least six months, with at least two blog posts per week
on average).  But if you think it’s worth a try, then we’re just an email away.

Here are the mechanics:

• Blog posting.  Participants
  are to post 2 quality articles about i.PH per week.  Length should be
  at least 2 paragraphs each.  These may be in form of a review or any
  commentary about the service.  This is to be done in the
  participant’s main blog (whether hosted by i.PH or other
  services).  The blog post should likewise clearly identify and have a link to the i.PH homepage.
• i.PH Logo - Participants
  are to display the i.PH logo (with an active link to the i.PH homepage)
  prominently on their sites (i.e. on the sidebar). We shall provide
  participants with a choice of logos you may include in their blogs.
• Comment posting. 
  Participants are to post at least 20 comments each week
  on other blogs (may or may not be friends or contacts) referring them
  to the articles posted on their own blogs, and to i.PH as a service as
  well.  So as not to be tagged as spam, these should be relevant and
  specific to the blog posts being responded to.  An example scenario
  would be a participant responding to a post with photos, and commenting
  that i.PH has a built-in photo gallery and photo blog, and that the
  participant has written about it in his/her own site.
• Full disclosure. 
  Participants are to disclose that they are part of the program; i.PH
  shall likewise name, and link to, participants and their blogs. 
  This can be viewed as a mutual publicity/traffic-generation between the i.PH site and the participants’.

The i.PH team will be sending the participants information packets and
links to relevant sites, for reference.  The participants shall
likewise touch base with the i.PH team on a regular basis to provide
links to new blog posts and comments.

Why are we doing this?  It’s because we feel it’s high time people
learned more about the i.PH service, spread the word to their friends,
and earn some money while they’re at it.