How do you like the new topbar?

If you’ve logged on to your i.ph blog today, you’d see the new topbar:

Also, here are the other features that we recently implemented in i.ph:

• Insert Photo has been reorganized in the blog editor! Check it out, it’s now easier to add photos.
• Simplified notify page
• When you update a blog post, the blog editor no longer goes out as a pop-out.
• Updated Blogroll system so you can add your friends’ links easier!
• Improved favicon.

How do you guys like the new topbar and all the other features? Give us your thoughts, we’d love to hear them!

You can join the i.ph forum or you can follow @iphblogs on Twitter for more updates!

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!

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!

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!

Here’s the Cherry on Top!

Candies and treats and now a cherry to top things off! Wordpress compatible templates, Dipdolt and Contaminated, are now available for your i.ph blogs! And we're looking to add some more in the near future. Here's a sneak peek:

Do you have any Wordpress templates you want to use for your i.ph blog? Then join the i.ph forums to submit your favorite.

Who wants Candy?!

I know I do! This Candy isn't made of sugar, but I'm telling you, it sure is SWEET! It's the newest i.ph template, and it's avalable right now. Here's a taste test:

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 updates

We recently uploaded a new set of updates to I.ph version 2 addressing most of the functionality issues that were raised regarding functionality and generally making I.ph an even more awesome blog publishing service.

Among the aspects of I.ph tweaked in this update are the Rich Text Editor, photo and audio uploading, enhanced navigation, and a host of other tweaks that would make updating your blog and its individual components much easier and faster.

We would like to thank everybody who took the time to emailed us their concerns and helped us a lot in terms of development. Again, we strive hard to constantly improve the service we provide so if you have any comments or suggestions regarding I.ph, feel free to email us.