Expressions 3.0
Tags
You may notice a new addition to our home page - tags! Yep, we have introduced tagging for your photos as a fun way to better our Expressions community. Browse the tags to find related photos and you never know what great site you may stumble upon. We think this will be a great way for your photoblog to be found, and for you to find other photoblogs that you may want to keep an eye on (you can always subscribe to their Atom feed). Tags are optional of course and your images won't show in our tags if you have a private blog.
Schedule posts
You can now schedule your posts. So, if you're off to Aruba but still want your photoblog to post a new entry/image every day, you can add your entries before you jet off and schedule when they will actually be posted on your photoblog. Now there's no excuse for not updating often, even if you aren't manually doing it each time (be sure to configure your blog to sort entries by date of entry)!
Template tag attributes
We know you want to have a blog look and feel that's all you, so in advanced mode you now have full control over each component through various new tag attributes. For example, you can set your Recently Added thumbnails to display in a grid of 4 x 4. Or, perhaps you want your archive links to display horizontally rather than vertically. It's all up to you!
Entry Text
When you add a new entry you'll see our new Entry Text area. We've introduced a new interface for adding text to your entries with better organization, helper buttons and an HTML preview window. We especially find the Dictionary option fun - that may be because we are horrible at spelling, or like to use big words to sound more impressive.
Faster
We've done a lot of cleanup as well which may not seem like anything, but it makes everything run faster for you. We've moved over to new and better servers, which is always a good thing, and improved things like caching and rendering (see, the dictionary option came in handy already!).
Free, means free
This is only applicable to new members, but we thought it was worth a mention. Now when you signup there is no PayPal step. Simply signup and start blogging. You'll get 30 days free to see what Expressions is all about. We didn't charge before, but that extra PayPal step was a tad annoying. We've done away with anything annoying. During the 30 day free trial, if you like what you see you can sign up for a subscription through PayPal.
New pre-designed templates
We have a bunch of new pre-designed templates for you, but in an attempt to not overwhelm you, we have not yet released them. We'll be releasing the new templates over the course of this weekend, so you can expect something new to peruse each day. We think it's a little more fun this way!
and even more
There are a lot of other more minor edits, additions and reorganization which we hope you'll like! Every small thing does make a big difference to your overall experience, and we want to make sure it's a good one.
Full Update List
New Features:
- Improved template tags.
- Image tagging
- Scheduled posting.
- New button-aided, condensed text editor for blog entry text.
- New billing system with no PayPal required to signup.
- Sort blog entries by order added or date assigned.
- Easier-to-use time zone selection
- Show EXIF Data checkbox for bulk image upload.
- More flexible template framework to accomodate for large images in any layout.
- Comment body text added to entry to appear at the top of comments list.
- 'You have x days left of your free trial' text for new accounts.
- Cleaner overall layout for better usability.
- New 'Welcome' page with news, quicklinks and tips.
- 'Configure' link on Pages list.
- Better-organized 'Tags' pop-up page with details on component tag attributes.
- Assisted tagging and Alt Tags - the add/edit entry pages will auto-fill the 'Tags' and 'Alt Tag' fields based on the title (these can be changed of course).
- New servers.
- Improved gallery/archive queries to be more memory/speed efficient.
- New caching system to improve page-serving performance.
- Improved page-rendering system.