FOCUSer.net

I have added the functionality of author profile and random photos to FOCUSer.net. If you are using the Movable Type 3.0 [FOCUSer.net] template, you can now manage your profile information and upload random photos using the “Manage” interface.

Author Profile

Currently the only thing that you can change is your photo. However, more fields – location, birthday, etc – (similar to Blogger.com’s profile page) are planned. Later on there will be a link to your generic profile page from your sidebar profile summary.

To change your profile:

1. Log in to FOCUSer.net Blog Management interface.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Under ‘Sidebar’ section, there will be a link called ‘Manage Author Profile’.
3. Follow the instruction there.

Random Photos

Want to have a randomly selected photo on your sidebar? You can now upload and manage photos on FOCUSer.net. To use it:

1. Log in to FOCUSer.net Blog Management interface.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Under ‘Sidebar’ section, there will be a link called ‘Manage Random Photos’.
3. Follow the instruction there.

All uploaded photos will generated a thumbnail of maximum 150 pixels to fit on your sidebar. You can also ‘deactivate’ some images so that they will still be available but will not be rotated.

I see that Sui has already started testing these features (it is working now, Sui!) Feel free to try it, and comment here about what needs to be fixed.

I am here to announce that Movable Type 3 templates and styles are now available for FOCUSer.net users.

To instantly use MT3 templates and styles on your blogsite, please do the following. WARNING: All your previous customisations to your template and style would be lost!

1. Login to Blog Management page using your login, password and blogsite.
2. Go down to “Reset Template” section, and change the action to “Reset” to “MovableType 3.0 [FOCUSer]“. Click on “Update”.
3. You will be back at the Blog Management page again. Go down to “Style” section, and pick one of the [MT3] styles. Click on “Update” to confirm.
4. Now log back into Movable Type, and rebuild all your pages!

Currently there are 5 styles that I took from MovableType’s default styles page. But feel free to modify them inside MovableType, once it has been reset. You can also get more styles from MovableStyle.com, as I believe that Lloyd has converted some of my older styles to MovableType 3.

These MovableType 3 templates have also been modified so they are different from the default templates you found in MovableType 3 installations. They are made to work with MovableType 2.6x, plus some alterations. Here’s a summary:

• No TypeKey support. We probably will never have TypeKey support unless someone wants to sponsor FOCUSer.net USD$99 so we can buy an unlimited site license for MovableType 3.
• Use PHP include to add sidebar to your individual archive page.

As your sidebar is now wrapped inside a PHP function, I will be developing tools to automatically spill out modules onto your sidebar. Here are some thoughts.

• Turning on and off and rearranging current modules – calendar, search form, monthly archives and recent articles
• Blogroll/links management
• Tagboard
• Author profile (aka Blogger style?)
• Random photos (Tim’s style)
• Customised HTML code
• Anything else?

These are just some tools to make you personalise your blogsite, without learning all the HTML, Javascript and PHP. It would take a few nights of coding, so I’ll probably do it after the talk next Friday.

Please provide feedback on how the current Blog Management system works (or not work), and ideas of what you would like to put into the sidebar.

There are some new featurs added to FOCUSer.net to assist you to manage your blog site. You need to first of all log into FOCUSer.net (not Movable Type interface but this very website) using the Username and Password from your Movable Type login. You will then be able to select which blog you would like to “manage” with a drop down list, and then click on ‘Manage’ to go to the ‘Blog Management’ page.

Here is a list of things that you can currently do on ‘Blog Management’ page:

• Turn on/off your robots.txt so you can optionally block out unwanted visits from search engines.
• Turn on/off your listing on FOCUSer.net recent updates/comments.
• Reset your Movable Type template to installation default.
• Change your stylesheet from the styles available on MovableStyle.com.

At least the last function would be useful, as many of you are still using MT’s default Clean stylesheet.

I am also planning to port the default template from Movable Type 3 so that you can potentially “reset” the template to MT3. You can then be able to apply MT3 compatible stylesheets.

Stay tuned.

Blogger’s paradox is always around whether to blog or not to blog. You want to write about things, but you do not want to tell the world. Especially you do not want to have FOCUSer.net listing your latest entries in real time…

Now on the new blog request form, it is possible to specify that you wish your new blog to be hidden. It is still accessible from the Internet, but FOCUSer.net statistics would not advertise it. Moreover, I’ll put a robots.txt there so that search engine would not try to index your entries.

For those who already has their blogsite hosted here but would like to have this feature, please email me or drop a comment here.

I saw the Movable Type announcement this morning on the release of Movable Type 2.65, which includes some XML-RPC server security fixes. I’ve thus upgraded all our installations to the most current version. Hopefully nothing is broken.

Blogging has to be one of the biggest thing (I refused to call it a technology as it is so simple behind the scene) over the last 2 or 3 years. Blog sites have poped up everywhere on the Internet, and FOCUSer.net and its hosted sites are no exceptions. In this article, I will continue to gather information on the current blogging scene, and provide links of resources on blogging.

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