Update: Fix For Some of the Issues from Our Recent Release

I'll start with a blanket "I'm sorry". The changes we recently made, especially to the blog editor were not met with the excitement we had hoped. (understatement of the year). Had there been no bugs, I'm going to assume people would still have been uphappy with the fact that the blog editor changed so drastically.

Let's set the bugs aside, (I'll update you on them below).

The changes that were recently made to the blog editor were not just changes we made for the sake of making change. The old blog editor (and the new one in fact) is a service provided by a third party company. If you've been around here for any amount of time, you realize that the blog editor has been pretty much the same since day one. We have made slight changes to it within the old framework, but it was very comfortable. Unfortunately, nothing in tech stays the same and our version was so old that we risked losing the ability to update or change any functionality. This move to a newer version was predicated on the fact that we did not want to continue to use an outdated version of a product that could have been shuttered at any time. A decision to move had to be made.

Now, could we have done a better job of giving everyone a head's up. Yes. For our upcoming releases, we will be letting everyone in on what we are planning to change with more room to spare. 

In every way, this is our fault. For a number of years, we became stagnant with our development efforts as we battled to manage large volumes of users and content. (I'm sure some remember a time a few years ago when site stability was an issue....thankfully that's behind us). 

We should have been making smaller incremental updates during that time to keep up with the most recent technologies and the most recent changes to Google. These recent updates (our most recent one, but also others like the profile page update) have been pushing to get our site back ahead of the curve. Because we became stagnant, you (our members) became comfortable with things not changing. But if you take a hard look around at the tools and services you use, they've changed considerably in four or five years. But, it's probable those changes have been more iterative and as such, less noticeable. 

Moving forward, you should expect more change. But it's not change just for the sake of change. It's change for the sake of returning ActiveRain to the cutting edge....and keeping us there. 

I've already promised a few people to expect these changes, but also to expect better communication from us regarding what to expect coming up. This was one time that we didn't have our Ambassadors take things for a spin on our testing servers. If I could do it again, I would absolutely invite them to try things out. As it relates to the blog editor, I'm not sure we would have done things much differently in terms of rolling it out (meaning we still would have) but we probably would have caught the spell check issue, and most likely the issue with formatting images. It also may have given us a better idea that we should have included a short tutorial on how to use the new image editor.

At any rate, here are some updates on the new 

The updates we announced last Friday caused quite the stir as there were a few bugs in the update that made your experience posting blogs a little challenging. Here is the latest update:

Spell Check:  This has been restored.

Login Points: We have fixed these points and they are now showing in your scoring summary. Points have been awarded for logins retro active to when the bug was introduced on Friday.

Adding Images to Your Posts: Currently in order to wrap text around an image, you will insert the image into the blog post, then once you do that, you can use the 'formats' drop down from top of the blog editor and select 'image right' or 'image left'. This will wrap text around your image. 

I plan on creating a short and easy tutorial on how to use the image editor to make your posts look how you want them to look. I'll share that this week. 

Copy and Paste: This has been fixed. You can now copy and paste from other sources using any of three options. The file option above in the blog editor, by right clicking and selecting 'paste' or by using the (control +V) paste keystrokes.

Blog Timestamps: Currently, when you post a blog that was previously saved as a draft, your post will show the correct date on the post itself, however it's not showing the correct date for the blog when you view it in your main blog roll, or on the overall blog roll and subscriber lists. This one has not been fixed. And that kind of stinks. So if you have a post in draft, and you post it today, it's not going to float to the top of your blog. This means you will need to copy and paste it to a new blog post from the old draft post until this is resolved. 

Outside Blogs: There are a few members that are having issues with outside blogs. It appears that this is isolated to people that had one of the original outside blogs which used a subdomain of activerain, where the subdomain was based on your ActiveRain user name. These outside blogs were given to a group of our original members when we first introduced outside blogs 4 years ago. If you set your outside blog up with it's own domain, it should be working properly. This is currently being investigated and I don't have a timeline on a fix. 

~Bob

 

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