In addition to the multilingual abilities of Maneno, one of the big things we talk about is the low bandwidth aspects to the site and the fact you can set varying levels of bandwidth throttling. To date, this function required that you join the site in order to use it as it is part of a member's profile. While we still recommend that people join to take advantage of various site features, we've now opened up bandwidth selection to anyone who visits the site to try out or use while reading the site. From the home page or any other top level page, you will now see on the right, a Connection Speed selector. Feel free to play around with it and see what we've done with the site to make it as light as possible depending on your needs.
If you try out each setting and analyze it with something like the Page Speed analyzer from Google, you will get results similar to these:
As you can see, the number of elements on a page (the left column) decreases with the actual size of the page (the right column). The last two settings of 'Slow' and 'Very Slow' might not seem all that different, but these settings make a very big difference when you are a member and access other areas of the site. But note that at the lowest setting our home page is a mere 9.4kb to download!
In the center column of this chart you will see that we are big fans of compressing the site to make it even smaller before you view it. This helps us to make the site anywhere from 50% to 70% smaller to download.
You will also notice that we've changed the home page a little bit. We've worked to make elements of more importance have a greater visual impact. We also worked to get more data on the page, while giving it a visual appearance that is lighter overall.
In addition to this, all language selectors have been moved up to the top of the screen for all top level, blog, and hosted blog pages. It clears up a bit of space, gives you the full name of each language in an easier format to select from, and most importantly, it gives us more space to add more language as we get them available.
We hope you like all the changes!
We're happy to announce today that we've just enable static pages for all the blogs on the site. So, if you want to have a page that isn't an article, you can go to your 'blog settings' and add whatever you'd like. For the time being you can code in a good deal of HTML in there. So, for instance, if you wanted to have an About page, then this would be the place to do it.
While the feature was accessible for awhile in the hosted blog setups, we've now made it accessible to all blogs, as well as a lot simpler to use and incorporate whatever someone might like to put in there including such items as: embedding a flickr stream, Google Map, a party you're having, or just about anything you'd like. You can create and take away these pages as much as you want and as necessary, so enjoy.
In the near future, we'll be adding in translation capabilities so that they work just like the articles as well, since there are many authors on this site who are multilingual and might want to be able to have something like an About pages in two or more languages.
What is CSS? The full name is Cascading Style Sheets and it is the code that constructs a web page. The Themes that you can invoke on your blog are new CSS files that override the basic look of the site and create a page that displays differently. Now, in addition to these themes and uploading a custom header image, Maneno users can tweak the CSS on their blog. They can either employ a theme and change its appearance or they can just start with the utmost basic theme (which the Siteblog uses) and build out something new.
CSS is definitely complex and has a very, very steep learning curve to it with a lot of things that can go work are you work with it, so we don't recommend that people start mucking around with this function unless they have some idea of what they're doing. So, why include it? Because it's a function that isn't available on a lot of blogs, or where it is, you either have to run the blog on your own host or pay an additional fee to get access to it. We're not charging for people to use it because we want this platform to be open and available for people to mold how they see fit. If it helps to encourage more bloggers and web developers, that's great. And if you create a custom CSS setup that is quite complex and cool that you'd like to share, let us know and we can set it up as a permanent theme for other people to use.
All of this taken in to account, this is a very new feature. We've put very few restrictions on it as we want to see how people tinker with it. As issues arise or as we see that something could be done better, we'll work on it accordingly. So enjoy it and see what happens. Just keep in mind that any changes you make will immediately show up on your blog (we will be building a 'sandbox' function soon) and also that you don't need to include an opening and closing 'style' tag. If the system detects that you've made use of this CSS function, it will automatically place your code where it needs to go in 'head' of the document with the appropriate tags around it.
Here's to hoping people have a lot of fun with this!
Those who are regular users of Maneno will have noticed by now that we've added a number of new items to the admin menu. These were all sections that have been around for awhile, but we were beta testing them in admin before releasing them to everyone else so that we could make sure that they worked well. Now, we're happy to announce that anyone with a blog can manage their comments, trackbacks, and various media files that they upload to the site.
Obviously one of the most powerful features on any blogging site. Users are free to delete comments that they feel are not appropriate or edit them if there are typos. Both of these items should be used with care, which is why we've made it easy to contact the person who submitted the comment if they listed an email. You'll see that in the comments admin pages, next to their name. Most of them time, people shouldn't have to do too much with this function, but it's there if it's needed.
This word has been problematic to translate as it's an artificial word in English. For those who aren't familiar with this function, Maneno records all the sites that link back to an article you've written. These links are then displayed below the article. It's generally considered to be something of a badge of honor if other people pick up and link to your article. Of course, some people may not want to have this in their blog, which is why it can be turned off in the 'blog settings' section if so desired.
Managing trackbacks has gotten to be something of an ordeal as there are endless spammers and bots who have picked up on trackbacks as an automated way to promote their garbage links. That being the case, we at Maneno do delete trackbacks that are outright bad from the start. There is also a delay built in to the system where once a trackback is recorded, the site waits for a period before displaying it so that it can be determined if it is valid or not and if it isn't, it can be deleted by the user in the admin section where it displays immediately.
Another tricky thing with trackbacks is to make sure that they link to a permanent source. It's often the case that someone will click on a link to an article of yours when that article is on the main page of another blog, recording a direct link to that blog. This is bad because in a short period of time, that link will not be on the front page of a blog and be an invalid trackback. It can take a bit of time to sort all this out, so please contact us if you have any questions.
This section is there for you to manage images you submit through the multiple image uploader. You can also grab the code from previously uploaded images if you want to link to one of them in a post. Lastly, you can upload a new image over an old one if you want to update it.
In time, we will be adding a lot more features (such as managing your sound files) to this section as it's a really powerful tool to control your assets on Maneno.
