Since there are quite a few new people joining Tabulas, I'll write a quick post that'll explain a lot of stuff about Tabulas:

- Tabulas is still a fledgling service. It is by no way a polished project. Unfortunately, I've tied my time down with another project (which will interest you people who like the gallery system here), so I haven't been able to work on fixing bugs or new features.

- There are a ton of new features in planning for the next upgrade of Tabulas. However, there is NO development for Tabulas right now, meaning any new features would happen within weeks at the earliest.

- Tabulas is mainly free because of a personal philosophy regarding service-based sites. However, understand that although this personal philosophy allows for all these free features, you should always consider going to paid accounts when possible. It's only $25/year and will go a long way in supporting this site. Unfortunately there is very little you get from getting a paid account right now besides more space for your gallery and access to hit logging data. But this will change as I get a chance to work on new features.

- There will never be advertisements on your journals. However, we ask you do NOT try to hide or remove the top navigation bar (regardless of how ugly it is. So consider it a trade-off.

- There are no plans to "roll-back" or restrict free features unless it becomes financially impossible for me to continue supporting this site without rolling back features. I am a jobless student, so this site doesn't exactly have the deepest pockets.

If you're having issues or problems, please comment below. I try my best to handle all support questions promptly.

Fixed up the usericon problem.

Fixed up the image resizing problem (smaller images were resized to larger sizes).

Thanks for the fan listing (http://www.regretless.com/tabulas/ ... it'll complement this site well)

You'll notice two options under your Styles tab called "linkroll" and "contentroll." These will create a list of all your links and content pages (created from the Content tab). To use these on any default template, simply type in under linkroll: <!--link--><br/> and <!--content--><br/> for the contentroll. This will create a list of links for you ...

Regarding payment for accounts:
If you cannot use PayPal, you may use any method you'd like that would work over snailmail. International money orders or checks will be accepted, granted I can accept them in the US.

If you have an AudioMatch account (which you should look at if you run Winamp), you can now set your AudioMatch username under "Entry Options."

This will automatically detect what song you're playing, and if you're running the Advanced Mode entry addition, it will automatically input what song you're listening so you don't have to type it.

There is now a new function under your "Entries" tab that is entitled Search Entries. As self-evident, this allows you to search your previous entries so you can quickly locate entries of interest.

Unfortunately, this is a high CPU-usage feature and much like hit logging is restricted only to paid users.

Extra features for the search:
The search engine will keep track of your queries and will remember what entry you picked to visit. This is for when you tend to search for the same stuff over and over again ... it'll remember what entry you picked with high frequency and display it first (with a 'r' for recommended). Try a search and click through an entry ... then search for the same phrase again.

Your search can also be limited to a month. Note that you cannot search for just a month - a month and year must be selected.

If you're taking advantage of our multiple-user groups (which lets you run multiple accounts with ease), you'll notice a dropdown next to the search that list all accounts linked to yours. You can search the entries of all your accounts or just one.

Let us know if there are any bugs!

Edit:
I think we've fixed up the bug with custom entry outputs not displaying the "music/mood/book" of the moments. Please let us know for sure.

I'll be gone until Sunday night and won't be able to fix up bugs until next week. So please be patient =) Any accounts bought until Sunday will be filled Sunday night in the order they are received

To those who want to buy beta accounts, we still got a few left, so buy it now!

To questions regarding what happens when your account expires:
We'll ask you to renew your account. We'll probably give you a two-week period to renew your account.

If you don't renew your account, we will keep your account open with the limits set to whatever images you have. Your account status goes back to free account, but your quotas for images and templates remain at however many you have.

Remember that you can also send payment via mail ... see the payment page for more information.

Thanks once again!
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Edit: We've finished the import function from LiveJournal. The XML files generated by LiveJournal can now be directly imported into your Tabulas.

If you've been crossposting and worry about double posts, do not worry! The feature will automatically detect which are double entries and will allow you to quickly remove them so your journals aren't cluttered

Go try it now...
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Edit2: To those of you with DeadJournals, could you e-mail me a copy of your backups so I can try to make a quick convert tool for these services? I need the XML versions

I'm also aware the Blurty crossposting won't work yet. We're working on it.
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Sometime next week I will be upgrading some of the entry display modes. As suggested by a Tabulas user, we will be using the &!--mood--> and the related tags to simply display the data and not the Currently Feeling/Listening/Reading. For those of you with custom templates, please be aware that I will be changing this. Those of you with preset Tabulas entries will not be affected - I will upgrade all the templates myself.

I'm not sure why we ever had this feature do this, but your friends-of now only lists the entries of people who list YOU as a friend but you don't reciprocate. Basically it'll filter your friends of against your friends page so you don't see your friends entries on your friends of page. (Did that make sense?)

Thanks to all the users who switched to paid Tabulas! =)

We will soon be purchasing a new server for Tabulas. This will be (hopefully) be a fast enough server that will serve our needs for the next few months.

However, we are still running a little short on paid accounts to do the switch. So please, switch to paid Tabulas if you can!

We will be making more announcements regarding the Tabulas server move as a date draws near.

Edit: We are now down to 14 beta accounts left! Please note that beta accounts get more than normal paid accounts ... their limits are 500 images, 100 css files, 100 templates, 25 autolinks, and 50 usericons! These are first come, first serve, so get them before they are gone forever! (These accounts will last as long as you keep your Tabulas subscription alive).

Note: Test this feature at your own risk.

We're testing out a new feature called categories, a feature which has been suggested countless times by many members. This will allow you to organize your existing entries into categories that you define and create.

To create/edit/delete your categories, go to the "Plug-Ins" tab in the administrator's panel (which was previously called Content) and hit "Categories."

Note that you MUST hit "Enable Categories" in order for your journal to display the proper category data.

Create a category, then go to "Move Entries" to move existing entries into that category. You will also be able to set a category from the Advanced Mode for adding entries (underneath "sticky this entry").

Right now this feature *only* works on the default Tabulas entry styles. It will *not* work for any custom entry fields (yet). We want to test this feature on the default layouts and then add support for custom entry styles.

Edit: We've just added support for custom templates! If you go to edit/create a new entry format, you'll notice a new place for "Category Info." Once you enable your categories, use the in the MAIN area of your entry format ... the secondary box is the HTML that comes up if the entry has a category attached to it. You also use the command ... if you're still confused, autogenerate one of the default Tabulas templates and you'll see.

Edit 2: We've fixed up the category name problem where it says you've already created a category with a certain name when you haven't

When you post an entry with a category, it will say so within the entry. Clicking the category name will list all entries from that category. This will hopefully let people who have a wide range of writing interests to organize their entries.

You do not have to set categories to entries; those entries without categories will simply not have that designation. Also note that if you decide to disable categories, your entries will still have the categories set; disabling will only make these changes not visible to the end users.

In the future, we will be experimenting with features to allow for "global" privacy settings ... e.g. allow you to set an "overriding" privacy status (e.g. "friends-only) for all entries within a category REGARDLESS of what the entry privacy setting is.

Things to Do:
- Add support for custom entries
- Add support for global privacy settings for entries

Please let us know of any bugs you notice with the categories.

We've begun a long process of converting the way date is displayed on this site.

Previously, all dates displayed on each journal were the times with respect to that author's journal. However, this did not make much sense as the time zones were not explicitly explained.

Timestamps on entries are now times according to your timezone (assuming you're logged-in). This will hopefully make it easier for you to know when a certain entry has been posted.

If you are not logged in, the time offset is defaulted to the owner of the journal.

We have not yet fixed up timestamps in gallery, as the whole output script for the gallery is mediocre. We will be fixing gallery timestamp issues shortly.

Did you know?
If you set a manual date in the future when you post an entry, it will not show up in your entry until that date comes! So post a few entries in the future for fun (Note: Your RSS feeds will *not* autoupdate in the future ... they will be rebuilt the next time you post an entry).

Your RSS feeds have been moved. We will continue to update your feeds at http://www.tabulas.com/rss/username.rss (case sensitive depending on how you format your username) for another week... but after that week we will discontinue those RSS feeds.

The new location for your RSS feeds are: http://xml.tabulets.com/rss/username.rss (username is ALL lowercase regardless of the way you format your username)

These RSS feeds have gone active starting now ... so use either one or the other, but please migrate to the xml.tabulets.com site.

The purpose of this move is to separate the servers in which the database, Tabulas, and XML data is stored. As we slowly begin to offer more services that are more varied, we do not want to put all our eggs in one basket - by offloading separate services onto separate servers, we can ensure better operation =).

(View Tabulas' RSS feed!)

Thanks!

Excuse the errors you might of gotten today posting entries and comments. We're working on doing full XML syndication of all our data. Should be done soon.

Update: Wow. I'm surprised mySQL scales so well: 273,715.64 queries per hour executed.

Tabulas loves YOU! Won't you love us back and purchase a paid account?

On a more serious note, we're in the process of wrapping up Tabulets (which should let you run your Tabulas journal on your own server)... but PLEASE purchase a paid account if you can :D. Or at least tell your friends about Tabulas so they might purchase a paid account!

We will soon be launching forums, which is where we'll start handling a majority of support requests.

Starting October 1st, we're going to test the long-term viability of Tabulas by going for a PAID ACCOUNT DRIVE. We're going to aim to sell 120 paid accounts during the month of October ... more news on this later.