[break=Paid/Beta Users, read more...]
Ok, so we're testing a new feature that we may pull in the future ... it is media uploads. Officially the feature is said for media uploads, but there is no verification for the files uploaded... they can be EXE, ZIP, MPG, MP3, AVI... whatever. The max filesize is limited to 7 megabytes.

You can upload the files from the Content tab » Media Files.

Once you upload a file, it will how up on your 'content' page. Beta accounts are being granted 4 media file uploads.

In the future, we will be zipping the file up. There are some server limitations right now and I cannot execute the ZIP queries ...

Right now I'm going to test the general interest in such a feature and see if I can expand it to make your journaling experience better.
[/break]

We realize that the admin panel is a mess. It's not consistent, and the learning curve in learning where stuff is is a major prohibiting factor for new users. I've started to make notes on how to organize stuff... the new UI will be under development for a few weeks, but please note that we ARE working on it.

If you have any suggestions in terms of the UI, please let us know!
Posted by tabulas on October 5, 2003 at 10:24 PM | 44 Comments

Related Entries

tabulas has turned on comment autolocking after 2 days.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:51 PM
I've just converted my template to an XHTML 1.1/css layout (talked about in here). Although it's not a priority, I can't validate my tabulas to XHTM 1.1. Maybe because of some tags?
Comment posted on October 7th, 2003 at 11:56 AM
Do you know what tags are not validating in XHTML 1.1?
Comment posted on October 7th, 2003 at 03:28 AM
Yeah, specifically, is there any way we can get the navbar in CSS instead of tables?
Comment posted on October 7th, 2003 at 11:57 AM
No, the navbar is not customizable... although I'll look into making it CSS instead of tables.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 09:08 PM
Is there a way to increase the number of posts per page? (Increase it over 15 that is?)
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 09:26 PM
Not beyond the max, no.

MacDaddyTatsu (guest)

Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 04:33 PM
YOU ARE A GOD...A SICK BLOGGING GOD, BRO.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 03:15 PM
I have these hamster smilies but there's only 14 of them. Mr. Tabulas could you still use them as smilies? Please?
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 04:12 PM
In my experience, those smilies are huge. Smilies should be very very small in size.

You sure do ask a lot for having a free account ;)
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 05:02 PM
They are 19x15, is that okay?
Is asking for a lot a bad thing?
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 08:33 PM
Not at all =)

But we're probably not going to add those smilies... we're quite satisfied with the ones we have now :)
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 01:18 PM
I wanted to enable hit logging, but when I went to my profile page there was nothing for me to click to enable it. I have a beta account, so I should be able to do this, right? I've looked everywhere in my control panel but don't know where to do this. Thanks in advance for any help!
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 01:48 PM
http://www.tabulas.com/private/style.php

it's one of the checkboxes.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:04 AM
Ah, were you ****fact@hotmail.com ?

There is no way of notifying me that you've paid unless you respond to my e-mail or send me one proactively as indicated in the paid accounts page ;)
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 03:07 PM
Alright! =) You've been moved to paid/beta status. Thanks :)
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 02:28 AM
How come the option of "stop search engines from crawling onto my website" doesn't apply when you check it and submit changes in the Style section?
Comment posted on October 7th, 2003 at 01:37 AM
That's a darn good question. Fixed =)
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 12:41 AM
I would like to have the option of having a post posted only to the shared journal, and not on my own journal.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 09:49 AM
You can do that. Set:

Status: Shared Journal Only

& check any shared journals you want to post to.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 12:45 AM
You can do that already. When posting your entry, under Status (where all your security settings are), there's a Shared Journal option.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 12:52 AM
d'oh!

I hadn't seen that one!

My bad!
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 12:39 AM
is it possible to lock your blogring from other views? and where can u change the status of the blogring..
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:05 AM
No, all blogring entries are public.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 12:14 AM
Oh yeah, one more thing. Seems like the smilies pictures are broken in the "add smilies" pop-up when you're creating entries.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:03 AM
They work for me? Which colors?
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:49 AM
All colors. I copied the link location and it's showing http://www.tabulas.com/ik/smilies/null/borg.gif

Looks like it's showing "null" instead of the correct color.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:57 AM
On the actual entry page where you add an entry, what's the javascript link to the "View Smiles" popup page?
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:07 AM
The link says "javascript:smiliesPopup('popupSmilies.php?style=yellow');"

The actual url of the popup is http://www.tabulas.com/private/popupSmilies.php?style=yellow

Hmm.... I just tested with IE and the smilies show up. I guess Tabulas really hates Mozilla? :P
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:13 AM
Ok, those two URLS are correct.

So Mozilla sees the JS popup, but won't load up the page as popupSmilies.php?style= (with nothing there?)

Not sure why Mozilla would fail here... weird.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:18 AM
Well, it loads the popup with the color in the url, but it's doing nothing with it. When I first signed on, it worked fine... either something really messed up is going with my browser, or something broke in the code.

I copied the correct url (http://www.tabulas.com/private/popupSmilies.php?style=yellow) from IE to Mozilla, and what shows up in IE properly won't show up in Mozilla (all the images become broken links because their url has "null" instead of the color in it).

I just tried it with http://www.tabulas.com/private/popupSmilies.php?style= and that doesn't work either.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 03:09 PM
Argh. I'm not sure what the deal is. I just tried smilies with Mozilla Firebird and it worked fine ...

Also, in regards to the links... firebird *does* convert the brackets and spaces, but it still downloads the file fine.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:32 PM
Hmm, well, I just completely removed all trace of Mozilla and reinstalled it, and now the smilies are showing up fine again. Guess something messed up on my end.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 12:10 AM
Ok, just tested the Media Files feature. After uploading, some files can't be accessed (says not found). From the links, it seems like it's translating the non-alphanumeric characters into garbage characters. I think it's the same reason my site's title has the apostrophe and space become garbage characters. Is it something with the server settings? So in any case, have to rename my files before uploading - another idea is to allow us to rename the files after uploading.

An example of what happens is that "[4265]My Sassy Girl - Pachelbel - Canon In D.mp3" in the link becomes "%5B4265%5DMy%20Sassy%20Girl%20-%20Pachelbel%20-%20Canon%20In%20D.mp3"

This one works fine, but originally it had an apostrophe and brackets and it didn't seem to like that (it had "Pachelbel's Canon" and "(Movie version)"
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:03 AM
I think your browser is converting the link into trash? I'm seeing the links fine in your content page, in the DB, and on the server ...
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:46 AM
It looks fine if you just hover your mouse over it, but try copying link location and then pasting it.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 10:56 AM
I did, and the only thing it did was convert the spaces to %20, which is normal. Are you not being able to download it at all?
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:01 AM
Um, I renamed my files so they could be downloaded. But try a file with apostrophes and () brackets. Or try one with Japanese characters.

The [] brackets don't show up as %5B and %5D to you?
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:02 AM
Hmm, ok, only the spaces get converted in IE, maybe it's Mozilla...
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:14 AM
Hrm, I have an inkling what the problem is. Let me try something and get back at you.
Comment posted on October 5th, 2003 at 11:44 PM
From an upaid users point of view I'd like it to be more obvious what features are paid only. I spent a while earlier today looking for how to turn on hit logging and only found from someone elses journal that it's a paid feature. I have no problems with it being paid only, only that it wasn't obvious that this was the case. I think there are a few other paid only things still mixed in with the rest too. Since you're looking at rearranging anyway then hopefully you can split them out.

I spent some time today editing the way my journal looked and found it kind of frustrating and confusing. I seemed to be doing the same things, and going to the same places again and again to get things to change. I'm not sure how it could be done better but it seems that the process could be streamlined or made more intuative. But then I'm sure you know this :D

Dracil's point number 7 is almost verbatum what I was thinking on that issue too :D
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:16 AM
Yeah, this is also part of hte reason why I'm trying to upgrade the UI. The UI was originally designed for the free users, but as I realized paid users need more of a reward, I designed a bunch of paid-only features, but it became impossible to separate the two.

I will fix this up soon =)
Comment posted on October 5th, 2003 at 11:15 PM
For the gallery, an option to mass select and delete images will be useful.. Right now, we can mass select to edit but not to delete since we'll need to click on "delete" for every photo.
Comment posted on October 6th, 2003 at 11:16 AM
Actually, the mass delete option is not something I've ever liked - you'll notice there are no mass delete features - no mass deleting comments, entries, or images. There also isn't a 'delete account' feature.

The reasoning here is if someone got ahold of your account, then you would be pretty screwed if there was one or two buttons that controlled the deletion of that much content...
Comment posted on October 5th, 2003 at 11:01 PM
Hmm, so here are my thoughts.

1)No need for a "view your site" tab. We have the link on the navbar already, so it's redundant.

2)Styles/Journal Styles/Entry Display Style should be moved elsewhere, because it conflicts with the Custom Entry Format. So right now, if I edit anything else in the Journal Styles, I have to go back and re-enable my Custom Entry Format. Perhaps they should be put together.

3)An option to re-arrange the order of our Shared Journals (especially how it appears on our actual journal with the Shared Journal rolling)

4)Usericons would seem to be more at home under the Preferences Tab, next to our profiles, since usericons have a more universal role than just our journal style/templates.

5)Ability to create CSS for custom templates? It would save a great deal of clutter on my templates if I could edit the styles separately and just include a code snippet to load up the styles. :P

6)Contact info in our profiles?

7)I take it the media uploads are only for paid accounts? It seems like a pretty cool feature that most other blogging sites don't have, so it'll set Tabulas apart. IMHO it is also easily abusable, but if it's a paid feature, probably won't cause too much problems. And if for legal reasons, it needs to be pulled in the future, it's completely understandable.

8)Haven't really used the gallery much, so can't comment on that yet. :P

But other than that, seems fine. :)