Entries for December, 2003

There was some downtime today. We apologize for any inconveniences caused.
Posted by tabulas on December 2, 2003 at 02:41 PM | 16 Comments
Ok, so we've been receiving a lot of questions regarding IP addresses.

We've unblocked the * in the tagboard; you can now view the full IP address of anyone who leaves a message in your tagboard.

We've also added IP address to the Feedback Log; you may now view the IP address of any user who leaves a comment in your journal.

From these, you should now be able to ban anyone from your Tabulas.
Posted by tabulas on December 4, 2003 at 12:37 AM | 9 Comments
We spent some time rewriting the method in which RSS files are generated; this is a huge step in revamping some of the clunky backend.

There were some errors before with RSS feeds which are now fixed.

For paid users, we've also added the functionality that allows RSS feeds to be generated for every category.

You may access your category RSS feed at:

http://xml.tabulets.com/rss/cats/[#categoryid]username.rss

Please note that you must add a post to a category to generate the category RSS file if you haven't done so.

We will be working on extending the functionality of the RSS feeds shortly (allowing RSS feeds to be turned on/off for each category or for the main site).

To answer some questions I know that will come up:

1.) Category overrides are still relevant to your primary RSS file; any entries posted to a category with a higher-than-public override will not syndicate the entry in RSS.

2.) Categories with overrides will not have their contents published via RSS.

We've gone ahead and generated all RSS feeds for each category on Tabulas so far (except those with privacy levels set).

Note that in your profiles, there is now a link to the RSS feeds next to your categories.
Posted by tabulas on December 4, 2003 at 02:03 AM in Syndication Formats | 26 Comments
We have decided to put our weight behind the FOAF XML format; we're quite excited about this new turn of events. By adopting open standards like FOAF, we can (hope) that some developers will be able to develop tools to examine the social network here within Tabulas.

Over the upcoming week, your site will start publishing FOAF data.

For those not technically savvy, FOAF is basically going to be a file that will be machine-readable that will take the data in your profile and output it so any machine can read it.

There are no security issues to worry about; your e-mail will be sha1summed (in essence being 'encrypted,' in laymen's terms) and the only data that will be published will be the data you have chosen to publish from your profiles page.

Over the next few days, you will see the profiles page being revamped; some additional information willl be available as well; we will make announcements at that time for more information regarding the changes.
Posted by tabulas on December 8, 2003 at 01:44 AM in Syndication Formats | Add a Comment
We've added more profiles options, and they are also now reflected in your own journal profile pages.

Go to the new profiles pages to update your personal profiles!

Please note that all fields in the profiles pages are OPTIONAL.

Edit: We've fixed up the errors that you were receiving earlier (mbox_sha1 errors).
Posted by tabulas on December 9, 2003 at 10:46 PM in Misc Features | 8 Comments
We've added FOAF files to your account. It is located at:

http://xml.tabulets.com/foaf/username.xml (username should be in all lowercase)

Your FOAF file contains all the profile data that you specify. We will be allowing you more control over your FOAF files in the future (adding currentProject, pastProjects, PGP Key are some of the upcoming features).

Your metatags have also been updated so include a link to your FOAF file.
Posted by tabulas on December 10, 2003 at 03:01 AM in Syndication Formats | 17 Comments
If you've been having trouble signing up for new accounts over the past 24 hour period, we apologize. After implementing the new profile/FOAF changes, we ran into some troubles with user account creation.

To compound the problem, we also were rescripting the whole user registration area ... everything should be dandy now... so go register an account now!
Posted by tabulas on December 11, 2003 at 03:32 AM in Commercial Things | 5 Comments
A feature that doesn't seem to be used very often is the change username feature.

We've expanded on this feature; now when you select "Remove Publicly," not only will it remove you from everyone's friend list, but any comments and tagboard entries that you left will be converted to an anonymous ID.

The purpose of the Remove Publicly is to allow people to quickly switch journal names for whatever reason.

If you do NOT select the "Remove Publicly" option, then your username simply changes ... all your comments and tagboard entries will automatically update to your new username (as well as all your friends' friends lists).

. . .

We've been working on the tagboard scripting; if you find any tagboard-related errors, please let us now.

There is now checkboxes when you go to moderate your tagboard entries (as well as the old links). You can use either option to delete tagboards from your site.
Posted by tabulas on December 11, 2003 at 07:02 AM in Misc Features | 12 Comments
Because we desperately need money and Christmas is coming up, we'd thought we'd run a promotion on paid accounts

From December 15th - January 1st we will be offering year-long accounts at $25... but if you purchase two accounts, you get the third one for FREE! So get together with your friends and give the gift of TABULAS (and help support this site too).

So for example:
1st 12-month subscription purchased: $25
2nd 12-month subscription purchased: $25
3rd 12-month subscription purchased: FREE
Total Price: $50 for 3 free 12-month accounts!)

These accounts must be for separate accounts (you cannot get all 3 and stack the 12 month subscriptions onto one account) because we're trying to promote SHARING
Posted by tabulas on December 12, 2003 at 02:49 PM in Commercial Things | 31 Comments
If you've noticed, our servers have been yo-yoing the past day ... going up and down. We really hate this ... as much as you're frustrated, I am frustrated much more over this. Server outages are the bane of the Internet ... I detest them from the bottom of my heart and try my best not to affect uptime of this site.

The problem is we simply have too many users with too little server power/hard drive space. Our paid to free user ratio is LESS than 0.5%
(yes, half a percent), which is not working out too good for me financially; I am actually break-even right now and will be dipping into my own pockets once again to help pay for the costs of the servers starting next month.

So with great reluctance, we're going to close off free account registrations after December 15th temporarily until I can get the server situation stabilized. This in essence will mean that I will be purchasing a few more servers (setting them up, rewriting the Tabulas architecture to spread the load over a few servers) ... but this is REALLY contingent on people buying some more paid accounts.

SO PLEASE, if you enjoy using this service and can afford $15 for half-year or $28 for a full year, PLEASE CONSIDER BUYING A PAID ACCOUNT. This money doesn't go to waste; every cent goes to making this site faster and better ... plus you help ensure it's future

Right now, I'm aiming for raising $600 by January 1st; this means that I'll have to sell 12 of the "special deals" below, which means I need 36 users who are willing to move into the "paid users" category. PLEASE HELP ME! The $600 will help buy new servers and cover their costs until late February.

You can read about paid accounts here ... and remember, we've got a 3 paid accounts for $50 promotion going on! (read more)

Please let all your friends know (those who don't list this account as a friend ...).

Thanks!

BEFORE YOU POST A QUESTION, READ THIS STATEMENT:
Existing users with free accounts will *not* be affected. I am simply turning off the ability to register new accounts; existing accounts are _not_ affected. This measure is taken to protect the accounts of those users who already have registered.
Posted by tabulas on December 15, 2003 at 03:57 AM in Commercial Things | 73 Comments
The special $50 for 3 1-year account deal has started We've also added a 3-month payment option for $8 for those who can't commit to half-year and year-long subscriptions.

You can find all relevant links in the payment pages!

Thanks once again!
Posted by tabulas on December 15, 2003 at 05:51 PM in Commercial Things | 4 Comments
When we re-open registrations, we will only be opening them up for a few days; we're stil a bit iffy about the whole server situation.

A new server *has* been purchased, but we are still in the process of configuring it.

We are also in the middle of a complete code revamp, switching up some technical things within the coding so that we can support the future growth of Tabulas.

We will be moving all CSS files to http://css.tabulas.com as well as all images to http://images.tabulas.co/.

These new changes will result in no difference for you - if our plan is executed smoothly, you will not even notice a change!

When we do re-open accounts, we have implement a new feature called "account reclamation." Basically when a new user registers, our site will search for an old unactivated account that is more than a month old. Unactivated accounts are those that were not confirmed via e-mail, so the account was never used.

We will be granting out those accounts to new registrations instead of creating a new userid. We have approximately 1000 unactivated accounts ... so this should also help our database a bit.

There's a ton of stuff coming out of Tabulas this week, so check this page regularly!
Posted by tabulas on December 17, 2003 at 07:26 PM in Commercial Things | 11 Comments
Registrations have reopened. Thanks for your patience!
Posted by tabulas on December 18, 2003 at 03:13 PM in Commercial Things | 7 Comments
We've been implementing new code to handle the main add entry page. Please let us know if you run into any problems.

Update: We've also updated the Entry Options page with some revamped coding. Please let us know if you run into any problems.

Note that we've added a "Default Privacy" status option. You can use this to set the default privacy level on any entry you add.

Edit 2: Shared Journals will probably not be working most of today but should work better starting tonight - we're implementing new shared journal features

Edit 3: Posting to shared journals should now work fine.
Posted by tabulas on December 20, 2003 at 01:19 PM in Bug Fixes | 42 Comments
For reasons we're not quite sure, some of you are having difficulties with commenting in your entries.

This is because your Allow Commenting Checkbox on your styles page has been unchecked. Simply check this box again, then go through your entries and find the "Allow Commenting" option and check that.

That should fix it. We're trying to locate how this problem occured in the first place.
Posted by tabulas on December 22, 2003 at 03:53 PM in Bug Fixes | 48 Comments
Just a reminder that the special 3 paid accounts for $50 will expire shortly. More information here.

Thanks and have a happy new years!
Posted by tabulas on December 28, 2003 at 08:35 PM in Commercial Things | 21 Comments
We have now removed the non-alphanumeric character restriction on autolinks. Autolink flag text can now include spaces as well as non-alphanumeric characters.

However, you still cannot include double quotes (") and single quotes (') as a flag for the autolinks. Any other character is okay though.
Posted by tabulas on December 30, 2003 at 02:51 AM in Journaling Features | Add a Comment
We've had to clear out a chunk of the database as a part of maintenance; a bunch of the 'personalized' hit logging data was deleted. However, the only data that was deleted was referrals from within the site.

We are only going to start storing referral data if the referrer is *not* within Tabulas.

We do plan on expanding the hit logging feature a bit (or just making it better in general). We plan on generating monthly reports for all paid users about referrals from outside Tabulas as well as a more aesthetic calendar view for monthly views. These features should be implemented over the next few days, so please be patient.


P.S. We've also added categories to this journal to help manage news a bit better (Thanks to that person who suggested a few weeks ago; I just got around to doing it).
Posted by tabulas on December 30, 2003 at 03:12 AM in General News | 2 Comments
We're slowly starting to release the new stuff we've been working on.

Links
We're trying to extend the functionality of our links so that eventually it will serve as your online bookmark center. We've added hierarchial categories that you can use to organize your links.

However, please note that these categories are not yet reflected in your site (e.g. no one will see the categories yet). This is still something we're working on. However, we figure this new feature will be a valuable tool for those who want to start organizing their links quickly.

We've also added better error-catching and link-fixing features (if you put in www.yahoo.com instead of http://www.yahoo.com, our script will detect that and automatically make the proper corrections).

We've also in general cleaned up the way the whole links area looks. Hopefully its a bit cleaner and easier to understand.

Go to your new links control page (accessible from Control Panel » Plug-Ins » Links) and go try them out!

Content Pages
Nothing new was really added here, but we did fix up the way you navigate around; something we're trying to do is make a consistent left-black menu bar show up just like on your main entries page, but for all other features.

So you'll see your recent 4 pages as well as a dropdown to access the Content Pages options.

Your content pages can also optionally opted out of the linebreak to
.

What does this mean? You'll notice that when you type an entry, if you hit enter twice, it'll create two linebreaks. This is because the script interprets this linebreak and converts it to the HTML command for "go to the next line."

This is not favorable when you create a linebreak when writing HTML. So this should fix up some of the HTML problems that have occured with content pages.

You'll also notice something new we're trying out with the content pages. In the main view your content page, you'll notice links at the top of the table. These links, when you click them, will use Javascript to sort the stuff in the tables. This can be useful if you want to quickly organize your content pages by when you last updated them, when you first created them, or alphabetically by title (as they do by default). Hopefully we'll be adding this functionality to some areas that could use some real help (e.g. your entries or gallery perhaps?).

Go to your new content control page (accessible from Control Panel » Plug-Ins » Content Pages) and go try them out!
Posted by tabulas on December 30, 2003 at 05:56 PM in Misc Features | 30 Comments
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