Blog design questions

[tormodg]

I am a bit concerned that vBdynamics looks 100% like a lot of other vB products (and of course the vBa products), particularly in the way it used a lot of table based HTML and only applies CSS for styling of table content.

1) Are there any plans to make, for example, a blog module template that is more CSS/XHTML based, or would this be entirely up to us as webmasters?

2) Are there ways to make sure that vBd blog entries are sent to blog ping services like pingomatic etc? Or would this be easy to configure as a custom thingy?

(I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere already).

[Brian]

1). I can't specifically say that there are plans for that at the moment as the product is still young and we're more at the stage of getting it out there, and seeing what other features our customers might like to see in future releases. The product is of course completely tempate based though, so anyone fluent in HTML could change the appearance. I'm sure as some members start customizing things, at least a few of them will share their work here as well.

2) I can't say that I'm familiar with services like pingomatic. Could you elaborate a little on what it does, and do you have any idea what's generally required to use their service on another web site?

[tormodg]

1) Understood! It would be really cool if we could make some sort of skin exchange system for vBa products. ;)

2) Pingomatic is a service that pings blog aggregators etc (like Technorati) when you post a new entry in your blog. The vBSEO plugin from Crawlability has this feature built-in. Wordpress and other blogs use this all the time - it's very helpful when it comes to getting traffic to blogs.

[Brian]

So do you just have to enter the URL and RSS link at Pingomatic? I tried entering the URL's to the demo here, chose the first 3 sites, and it came back with this:
Weblogs.com results:
Thanks for the ping.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Feed Burner results:
Ok



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Feedster results:
Thanks for the ping, and thanks for choosing Feedster(tm)!

Is that all it's really supposed to do, or is there something more that I'm missing?

[tormodg]

That's it, really... :)

[Brian]

So are you looking for something that will automatically submit data to that site on a regular basis, or just the ability to submit to that site as I did with the demo?

[tormodg]

Well, the way it works in Wordpress is that once you publish a blog entry, Wordpress pings all the servers you have in your ping list (pingomatic is cool since it pings the most important ones for you).

It would be nice if vBdynamics had:

a) a list of sites to ping when a post is published
b) a checkbox for "Ping servers when this post is published" option under the editor
c) the ability to choose "always ping servers when posting" in the AdminCP.

[Brian]

Sounds like a good idea. I can't make any promises as to when I might be able to work something like that in, but I've added a note to my to-do list to be sure to check those functions out.

[tormodg]

Great. I am currently setting up a new vB test server and will study vBdynamics when I got it all configured.