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QQBlogs New Feature - Categories! Saturday, May 26, 2007 | QQBlogs Dev I've spent about 8 to 10 straight hours of design, coding and testing to add just one feature to QQBlogs -- categorization of posts. After creating hundreds of posts in my blog over several years, being able to categorize them makes my life easier. Now, I don't feel like my blog's a mess. Many blogs out there have categorization, but it was a secondary aim for QQBlogs (more about that later), so it has finally come. As a developer, I'm super privileged to get a trial run of the categorization feature in my own blog. (See Category on left.) Somehow it seems to work pretty well. If you'd ask me - I simply love the new feature! Meanwhile, let me do some selling for QQBlogs. If you didn't know, I've sworn by QQBlogs not to put banners on user's blogs. This is our #1 goal. No banners, no ads. The template's all yours. Even my present company is using QQBlogs. If you live in Singapore, you bet QQBlogs is probably one of the fastest blogging site you can find, ever. This is our #2 goal. Not fast, but blazing fast. Our #3 goal is to allow multi-user-per-blog, multi-blog-per-user. You can create as many blogs as you wish under a single login. You could also invite others to your blog, or participate in other blogs. Our #4 goal was to allow template sharing. Easier said than done, but we've did it. I'm still thinking of ways to improve this, though. Here's a bit of history. QQBlogs was developed and launched way before Google acquired Blog*Spot. We were one of the first to provide a built-in comments engine. Blogs back then did not have comments conveniently built-in. Instead, bloggers had to link to tagboards and guestbooks. (Hey, what happened to guestbooks? They seem to have vanished.) There's really no other reason why you should choose something else. (Yes, I am working on the orange template. We'll get rid of that eyesore soon. Please be patient.) You think I'm all bullshit? Do it. Sign up. Registration is free. posted by detach at 02:25:12 AM | permanent link | 1 comments QQBlogs Migrated Tuesday, August 29, 2006 | QQBlogs Dev Yea most of you may not feel the change but QQBlogs has been migrated to a brand new server as of 5:30 am this morning. The more powerful server and better bandwidth will help bring this blog site another step further. For the techie and curious, QQBlogs is hosted on a Sun Fire X2100 server running a 2.0GHz AMD Opteron processor. The server runs CentOS 4.3, MySQL, PHP and Apache2 with very customized configurations. On top of that, I am actually in need of helpers to build more templates. I will provide the disk space for your images. Please drop me a comment if you're interested! :) posted by detach at 09:58:07 PM | permanent link | 0 comments How to improve QQBlogs? Wednesday, August 16, 2006 | QQBlogs Dev I'm in the midst of moving QQBlogs across to the new Sun Fire X2100 server . While I'm planning the entire migration process, there were other thoughts that filled my mind. For the past years, it has been quite a daunting task keeping QQBlogs alive. I've written much about QQBlog's history in an earlier post, describing what QQBlogs aims to be. As I have promised, QQBlogs will remain free. This means there will be no advertisement banners on your blog site, ever. To be able to sustain this, QQBlogs is proudly sponsored by my company, Securlogic. Of course, this doesn't mean that QQBlogs has no commercial interest. All blog sites have their own set of commercial interests. It's only how they utilize your data. QQBlog's interests are simple and they don't intrude your privacy nor annoy your readers. There are plans for advertisements within the member's area in future. These are not like the public banners that appear on your blogs. It's not targeted at your readers -- it's targeted at you. No popups or layers, I promise. Just banners, announcements or texts. You can choose to ignore them, but they are often delicious goodies. However, I must admit that QQBlogs still lacks several features most people desire. On the top of my list is actually a photo gallery. This will be done soon, but how much space to allocate is an issue. I would appreciate suggestions. Please be realistic with the figures though. We're tight on storage. Second would be a colour scheme change. Many people told me that the orange was too striking, so I might just pick a soothing grey / white scheme. So, how we can improve QQBlogs? Your comments are most welcome. posted by detach at 11:11:46 PM | permanent link | 2 comments The history of QQBlogs Tuesday, January 31, 2006 | QQBlogs Dev Yes yes! QQ is officially launched as of yesterday (it's past midnight now). It's been way outdated for the current "competition" for a long, long time.Formerly O2r Bloggers, I developed this blog site more than 2 years ago during my polytechnic days when I saw a rising demand for blogs. During that time (late 2002), Blog*Spot (now blogger.com and 0wn3d by Google) was getting pretty popular. So the very typical me who loved re-inventing things that already exists, I created O2r Bloggers as a subdomain, bloggers.o2r.net. O2r.net was a domain I already owned and used it to host my friend's websites. Back then I didn't know O2r Bloggers would grow to become something quite (i wouldn't say very, but quite) important to people who have been using it to write their daily intricacies. I've always, and still do, promote QQ Blogs as a community website. There will be no banners, no restrictions, no fine prints (except the copyright message), and no rules. This means you can make the blog site look like whatever you want, write whatever you want, and there'll be no red tape unless until some legal authority comes after me for you publishing child pornography. Enough said. So, towards the end of 2003, three months after I have enlisted for National Service in the Singapore Armed Forces, O2r Bloggers had over 300 registered users. However, probably less than a third were really active users. During that time, Blogger had already been acquired by Google and is getting better. Many people didn't see the reason behind this -- that Google is using the links generated by blogs to aid in their search business. You could pretty much guess the rest. My active supporters are still religiously blogging. Some of them I must really thank because they kept my site alive over the years, particularly Sze Yun, a very talented girl who designed most of the templates you see in QQBlogs today without demanding for money nor fame. 2004 was a hectic year. I was caught up with NS as I just joined the SAF Music and Drama Company as a musician. I had a hard time catching up with my skills and knowledge in music. There was nothing much I could do to keep my own IT skills going except the random visits to the Data Center when servers went down. So in early 2005 I asked myself where is O2r Bloggers headed. I was convinced not to use blogger.com, and I saw O2r Bloggers slowly losing pace from its early days. I took the first step to find a new name for O2r Bloggers and decided to buy qqblogs.com, a sound-alike for Cute-Cute Blogs, targeted at young teenagers. January 2005, QQBlogs.com was born. I re-designed the entry page and made everything else from its original dull purple to bright orange, hopefully attracting more signups. It didn't work. I knew a fresh start was the only way. I promised users that a new version would be ready on Valentine's day 2005, but it was never ready. By the end of Q2 2005, QQBlogs.com was almost dead. I had 500 users and only about 10% were active users, and almost 30% were spammers. I had to get working. The first step was to redesign the entire template engine. The current ones were simple, but too simple for any flexibility at all. I created a prototype using Smarty but it was way too complex for a typical blog site. It got way too complicated so I stopped work for a while. My girlfriend, Mei Sin, also a typical geek-girl started getting naggy about QQBlogs and we got back to work in Q4 2005. A new template engine was selected and confirmed, and I went on to set up the file structure, database and security mechanisms of the entire site while Mei Sin worked on most of the code bits of the member's corner. So, after much procastination we launched QQBlogs during the sunny morning of 30th January 2006. I shut down Apache on the old web server to prevent further updates, and then started migrating the DNS entries and configuring Apache on the new server. Once the data was migrated, the site went live while Mei Sin and I churned out some new templates as well as tidied up the old ones. I stood by my motto and I kept QQBlogs a community site for over two years, and I hope it would continue for the many years after. The new site is designed in a manner where everybody gets to share not only their blogs, but their designs as well. We can write in each other's blogs, and we can use each other's designs. We're all writers, as well as designers. So when somebody asks if you write in a blog, you tell them: "I design as well!" May the new year make us all better writers and designers! posted by detach at 01:29:04 AM | permanent link
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