I have added a chatroom counter now at the top of the main site and in the blogbar so you know if there are people waiting to chat. Hopefully this will help you find other people to chat with. I may change how it looks on the front page over time -- lets see how it works out.

I've decided to pull the rating system. It never really got enough use to actually show the ratings. Very very few blogs got rated by over 20 people, most popular ones only were rated by 4-5 people.

Don't worry, you aren't missing anything. :) The data I gathered never showed on any of the blogs since there was not enough to show.

(On a positive note, the blog pages will be less cluttered now anyway)

-John

New official record. Yesterday you all officially broke the "1,000 comment mark" for the one day. Over 1,200 comments were posted yesterday!

Possible good news... I screwed up! :)

Why is this good? Well, to promote your blogs, I "ping" your blogs out to blog search engines.. about 20 of them currently. That tells those search engines that your blog has changed and they should "index" your content so it is available in their search.

Well I was just troubleshooting with one blog search to see why they had responded and said they were taking our blogs, but they would not appear in any search. It turns out some items they required were missing.

I am fixing it now, I think it's done but it might require some tweaking. Anyway, if this works it may increase the visibility of everyones blog outside of this service. (Bottom line, it will be easier for others to find your blogs when they search outside of this site.)

I'm working on some new blog navigation on the blog pages... you may see a little bar that says "Blogstream > {Category} > My Blog"... etc. It's not complete yet and does not necessarily say what it will in the final version. Just playing around for now (and have to head out in a few minutes).

-John