Hey everyone! I know I have not been around lately... sorry I have been pretty busy.

First, Happy Easter to everyone that celebrates it out there!

Second, I was browsing the web and came across this interesting story:

Man trying ot trade red paperclip for a house

And then I remembered reading about this blog, where a guy has people send in anonymous artistic postcards with secrets on them that he posts. The postcards are realy creative and interesting.

Post Secret

Where am I going with this??

Well, I decided to run a contest on Blogstream... I am looking for the most creative use of a Blog! I want you to create a blog that is new and innovative... do something different -- something that has never been done before like the items above.

The winner will be decided by me and will be based on how creative and popular your idea becomes. The contest runs until June 30th, 2006 and the winner will receive $250.

The only rules are: No illegal activities, No copying an idea already done (IE: don't just make another "Post Secret" website), Don't submit your entry until your blog is established (see below), No cheating or sneaky behavior, No blogs that are against the Blogstream Terms and Conditions (T&Cs). (These rules may be adjusted as new questions come up).

If you have any questions about this post them here.

You can post your entries here as well, but DO NOT POST AN ENTRY UNTIL IT IS ESTABLISHED. Don't just create a blog tonight, give it a title and one post and submit it... I will just remove your entry.

Good Luck!

We've been getting hit by major search engine crawlers lately due to all the content and all the new blogs. There is also a new search engine startup out there that is doing heavy crawling trying to catch up with all the other search engines... they are very aggressive.

I just added some more memory the the system which should solve part of the problem... I'll have to keep making some adjustments to speed it up as well. The memory should definitely help, as we were running low.

Don't worry, we didn't go anywhere!

Server had some problems unexpectedly late last evening and was down most of the night... partially due to me not catching it until late.

Sorry for any inconvenience. We are backup and things seem fine.

Made a few changes, fixes, upgrades, etc. today...

* There was a bug with sending private messages to members that did not create a blog (people that just joined to comment/read blogs). It has been fixed -- you should now be able to send those memnbers PMs.

* I have added a "more" link to the Recent Posts area in the blog page... it goes to the history page and shows a list of all posts. I'll be improving that over time.

* I noticed the site was hanging a little and going slow sometimes. I think it is due to increase in users and viewing images -- every image on a page takes up server time... so I moved images to a separate server. It seems to have solved the problem but we'll have to see over time.

* I changed the blog search the other day to use google to do the search -- it's more powerful, faster, can find comments, shows more information and much more. There are just so many blogs now that it seemed to make sense. We will have to see how it works over time.

* I finally got off my duff and fixed the Blog List bugs -- some of you noticed that if you changed a category and a page at the same time it really didn't work, and the page change at the bottom didn't work correctly either. It should all be fixed now.

I have created a simple comment history page where you can get a synopsis of where you have left comments, when, and what they were about. You can find this in the "My Account" area.

At this time you can only view comment histories for your own account and must be logged in to do it. I may open it up in the future to allow others to view your "public" histories but want to test this out first and see how it goes.

Let me know what you think and how it works... or if you find any problems... there will be some quirks in areas where blogs were removed or posts deleted that the comment corresponded to.

It is definitely a useful feature for looking up what you have done.