New Release! Huzzah!

It's new release time (hello 10, aka Littleford). The theme of today's release is "Control." That's control over your content and information. As our community grows and more and more members sign up for Vox, we've realized that you don't have to be a power user to appreciate finer grain privacy permissions. In fact, it's the people who are newer to blogging that truly understand the value of limiting what the casual blog reader can see.

So that said, let's go over the highlights of this release.

Account Settings Overhaul
Because we're giving Vox members more settings for their account and blog, we made the account section of Vox able to be more scalable with growth. That means we've moved a lot of the functionality into their own sections. Short and sweet, you have a ton of new stuff in account.

Profile Privacy Settings
You have an email address, a birthday, a location, an AIM account, a Skype name -- this list goes on and on. You want to allow readers of your blog to be able to contact you or know information about you, but you don't want just anyone to have these details. On Vox, it's now possible for you to choose what groups can see what information. Want your family to have your Skype name and your friends to have your AIM? You can do that. Want the public to see your birthday, but not your gender? You can do that to. It's now easy to limit access on almost everything displayed on the profile page.

Mobile Posting Settings

Now you can set up multiple email addresses to send your mobile and email posts to. For instance, you can have a mobile address called "Vox Family" that publishes to family only and is tagged a certain way and another one that is for the general public consumption. Additionally, you can choose whether or not a post is created when you moblog a photo. This feature is going to come in very handy with Vox Hunt (see below).

Notifications Preferences
By popular demand you can now choose whether you want to receive email notifications when you're added as a neighbor or when you receive a new comment.

Profile Photo vs. Member Photo
Vox now allows you to pick a different photo/picture to display on your profile page and as your member photo.

Explore People

It's now possible to explore Vox members by interests. Just go to the explore page and you'll see a new option called "people." Do a search for a interest tag like "dogs" and you'll find all the people who've tagged that as their interest. And, you'll find a list of a few other tags that they've indicated. Don't know how to add interest tags to your Vox profile? Just go to account settings and edit it in your public user profile

Block

Block User

So you've explored people and have found some new and interesting Voxsters. That's great. But What happens when someone finds you and they're either annoying or just not right for your neighborhood? You can now block a user from commenting on or favoriting your content. They'll still be able to read your public posts, however. We hope that our Vox members won't have to use this feature often but if they do, it can be found by simply hovering over the member photo of the person that they wish to block.

New Themes
What's a new release without some great new themes? Our designers have been hard at work making a slew of new themes and we're happy to release four new ones (each with four variations) today.

Ocean (Turtle, Whale, Fish, Squid)

Running (Red, Green, Brown, Blue)

Cityscapes (London, Chicago, Washington D.Cc, Vintage Vegas)

Trees (Blue, Brown, Noir, Purple)

Vox Hunt

And last, but certainly not least, we introduce QotD's buddy, the Vox Hunt (get it, like Fox Hunt, but much more humane). The Vox Hunt is a daily photo scavenger hunt that's meant to not only prompt you to take a photo, but also to explore and share the physical world around you. We've seen great responses to the photo questions we've asked on QotD, so it only made sense to give photos their own place on the dashboard. Bear with us while it finds its voice -- unlike QotD, this launches to tens of thousands of people, not ten. We're really excited and would love to hear suggestions for the hunts you'd like to see.

Remember above when I said the new mobile posting functionality would be great for Vox Hunt? Well, here's how: you can set up a mobile posting email address that will publish to the public and have it tagged "Vox Hunt." That way all your Vox Hunt posts can be tagged from the road. Don't fret if you don't use a mobile phone to post -- you can still use the application interface on the dashboard (just like QotD). The Vox Hunt can be found right behind QotD on the dashboard, by the way.

While those are the highlights of this release, there are a few other features sprinkled around the service. Be sure to explore the rest of Vox to find what else we've added.  As a reminder, the best way to give us feedback is by using the feedback link on the top of the page.

And once again, thanks for all your feedback and excitement about Vox!

-Mena