Release Notes: Olé!
I'm back from vacation in Austin, recovering from an abundance of hot weather and Tex-Mex food, just in time to jump right in to a brand new release!
Widgets, We've Got Widgets
We know you want a widget to your sidebar too, so you can now do that in beta. To add it, be sure you're opted in as a beta tester and head to the Design tab and click on "Customize your sidebars". Check the box next to "Embed" and click on the configure link to add the code and optional title for your widget. For now you can only embed one widget in your sidebar and if it's wider than 160 pixels, it might look all wonky or just not display at all.
We've made a slight change to how Vox handles widgets: we allow most HTML and CSS, as well as embed and object tags, but to protect our users and to keep the place pretty clean we've disabled javascript and iframes in widgets. Widgets containing javascript or iframes simply will not render.
Read all the details about embedding widgets.
Digesting Vox
The neighborhood update emails show you excerpts from the last five updates from your neighborhood, plus recent photos or media that were added by your neighbors as well as the current QotD. Think of these digest emails as a quick snapshot of some of what's happened in your Vox neighborhood -- the emails won't show you everything, but they'll give you a good at-a-glance idea of what's new in your 'hood. If you're checking your Vox neighborhood regularly and religiously (like all of us are) you may not need to subscribe to the digest, but if you're busy or go on vacation or just enjoy a quick reminder of what's been going on, you can subscribe for either weekly or daily digests.
By default, we'll send everyone these emails on a weekly basis, every Thursday at midnight in your time zone. That means your first weekly digest will come to you next week. To change your settings, click on the Account tab, then on Notifications. You can receive the digests weekly or daily, or just uncheck the box to stop receiving them.
A Few Small Changes to Groups
The home page of your groups has been refreshed, so you'll notice just a few changes:
- The Group Keywords are in their own module, moved to the bottom of the page
- Recent Comments have moved to the sidebar
- The Newest Members module is now in the main column
New Themes
Just a few new themes this time around -- check out Squares and Huntington. We're also featuring some oldies-but-goodies too! 1st row: Havianas Flowers, Elephant Summer, Endless Summer. 2nd row: Hanafuda June, Huntington and Squares.
Vox En Español
Si entiendes esto, te va a interesar en el anuncio siguiente. If you've set your language preference to Spanish, starting this afternoon the site is going to suddenly be en español. We're not announcing this officially until Monday, but wanted to give y'all a heads up. So keep that information under your sombrero, as it were.
-- Krissy
Comments
What are widgets?
Yeah, I'm dumb.
Check out the site Widgetbox to see the variety of things you can add. There's plenty of other sites with widgets as well.
Which you can't add.
Boo.
I understand completely with wanting to keep things neat and pretty here. Last thing you want are sidebars like bad Myspace pages floating around on Vox. The prettiness is one of the reasons I like it here so much. Nothing is an eyesore.
So, in an effort to please those who want widgets like Twitter, Last.fm and sitemeter... what if you make custom options for those, like adding or not adding the 'recent photos' to the sidebar? Want to add Twitter? Check the box and it'll pop up in a pleasing spot. Same for Last.fm.
And to please those who want custom widgets, they have the option to add ONE to the sidebar like the current one. That way, things will stay clean and everyone will get what they want.
I think those three (last.fm, Twitter and Sitemeter) are indeed the ones most people would want to add to their sidebars, so having a straight option to add them automatically, and then have one extra widget spot, would be fantastic.
(but hey, great improvement already, thank you Vox!)
Carlos wrote in portuguese ( BRAS )
I tried an Etsy widget, but yes ... it's based on jscript and an iframe. :/
They have an alternative one, but that's flash in a table and doesn't render as well. But technically, flash should render, right? So I'll try to find a workaround for this...
Also 160px just isn't big enough. And we really need to be able to arrange our sidebar items.
But I love the progress that Team VOX is making on this front.
Keep Voxing,
Seth Rubenstein
The Etsy widget would look best at either 2x4 thumbnails (each is 75x75px), or 1x3 thumbnails, but these two modes don't fit into the space allotted in the sidebar.
In short, it doesn't work, because even though a flash object is OK, the space is too narrow and too short and things get chopped off.
(but a statscounter snippet works great ;) )
(Uh, I guess this is a "me too." I will now go hang my head in shame. ;)
Oh.. and I found a possible issue with the Lunar Widget over at springwidget.com. Just a heads up for people considering using it:
http://michellesolange.vox.com/library/post/beta-testing-cpu-useage-tracked-for-lunar-widget.html
By the way, for those who aren't aware, Widgetbox also works for Vox Groups! I just created a new group today and put the widget on my Vox blog.
Now if we could only specify them to appear in right or left column. I'd like my usual Vox info in one column and the widget for my Vox group in the other. My reasoning is having the widget at the bottom of a lone column makes it a useless tool for promoting my group.
About widgetbox, btw., I tried to understand how they work, and why I should be able, according to Jamison, to place their panel / widgets to my Vox blog. Effectively, though, placing their panel to a site works only with jscript, so how would I be able to do it here? Has anybody else tried it, and can I see some results, please? :)
That's called SPAM - Unsolicited Bulk Email. This setting should have been OFF by default.
If I visit your site often enough to see the announcement about this, then I can easily turn it on. If I'm not visiting your site often enough to see the announcement, then I do NOT want to get spammed by you.
Thank you (NOT) for the rude surprise this morning of finding spam from you in my email box. This is NOT a positive way to get me to visit your website again.
are we ever going to get to have comments from non-Vox users? I am considering moving to a different blog host that allows comments, but if I knew I would have the capability of having comments on my Vox blog in the near future, I would for sure stay put.
Could someone give me a status update on COMMENTS please?
Thanks, Susan D