1 post tagged “new release”

As promised, we're back from the long July Fourth weekend and have a brand new Vox release to play with. Instead of making the obligatory pun involving fireworks or independence, let's get right to the new stuff in Vox 0.8 (its release version number, for those playing at home).

More privacy controls & default settings
Want to write a public post but only allow your friends and family to comment on it? You can now do that. The same is true for anything (photos, video, etc...) you insert into your Vox blog. Additionally, we've made it possible for you to set your default privacy settings on stuff you send through a mobile device/email as well as through the browser

Global Explore
Want to explore Vox globally by tag? Meaning, see other posts on Vox that have been tagged a specific keyword. Well, you can do that now by simply hovering over the tag on the public blog. You'll then be prompted to view the type of content you want to see (either post, photo, audio or video).

QotD improvements
Although we've been delighted by the uptake on the Question of the Day, we've always realized that it should be a whole lot easier to answer the questions and insert other types of content in your posts. The solution? If you see a QotD that you'd like to answer, simply click on the "answer" button and you're taken to a compose page with all of the relevant fields already filled in. And, for future context, we've made it so that the question has been inserted in fabulous blockquoted glory! Want to save that post for later? You can set it as a draft as well

Post Titler
We wanted to make adding a title to your post as easy as possible, and we realized one way to do that would be by letting Vox do some of the work for you. In the past, if you hadn't entered a title at the time of saving your post, you'd get a little dialog that said you needed to enter a title. We've improved that dialog by actually offering smart suggestions for your post based on the content. Want to try it out? Just leave the title field blank and click save.

 

More themes
This is our first release to incorporate the work of our summer intern, Tiffany. Tiffany is an awesome illustrator and has been busily working to incorporate cityscapes (Paris, San Francisco, New York and Tokyo -- more to come) and our favorite four-legged friends into themes. And these are just the first batch!

 

Fav

Favorites

By popular demand, we've introduced the ability for users to mark posts, photos, audio, video and books -- from their own blog as well as other Vox blogs -- as favorites. We've nicknamed this feature the "David Jacobs" after friend and Vox user, who, at last count has favorited 1,677 photos on Flickr. It's a great way to keep track of good stuff you've seen on Vox, as well as keep a record of your own things that you particularly like.

 

[This is Good]
Favorites are a way for you to keep track of things you like a lot. But sometimes, there are things that are good that you just want to quickly acknowledge. The ability to tell someone you like something of theirs, without the pressure of having to write a comment or think of something clever to say, was the motivation of the [this is good] feature. It's treated just like a comment in the sense that you can append more text to it if you like. But, if you just want to use [this is good] to say "hey, I liked this," that's good too. Thanks to Andre for the inspiration and blessing to use the concept of [this is good]

iStockphoto integration
Inserting a photo or image into a post does a great deal to illustrate a story. But sometimes you just don't have the right image on your computer. Most of the time, we find ourselves going to Google image search, locating a photo, saving it to the desktop and then uploading it into Vox -- not the best experience, by far. We're happy to say that we've made inserting an image impossibly easy: you can now insert images that you find from iStockphoto.com, a revolutionary service that does stock photos right (very much user-generated content, affordable and great experience). Search for a term, click on the image and insert. That's it! This is probably our favorite new feature of this release.

Cross-Posting to TypePad
Have a TypePad blog? Have a Vox blog? Want them to play together? Now, when you write a public post on Vox, you have the option of having an excerpt published to your TypePad blog.

But wait, there's so much more! We'll leave it to you to explore:

• Friends and Family tagging
• Ability to flag items as possibly offensive
• New hover behaviors with speed improvements
• Ability to add thumbnails for collections

-Mena