Twitter; the social networking phenomenon which just keeps growing and growing has just grown a little more... Pixy is now using Twitter to give up-to-the-minute news. So if you're interested please follow us.
Many PixyBlogger's are already using Twitter and have integrated it into their blogs. There are many different ways on doing this, but by far the easiest is to use the Twitter Badge. Just like the PixyBlog Badge, it's a simple step-by-step process to cut-and-paste the code into your template. We have just set-up a twitter page on our News Blog which displays the latest updates. We used the simple HTML Widget which produced the following code snippet:
<div id="twitter_div"> <h2 class="sidebar-title">Twitter Updates</h2> <ul id="twitter_update_list"></ul> <a href="http://twitter.com/pixyblog" id="twitter-link" style="display:block;text-align:right;">follow me on Twitter</a> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/pixyblog.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=5"></script>
Very easy... But be warned, Twitter is addictive!
A new theme is now available for our users, it's a variation on the theme which was originally created for Eric Kelly's photoblog; Conomocity. As part of updating Eric's theme we have released a version of it named Zebra. You can see the theme in use on his site photoblog.conomocity.com.
We have also bundled some updates for all the other themes. Most of these are minor fixes just for browser compatibility, but the Mangosteen theme has been revamped with a new colour scheme and other smaller changes. You can see the new Mangosteen theme in use on woklife.com.
For those of you who have customized your theme and are either wanting to update to the new revision or want to change themes completely, please read our FAQ article on updating your theme.
Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of interest in pixyBlog, which is great news for us and our users... we must be doing something right! We've been signing-up more beta-testers than ever before and the full release is just around the corner.
With the release of version 3.1 we have started to see a number of photoblogs being fully customized, another great step forward as this is exactly what we want to see. It's fine that we can create different Themes for our users, but we want to make the pixyBlog platform as open and easily customizable as possible, and seeing some of our users doing exactly this is very encouraging. So I thought I would take some time-out to write about the different customizations going on now and how others can do the same.
By far the easiest way to add your own content to your About page is to simply edit your site description (Preferences > Settings). From here you can enter text and links, include images and add much more. The majority of our users have done this in varying degrees, from text descriptions and contact details, e.g:
to more in-depth descriptions and inclusion of images, e.g:
Checkout our User FAQ for more details.
pixyBlog has a built-in bookmark manager, so it's easy to add your own bookmarks. Perhaps you run another Blog or have a Flickr profile you want to link to, you can simple add these from the admin area (Blog > Bookmarks). It's also a good idea to link to friends blogs/photoblogs/websites and sites which you like to visit; this not only helps your visitors but can also help promote your site (see promoting your website for more information).
Most Themes will include your bookmarks on the About page of your site. Alternatively if you want to link to external sites from your navigation bar, then check this FAQ.
A lot of our users have created their own custom pages on their sites. These can be for all sorts of reasons; if you're a wedding photographer you might want to have a page with rates and booking information. Another might want a page of client testimonials or your latest news & offers. Whatever the reason, creating your own pages is easy; checkout our wiki section on customizing your website.
These are just a few of our users who have created their own pages:
Another feature which is now possible with pixyBlog is to change the default homepage of your site. Perhaps you want to include a multimedia flash slideshow, or if you run multiple sites then a portal page with links off to each of your sites. A few of our users are currently using this feature, including:
To change the homepage of your site read our wiki section on customizing your website.
A couple of our users have added payment options from their sites to allow easy payment through either PayPal or Google Checkout.
Finally, it would appear pixyBlog is stepping into the video market... ok, not really. But embedded video has appeared on one of our users sites. Checkout the following post by Mark Fleming; http://markfleming.pixyblog.com/entry/speed-sp%C3%A9d-noun-the-rate.
pixyBlog will continue to make it as easy as possible to create your own bespoke photoblogs. The next release has some new features which will help with this. I will post an article on the these, and more, upcoming features shortly.
