It's been a while since the new and improved Blog Central has seen the light of day. Two months now, to be precise. We thought it might be a good idea to look back on these two months of blogging and see how y'all have been doing.

• First of all, thanks to the AskJolene blogging community for all the bug reports, hatemail, lovemail and general feedback. Big kudos to all of you. We know it's not always easy adapting to a new lay-out, or trying to work with new tools and toys, and we believe we've gotten rid of all the little bugs and annoyances. So thanks for sticking with us!
  
  
• Secondly, thanks for surprising the AskJolene team with some really great blog designs. Some of you decided to stick to the default color scheme, which is fine of course, but some of you have really gone out of your way to create a personalized, atmospheric or just plain FUCKING AWESOME blog. Keep up the good work!
  
  
• Third, we've seen an overall rise in quality. We're seeing better galleries, better posts, more frequent updates, more comments and more visitors. There's blogs on Blog Central that rival TGPs and blogs from "the industry" in both content and quality. We're happy, you're happy, and most importantly: the visitors are happy!

And last but not least: there's a good reason it took us a while to update our blog. We can't tell you why YET, but my advice is to keep an eye on this blog... and maybe you'll be the first to know what new treats we've been working on!

After giving a thumbs-up to a story on Digg about how certain sites enable their users to judge content by giving a story or a post a "thumbs up", thereby increasing the popularity of the post and making sure more people will see it, I got a completely awesome idea. What if we would enable our Blog Central users to judge content by giving a post the "thumbs up", thereby increasing the popularity of that post and making sure more people will see it?

After high-fiving myself for this original idea, I quickly went on to implement it on Blog Central. So here it is: complete and unlimited democratic control of your favorite blog posts!

"But, how is this different from voting on the blog ITSELF?", you might ask. "In plenty of ways!", I'd probably respond. A vote on a blog, by using the yellow stars, reflects your opinion on the entire blog. You probably like the particular theme or fetish, or you like the consistent quality of the blog. An individual vote on a post, on the other hand, is cast by using the heart-in-a-box button. This will only express your appreciation of this single post, regardless of what you think of the rest of the blog.

On the Blog Central home page you'll always see the most popular posts of the past 24 hours. For some reason, lots of people thought these are exceptionally good posts, so you might be interested in them as well. Maybe today these bloggers dedicated an entire post to a popular actress, found some amazing new galleries or just did a really good job at finding grade-A fap material.

The rules are simple: you can either vote, or not vote —there's no "thumbs down". You can only vote once per post, and only registered AskJolene members can vote. That's it!

We hope you like this new feature, and we hope it'll help in bringing interesting posts to your attention, stuff you might otherwise never have seen.

Let us know in the comments if you can dig this new voting system. Also check out my previous posts, especially the one about the FAQs — we still need your input!

(ps. Today we've been fine-tuning the HTML you guys can use in your blog. This has fixed some annoying weirdness with aligning images and extra newlines. We hope you'll enjoy the improvement!)

Hey bloggers and bloggettes,

Today I'll be addressing some of your questions about the new blog. This isn't the official FAQ yet, but this is the first draft. This is your chance to get all your questions answered, so leave your questions in the comments and I'll take care of them!

Q: What's the width of my blog? What the maximum size of an image I can insert?
A: The effective width of your blog is 690 pixels. If you post images bigger than that, they'll get cut off at the right side. So your blog will no longer scale to fit the image! The width of the column on the left (which holds your blog avatar, vote results and your personal bar) is 220 pixels.

Q: I see a lot of empty space (newlines) when I look at an older blog post. Why is that? All my old posts look different now!
A: We tried to make editing your blog easier. This involved fixing some bugs in the way the HTML of the old blog posts was displayed. In the old Blog Central, it was difficult to put images underneath each other, because the
tag didn't always result in a newline. Now it does, so some old posts (where people tried to work around this bug by inserting a lot of newlines), are now also rendered properly. This results in more newlines than the poster probably intended.

Q: Why do some of the blogs have the "Vote for this post"-heart? How I can get that on my blog?
A: This button is available for everyone! Just go to your blog settings, and check the "Allow votes on posts" checkbox near the top of the page.

Q: Do I need to know HTML to make my blog pretty?
A: No. We've added a "wysiwyg" editor that allows you to edit your text much like you would in Microsoft Word or Wordpad. You can select text, and make it bold, change its color, put a link underneath it, etcetera. There's no need for you to ever see or work with the actual HTML. If you still WANT to dabble in HTML, there's a button that allows you to. Best of both worlds!

Q: This looks a lot different than I'm used to! Are there a lot of new things I need to learn?
A: Not really. Although your blog now looks slightly different from what you're used to, all the basic functionality has been maintained. This means you can still edit and update your blog like you're used to. We tried to keep the new functionality as simple as possible, so once you decide to check those out, we're confident you'll quickly master them.

Q: Where are the plinks? Do they still work?
A: You get the plink (permanent link) for a blog post by clicking on the post title. All the old-style incoming plinks still work too!

Q: How can I delete a background image or color?
A: Just leave the filename or color code field empty, and click "Insert".

Q: How can I change the color and style of my fonts?
A: Instead of having to use HTML, you can now easily change font colors and sizes in the edit-field itself.

Please leave any unanswered questions in the comments! Happy blogging!