• Guest comment limit has been increased to 512 characters
  
• A bug where post content wasn't being formatted properly in RSS feeds has been fixed.
  
• You can now go straight to the list of recent posts from the home page.
  

• A bug in the "add entry" screen where some settings mysteriously disappeared, or became disabled, has been fixed.
• Check boxes in the add entry screen are wrapped in <label> tags, so you can click on the label text to toggle the options.
• The RSS feeds now contain entire posts, instead of the previous tantilizingly short 200 character excerpt.
• There was a mistake in the server configuration that caused character sets to be forced to ISO-8859-1 in all pages (both in the user interface, and in blogs). The character set should now be UTF-8, but since ISO-8859-1 is a subset of UTF-8, in theory, there shouldn't be any problems. (Basically, if text shows up garbled, let us know.)

One minor change to Clause 6 of the TOS. Basically, currently active users will get free service, if we ever decide to turn IlohaBlog into a paid service (not that that's very likely to happen anytime soon).

I've improved the "Add Image" page so that IlohaBlog can now automatically create thumbnails and scale images. You can also upload larger images now, as long as the scaled version is less than the size limit. Here's an example post.

A word on "nofollow" (which Google suggested as a solution to comment spam). Joining the bandwagon, IlohaBlog will insert "nofollow" tags to links in comments, although only logged in members can post links. In general, restrictions on comment posting seem to have eliminated comment spamming on IlohaBlog, except for...

Trackback spamming. I've noticed a few trackback spams, but that loophole has now been plugged, and the same non-member restrictions are applied to trackbacks (i.e. no links anywhere, and IPs are shown). The originating blog's URL is inserted at the bottom of the comment text, so you can still get to it if you really want to. I decided not to just use nofollow and hope they'll stop, because I have a feeling that spammers will indescriminately ping trackbacks anyway.

Utilizing all this free time Christmas gives us, I've made some changes to IlohaBlog. Most of it was anti-spam-comment stuff, but there are also some long overdue fixes as well:

• Comments can now be posted as a IlohaBlog member or guest. - If you've already logged in, it'll recognize you, otherwise you can log in directly from the comment form. If you're a guest, you can now only enter your name, no URLs (because that was being abused). Also, guest comments are extremely restricted, but I'll let you spammers figure out what you can or can't do :-)
• Karma - You have karma. If you're bad, you lose karma. If you're good, you get karma. If you lose all your karma, your account gets suspended (it'll be revived if we think it was suspended erroneously).
• Karma vs Comment Score - Not all comments are made equal. If you're bad, your comments will have a low score.
• Comment Deletion - You can now delete comments in your own blog(s) right away. Click on the "moderate" link below the offending comment, and when you hit the "Spam" button, the comment goes *poof* (disclaimer: sound effect not included).
• Comment Formatting - Line breaks in comments are now preserved... Sorry, this should've happened long ago.
• Untitled blog posts - So you know those untitled posts that you couldn't edit/delete because the link wasn't there in the "Recent Posts" page? Well, you can click on them now. Exciting, eh?

As I'm sure you've noticed, the server was down for a while, and we sincerely apologize for any inconveniences. We are now back up on a brand spanking new server, and all your data has been restored to the exact state it was in when the server went down.

This round of updates includes:

+Fixed bug where changing sections of an entry simply copied it to the new one, while leaving a copy in the old section.
+Added ability to set the date&time of an entry; useful when you neglect your blog for a while and don't want to write an entry about something that happened two weeks ago under the current date.
+Added date/time verification page. If the post date is not entirely accurate (i.e. either the entry has since been updated, or a date&time was set artificially) a little '*' shows up next to the date. Click on the astrix to see when the entry was actually entered, and when (if at all) it was modified. (This post has been modified, so you should see the astrix next to the date below.)

IlohaBlog can now accept trackback pings. The "Trackback" link added in post footers point to the ping URL for that post. Trackbacks appear as comments, with the URL to the trackback originator's URL, and "Trackback: " prepended to title/subject.

I've added a comment moderation feature. Basic idea is that people can mod down spam, and pick up points as they do so. At first, everybody starts with 1 point, which means they can take one point off a comment (which are given 2 + poster's score = 3 or more points). If they mod down a comment that's already been modded down, they get 0.2 points (i.e. bonus points for modding down actual spam). When a comment's score goes down to 0, it gets removed.

In order to implement this feature, I had to add some visitor tracking via cookies. Since cookies are supposed to be good, I decided to use the same cookies to remember visitor's identities. That is, if you enter your name and URL once when posting a comment, it'll remember so that you won't have to re-enter the same info all the time.

Another minor change is that, when posting a comment, if no name is specified, the poster's perceived IP address is used.

I've made the switch to IlohaBlog2 for the default interface. If anything blows up... speaking of which, did you see how The Cheat's head blew up in the last SB Email? That was awsome.