Webon Blog

Style update plus "Share this" function

webon.james — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:24:00 UTC

We've released five new styles this week. Coincidentally, they all happen to have the flavor of "sky" in some way or another.

Skyline has the urban look of a big city at night.

Autumn Sunrise utilizes the bright, warm colors of fall foliage.

Sky Blue Sky is a classic blue-sky look.

Rockin Purple has a funky, metropolitan flavor.

Reach for the Sky is a blue-sky look with a modern feel.

In addition to the new styles we've also released a very useful new feature called "Share this" that lets readers of your site share your blog posts easily with popular sites such as del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, and more. This can really help your blogs attract a larger audience.

Video redux

webon.derek — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:28:00 UTC

If you're a fan of video, we recently made some changes that should make it even easier to use in your site.

First off, we now support the WMV format. For various technical reasons, this took quite a bit of work, but since it's a popular format we wanted to support it. In the process, we switched to a different encoding process that does a better job with our existing video formats, too. If you weren't totally happy with how your video played before, try re-uploading it; we think this should take care of the (rare) glitches that we've heard about.

As always, leave us a comment or put in a help request if you run into any problems.

New image tools and a new blog add-on

webon.team — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:03:00 UTC

We just released two new features: an image crop & zoom tool, and an add-on that will make it easier for visitors to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed.

The crop & zoom feature lets you adjust your images on the fly within the editor. For example, you can turn a rectangular full-length photo into a square head shot. Here's how:

To crop, mouse over an image and drag one of the lighter-colored squares on the side of its frame. (You can still resize the image using the darker-colored squares on the corners of the frame.)
To zoom, use the slider that appears when you mouse over an image. If the image is small, you may only see two buttons for "zoom in" and "zoom out", and you can click those instead of the slider. What's more, you can also reposition an image once you've zoomed in on it by dragging it within the frame.

Cropping and zooming usually requires special desktop software, but it's now standard for Webon images.

For bloggers, we've also added the Blog Subscribe add-on, which makes it easier for visitors to subscribe to your blog using their favorite RSS readers. If they're signed in to one of the popular readers like Google or Technorati, subscribing only takes a couple of clicks. Otherwise, they can copy and paste the feed URL.

If you run into problems with any of these features, please let us know using our help system. Enjoy!

Webon: now with video!

webon.team — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:28:00 UTC

We're pleased to announce that you can now add video to your Webon sites without the need for a third-party service. If you have a home movie, screen capture, or other video file you'd like to add, just drag the Video icon from the editing toolbar onto your page. You'll be prompted to select the video file you want to upload, and then a placeholder will keep you posted on the progress of the upload and encoding of the video. Once encoding is complete, the video will appear automatically just where you placed it, with standard player controls (play, pause, volume, and so on).

Unlike many sites, we don't put any ads or Webon logos over your videos; they look just the way you want them to. You can also resize the dimensions of the video player to fit your site better.

Free accounts can upload a few short videos. If you want to host more, however, you'll need to upgrade to a Personal Account, which now includes 100 videos of up to 10 minutes in length. (We do have to pay the bills somehow, after all.)

A lot of work went into this, and we hope you'll enjoy it!

Style update

webon.team — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:35:00 UTC

In addition to our recent feature update, we have three more styles to share with you, straight from our talented designers:

Break is an edgier, expressionistic style with a dark background and pink accents.
Bouquet is an elegant style with a floral motif, suitable for weddings and invitations.
Tranquility combines natural images--birds taking flight from a tree, blades of grass--with an out-of-the-ordinary color scheme and layout.

Check them out, and let us know in the comments if you're looking for a particular kind of style that we don't offer yet.

More domain options and connection groups

webon.team — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:02:00 UTC

We recently released an update to Webon that included two new features:

Now, when you upgrade your account and get a domain, you can use the Domain Manager to create web addresses for multiple sites using that domain. For example, say you have a site for your business and one for your upcoming wedding: you can use something like store.mydomain.com for the first and wedding.mydomain.com for the second. (These are referred to as subdomains of mydomain.com.)
On your profile, you can now organize your connections into groups to make them easier to keep track of.

We're hard at work on a bevy of other features, too. You should hear more about those in a few weeks.

Style update

webon.team — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:35:00 UTC

This week's update includes three new styles:

Back to Basics is a clean, general-purpose style with a modern touch.
Business Casual is what it sounds like: a business-ready style that's not overly formal.
Candy Striper is a more playful style to balance the other two. Its name is a pun on its cotton candy-like colors and the stripe motif in its header.

Enjoy!

User-created add-ons!

webon.team — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:30:00 UTC

Today we're unveiling a new feature that we've been working on for quite a while: user-created add-ons. These add-ons use the OpenSocial API, an emerging standard for socially-enabled gadgets supported by folks like Google, MySpace, and Yahoo!

What does this mean for you?

If you're a site builder, you'll ultimately have a much larger library of add-ons to use with your site. You'll be able to choose both from the add-ons we develop and from the add-ons shared with the Webon community by developers. In addition, these user-created add-ons can take advantage of user profiles, friends lists, and other social features.

If you're a developer, you can now extend your site's functionality by creating custom add-ons. What's more, you can easily share your creations, giving them a larger audience than they otherwise would have. And because our add-ons use the OpenSocial API, you don't need to learn a proprietary language to create them.

This is all part of our goal of making Webon a user-extensible platform, not one that's defined solely by us. If you'd like to try your hand at creating an add-on, check out this early peek at our Add-On Editor. After you've saved an add-on, it'll be available the next time you edit a site; just select "my add-ons" from the pulldown menu in the Add-Ons window.

Please note: we don't yet support the entire OpenSocial API (version 0.8 to be precise), and we're still working on developer documentation. But we wanted to let you start playing around with the editor so that you could give us feedback.

Enjoy!

Style update

webon.team — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:37:00 UTC

As some of you have already noticed, we've rolled out some new styles over the past week:

Black Lace has a dark background with gold highlights and a very classy feel to the typography.
Charcoal is a clean style with a black background and gray and red accent colors.
Vino is saturated with purple. If you like deep, vivid colors, this is the style for you.

We've also seen some good user-submitted styles such as Rojo recently. Check them out!

Announcing the new Style Editor

webon.team — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:43:00 UTC

At the end of last week, we released a major update to the Style Editor. It's intended for builders who want to edit the CSS for their sites, but in the future we'll roll out another update that will let you change the basic elements of a style, such as color and background, without knowing any CSS.

The new Style Editor now includes:

code highlighting for the Source View
a revamped Properties View (formerly Visual View) that makes it easy to jump between selectors and upload images
a significant performance boost over the old editor

We hope you like the changes. If you've never worked with the Style Editor before, you can find it by opening the Styles window and clicking the Customize link for your site's style.

Let us know what you think, and remember to hit the Share button for any styles you create that you think other builders might appreciate.