HeartOfThe.Net's Blog

We have just updated the system files.

Now, there’s a fresh, new, polished feel to the HeartOfThe.Net user dashboard and lots of cool new features that we know you’ll like and find useful.

“Cut to the chase, what’s new…?”

Easier Uploading

File Type Detection

We’ve streamlined things. Instead of needing to click on a specific upload icon based on your file type, now there’s just one. Once your file is uploaded, the appropriate fields will be displayed for entering information based on the file type.

Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

Adding photos or other files to posts and pages just got easier. Drag files from your desktop and drop them into the uploader. Add one file at a time, or many at once.

More File Formats

We’ve added the rar and 7z file formats to the list of allowed file types in the uploader.

Dashboard Design

Flyout Menus

Speed up navigating the dashboard and reduce repetitive clicking with our new flyout submenus. As you hover over each main menu item in your dashboard navigation, the submenus will magically appear, providing single-click access to any dashboard screen.

Header + Admin Bar = Toolbar

To save space and increase efficiency, we’ve combined the admin bar and the old dashboard header into one persistent toolbar. Hovering over the toolbar items will reveal submenus when available for quick access.

Responsive Design

Certain dashboard screens have been updated to look better at various sizes, including improved iPad/tablet support.

Help Tabs

The Help tabs located in the upper corner of the dashboard screens below a user’s name have received a facelift. Help content is broken into smaller sections for easier access, with links to relevant documentation and the support forums always visible.

Feels Like the First Time

New Feature Pointers

When we add new features, move navigation, or do anything else with the dashboard that might bowl you a googly, we’ll let you know about it with new feature pointers explaining the change.

Content Tools

Better Co-Editing

Have you ever gone to edit a post after someone else has finished with it, only to get an alert that tells you the other person is still editing the post? From now on, you’ll only get that alert if another person is still on the editing screen — no more time lag.

Widget Improvements

Changing themes often requires widget re-configuration based on the number and position of sidebars. Now if you change back to a previous theme, the widgets will automatically go back to how you had them arranged in that theme. Note: if you’ve added new widgets since the switch, you’ll need to rescue them from the Inactive Widgets area.

We hope that you continue to enjoy your web publishing experience, here at the HeartOfThe.Net

-Support Team

Today, we are delighted to launch our new HeartOfThe.Net logo and frontpage.

Visitors and users will see the new logo across the network and on user’s dashboards. We love the new logo and hope that you do too!

We’ve also designed a user friendly frontpage to the site, which not only allows new user/site/blog sign-ups (as before) but also current users can log in to the network from the HeartOfThe.Net homepage as well. This feature will become very important in the coming months as we roll out more cool interactive stuff that will build a community across the HeartOfThe.Net network.

Don’t worry though if you are used to logging in at your old site or blog’s log in page, as that will continue to function as usual.

No need to change your browser’s favourites/bookmarks, just log in as you’ve been doing before!

And while we were designing the frontpage, we added a new facility for users to add an avatar to their profile.

Users can associate one avatar to their user ID and another avatar to their blog or site. A user’s ID avatar, if set, will now appear in comments left across the network. But again this will become very important as we roll out new features based on user interactivity across the network.

So now, all that’s left to do is to say goodbye to our old frontpage…

Adiós, you served us well.

-Support Team

We are always looking for ways to make things quicker and easier for our users.

Today we’ve implemented a quicker sign-up procedure which eliminates the need to verify a new user’s email address.

Users must still enter an email address at sign-up, which will be used for account administration tasks like “lost password” etc.. But they don’t have to go to their email client/service and then have to potentially scour their inbox and junk email folders looking for their HeartOfThe.Net account activation email.

Now, it’s just straight to the new “account activated” page with all of their user login details displayed, including their system generated password, waiting to be changed to whatever they choose in their user profile as soon as they login to the network.

It’s a more simpler, streamlined process all round. Simpler = faster!

-Support Team

The login/dashboard problems experienced earlier are now resolved.

Thank you for your patience.

-Support Team

Some users are reporting login/dashboard access problems on the HeartOfThe.Net network.

We are currently investigating this issue and working towards a speedy solution.

-Support Team

It is critical for any website to have excellent Search Engine Optimisation (also known as SEO) to assist sites with getting good results on Search Engine Results Pages (also known as SERPs).

SEO has been around for approx. 15/20 years and is basically a series of techniques to get your site/blog to be ranked higher within the search engines for a certain query or keyword. Even now, as the search engines move towards “personal search” SEO is still highly valuable.

While sites and blogs in the HeartOfThe.Net network already benefit from excellent SEO features – like nice search engine friendly page links, clean formatting and integration with Ping-o-matic! there is always room for improvement!

Based on best practise SEO techniques, we’ve just added extra settings so that HeartOfThe.Net users can now optimise their sites/blogs with a quick preview of how the particular post or page would theoretically look in search engine results:

It is not imperitive that users complete the fields in the form, but if you are serious about promoting your site it will help your site’s ranking. Therefore if you would like to promote your post or page using specific keywords and descriptions, you can now do so.

While we were looking at SEO we also decided to add an automatically generated XML sitemap for every site/blog within the network which helps the various crawlers, spiders and bots index our users content in an efficient way. Also better for SEO!

And, what’s the point in doing all the hard work with titles, meta keywords and descriptions if you can’t measure how successful you are being?

So, we’ve also hooked up to the SEOmoz API to provide each site or blog in the HeartOfThe.Net network free SEO metrics for the specific site and for each post or page. Users will now see the SEOmoz report panel on their dashboard and on the post/page editor:

From the moment a new site/blog is registered at HeartOfThe.Net a new user can check stats and ranking information for their site from the most highly-regarded SEO experts in the industry. The SEOmoz API provides solid metrics which allow you to measure your site’s content ranking effectively. Their index is never more than a month old, so you are sure to get the freshest look at how your rankings are improving month after month.

Another excellent way to improve a site’s SEO is by increasing the amount of inbound links to the site in question, to increase the site’s page rank.

Google first developed it’s PageRank algorithm in 1998 and all the other search engines soon jumped onto the band wagon developing their own versions for how to rank a website in their search results.

In simple terms, a site’s page ranking is pretty much like a popularity contest.

Think of the real world: if a movie star is talked or written about then they rank highly as a celebrity, if no-one talks about them then they rank lowly. So, one of the best ways to improve your site’s/blog’s ranking (a part of SEO) is to get as many incoming links (ie people talking about or recommending your site) from other websites on the internet as possible.

Whether it’s from your Twitter/Facebook/favourite forum profile to your friend’s personal website/blog about fishing, every link back to your site/blog counts!

We recommend the AddToThe.Net free SEO search engine friendly directory. It only takes a few minutes to add your details and it’s a great starting point to improve your site’s page rank and overall SEO. Check it out!

-Support Team

We’ve altered the look of the HeartOfThe.Net user dashboard.

When a user logs in, they will be welcomed with the updated dashboard similar to the screenshot above. The new dashboard includes all the previous handy features like “Right Now”, “QuickPress” etc., but now also incorporates an automatically updated summary of the latest posts from this blog (HeartOfThe.Net’s blog) so that our lovely users can, at a glance, keep up to date with everything that is going on regarding the HeartOfThe.Net network and click through to the actual post if they wish.

We have also added a “HeartOfThe.Net Recommends” information text box to highlight sites inside and outside of the HeartOfThe.Net network which we like or find useful and the RSS feed from Paul’s Blog too.

We hope you like the new look!

-Support Team

For monitoring traffic to sites in the HeartOfThe.Net network, we have always recommended using Google Analytics. It’s an enterprise-class web analytics solution which is feature rich and quick to set up.

We’ve used Google Analytics on our personal sites and blogs for years and now it makes sense to migrate all HeartOfThe.Net network traffic tracking from AWStats and centralise the data with Google Analytics.

This new tracking method, rather than being a third party add-on for tracking a single site/blog which the old Anflex GA plug-in was, is part of the core HeartOfThe.Net system and allows us to completely track all sites/blogs within the HeartOfThe.Net network.

The old Anflex GA plugin will become redundant in due course. Therefore, users who are currently utilising the old Anflex GA plugin for their individual site/blog tracking should move their tracking code (UA-XXXXXXXX-X) to the new setting found under “Dashboard > Settings > Google Analytics” as shown in the screen shot above.

If you’re not using Google Analytics to track the visitors to your site/blog, you can sign up here, it’s very cool and free. And if you already have a GMail/GoogleMail account, you’re half way there!

Any problems, please drop us a line at the usual email address.

-Support Team

Around a week or so ago, we began to implement sophisticated methods to help combat the rising problem of spam blogs and sites within the HeartOfThe.Net network.

The methods we use to identify spam blogs and sites are complex, including blocking automatic sign-ups and posting by bots.

We expect that this automated server side process will be correct most of the time.

However, if your genuine blog or site has been marked incorrectly as spam, please complete the contact form served for your HeartOfThe.Net domain and we will review it as soon as we possibly can.

If your blog or site appears to be genuine, we will take immediate action to allow you access. If your blog or site is blatently spam, then it will remain marked as such.

 
Please note, if you are constructing (or have constructed) a genuine blog or site within the network, you are highly unlikely to have your blog or site marked as spam, and will be unaffected by this new process.

-Support Team

The HeartOfThe.Net network continues to grow quickly. At just six months old, we now have 1467 sites/blogs and 1332 users.

Keep up the good work everyone!