You may have noticed some changes around here. I’ve done kind of a soft launch of a bunch of improvements — soft in case anything needed to be removed in a hurry. It’s been about a week and things seem to be ::knock on wood:: fairly stable.

So here’s a laundry list of what did change, just in case you’re keeping score.

• added COLOR & STYLE to the Easy-Linky and Thumbnail-Linky widgets (and the Original Auto-Linky Widget for Gold/Platinum members)
• added new graphics for the “You’re next” person in the Thumbnail-Linky widget — they match the link colors, of course!
• improved the performance of widget delivery (with more coming soon!)
• streamlined the Auto-Linky instructions, removed a lot of no-longer-applicable bits.
• fixed the “Remember these settings” button in the Widget Wizard, i.e. that button works now!!
• made it easier to change widget settings like meme, columns, even which type of widget you’re showing!
• continued with CSS cleanup in all widgets, an ongoing effort.
• fixed the problem with manual membership updates not being recognized.
• updated a bunch more admin functions, making it easier for me to help you.

There’s one more thing coming soon that I don’t want to mention quite yet, since I’m still testing it out. Let’s just say, though, that WordPress users (with their own hosting, not wordpress.com) will be pretty happy.

As always, if you run into any trouble, or if you’d like to beta-test a new WordPress plugin that works with ANY widget type, please let me know via the Help Desk.

Testing. Nobody should be able to see this.

Here is the CSS template mentioned on the Style Options page…

It can also be downloaded from here.

/* common css */
.blenza-top table, .blenza-top tr td, .blenza-top tr, .blenza-top td {
border: 0 !important;
padding: 0 0 0 0 !important;
margin: 0 !important;
}

.blenza-box table {
width: 100%;
}

.blenza-tdl {
text-align: right;
}

.blenza-tdm {
text-align: center;
}

.blenza-tdr {
text-align: left;
}

.blenza-box table, .blenza-box tr td, .blenza-box tr, .blenza-box td {
border: 0 !important;
padding: 4px 0 !important;
margin: 4px 0 !important;
}

.blenza-box input.blenza-input {
width: 90%;
margin: 0;
}

/* css for widget style simple */
.blenza-box {
background: white;
border: 3px solid black;
-moz-border-radius: 12px;
border-radius: 12px;
text-align: center;
color: black;
padding: 4px
}

.blenza-box .blenza-label, .blenza-box a {
color: black;
}

.blenza-box #bztitle {
color: #222;
}

.blenza-box #bzcktool {
color: #444;
}

.blenza-top .blenza-link, .blenza-top .blenza-link a, .blenza-meme a {
color: black;
}

That scheduled maintenance I mentioned before is underway and we’ll take some brief downtime as a result, hopefully while most of you are still asleep.

Update: the maintenance is completed. Thanks, everybody, for your patience!!

There will be some maintenance this weekend, between Saturday night and Sunday morning eastern US time. Nothing major, just have to resize our hosting. Shouldn’t be down long.

Update: looks like we had some downtime that was nothing to do with the maintenance, most likely a network glitch. I’ll reschedule the maintenance for another overnight.

There will be some unavoidable scheduled maintenance due to changes at our hosting provider. This is expected to take place on Thursday April 12th and impact is expected to be brief. I will update this page as soon as a specific time is known.

Update, as of Thursday at 1215 pm Eastern, this is taking place, and we’ll be down until completion. Sorry for the inconvenience.

And we’re back… Thanks for your patience!

You may have noticed some new stuff around here… I’ll have more to say about that soon, once the dust has all settled.

I want to let you all know that there will be some downtime next THIS week for maintenance. I’ve been working like crazy to optimize the system and streamline as much as possible. But with the tremendous growth we’ve seen lately, especially in the past couple weeks, it’s time to upgrade our hosting.

This is a multi-step process that does require some downtime. However, because the first step involves backing up of existing data, there will be some time when the system is up but not writable.

What does this mean? As soon as the upgrade process begins, everybody’s widgets WILL be available. However, they will NOT be able to accept new links during the backup. Once the system has been backed up, they will shut us down briefly while the data is all restored on the larger system. Once that has completed, the widgets will be available once again. And as soon as I make sure everything is working correctly, the widgets will accept links again and everything will be back to normal.

When will this happen? I’m currently thinking I’ll start the upgrade at about 11:30 P.M. Eastern U.S. time on Wednesday, February 23rd. This is WAY past my bedtime, but I want to do this at a time that will impact most users as little as possible. How long it will take, I’m not really certain. I do know, however, that by keeping the widgets read-only during the backup, we will be back up and running a lot sooner.

So thank you in advance for your patience with this upgrade. It’s not much fun for anybody, but it’s something we’ll all be glad we did.

Need to make your widget a little narrower? Try adding this to your post, just before your widget. Once you find it works for you, you can add it to your template, before any posts containing widgets.

Here’s the code:

<style type="text/css">
.blenza-box {
  width:400px;
}
</style>

For more styling tips, see this post.

Got spam? Here’s a quick note about what you can do about it.

• log in at www.blenza.com
• click Options and then under “Functional Options” is the filtering list
• click to add a new filter
• on the screen that follows, select Host if you want to block based on part of a url or Name if you want to block based on part of the name
• then type in the text
• for example, to block links from this blog, you would select “Host” and type “misterlinky” into the text box
• click Enter

There may be days when you are posting multiple linkies. Or there may be days when you’re just getting the code for more than one widget. In either case, you’ll want to take care to keep them separate from each other. No, they won’t fight — on the contrary, they’re so nice they’ll just want so share each other’s links! Know what I mean? OK.

Here’s the problem. When you use the Widget Wizard to create the code for a linky widget, it takes the current date and uses that as an identifier, to distinguish it from other widgets. And back when people did one, maybe two memes a week, that was just fine. But let’s say you’re setting up today’s widget and tomorrow’s at the same time, they’re both going to have the same code. Let’s look at an example:

<img border=”0″
src=”http://www2.blenza.com/linkies/graphic.php?owner=whiskeytalking&postid=02Jul2009“>

And then you run the wizard again and you get the same code. What can you do? Simply add a letter to the postid= part that will make it different from the first one. Like this:

<img border=”0″
src=”http://www2.blenza.com/linkies/graphic.php?owner=whiskeytalking&postid=02Jul2009A“>

Now each widget will keep its links to itself. Hope this helps!