October 12, 2011: Please welcome new affiliates to Progressive Bloggers: Finding Clarity, Edwin Current and Politics Canada
September 23, 2011: We haven’t done announcements of new blog affiliates since we started at the new site in June, and it’s about time we did. The honours for the restarting of this goes to The Ontario Leftist. Please welcome him to Progressive Bloggers.
September 19, 2011: – Starting today as a local post for a day and in our message forum, we’ll be posting weekly and as applicable monthly and other summaries showing the site’s traffic, since we moved here in June. It will give folks an idea how often we’re visited and how many potential people there are to click on links to visit individual bloggers blogs.
August 9, 2011, 10:50 pm: Progressive Blogger Meetup. We have a date of Oct 15 in Toronto from 2-5 pm. If you’re a Progressive Blogger affiliate who is on Facebook, but is not a member of the Progressive Blogger group, send a request to join the group and I’ll add you in and then send you the invite to the event which contains the specifics and particulars. If you’re not on Facebook, I can email you the details, either externally from Facebook or just me directly telling you. 
Send me a note in the forum or by email if interested in possibly attending.
August 3, 2011, 1:16 pm: We have applied a temporary fix to the feed plugin as suggested by the plugin’s creator.. so we’ll let the site run as is for the next couple of hours and see if it picks up all feeds.
August 2, 2011, 6:37 pm: Certain affiliates feeds are not being fed in automatically by our feed reader right now. That is a plugin issue on our end, not your feed causing the error, or us banning you . We’re aware of the issue and think we know what needs to be done to fix it. Bear with us in the meantime if your blog is one of those affiliates whose feeds aren’t being picked up
June 20, 2001, 11:17 pm: Some people have issues with the 1-5 voting rating stars system, thinking it is too much set up as an adversarial system. I’ve gone to something I’ve found that is the most similar to the old voting system we had. With this one, you either click the heart to indicate you like the post.. or not. That also means I’ve modified the ranked posts for voting at the sidebar a bit. We’ll see if people like this way better.
June 12, 2011, 9:06 am: The server has now been upgraded to try and correct the nagging issues on feeds and such. Please keep an eye out, especially during peak times, and let us know if you notice any inconsistencies with your posts appearing, or any other performance-related issues. As always, your patience is appreciated as we work to build on the Progressive Bloggers website under the new framework. Thanks!
June 11, 2011, 10:43 am: Mini-update: feeds are still being problematic. I’m of the suspicion the actual feed plugin we are currently using has a bug in it, which is part of the reason certain sites aren’t being updated. We’re still trying to isolate it though. (The server still has not been upgraded, if you’re wondering).
June 10, 2011 – Affiliates missing from blogroll, intermittent site issues still
- 2:06 pm - It has been noted that today we’ve had slowness of getting new feeds and at the same time some intermittent site loading issues. This is occurring when the server we sit on tries to load those feeds and/or we get a huge boost in traffic, or both at the same time. That has to do with Disk seeking and CPU performance getting stretched, not memory. We are working on tweaking the setup to solve that, but it may be that we will need to pay to upgrade the server to have more CPU power. Thank you for bearing with us as we try to get this particular issue fixed.
- 7:55 am – When we exported our affiliate list, we only kept those who had posted in 2011, or had sent me a request to keep their blog on the list if they had not been. Some blog affiliates who are still active or at least still want to be on the blogroll when they start posting again may have inadvertently been left off, so if that has happened, send me a note and I’ll add you and your blog back on.
June 9, 2011 – Mobile Support activated
- We’ve installed a plugin designed by ex-Prog Blogger Dale Mugford, called Wptouch, which hopefully will support most mobile phones and browsers.
June 8, 2011: – Changes to Prog Blog
Briefly, the new changes, which I will detail more as I get time to do so.
Blog software and server: We’re running the new blog aggregator system on WordPress and on a brand new server. The aesthetics and color have been some the topic of some debate.. and I’m open to changing it.. but for now, I went with a base theme design to be quick about it.
Voting: Voting for a post has been changed. The old system setup could not be brought over to this configuration (and quite frankly, there were lots of complaints about it being manipulated). At present, I’ve gone for a star system for voting, mainly because the plugins for allowing voting for posts on WordPress – and one that works right on an aggregation system – are very limited. Posts will not automatically be shot to the front page in this setup. However, they will be shown at the left sidebar (most voted on, most popular in the last day or month). I’m seeing if that can be moved to a separate page to “un-clutter” the sidebar, but for now, that’s where those results will be.
- Consequently, all the folks that had “vote for this post” widgets on their own site should remove them, as those will no longer work under this setup. I know that was a popular widget to have, but the current plugin doesn’t have external voting support. If someone wants to write me a voting plugin, I will happily test it out.
Message Forum: We’ve decided to install a new message forum and see how it goes. Users must be registered to post there.
Links and Buttons: Coming as I get the chance to add them. (Update: Jun 9, 2011 – a Button page is now active. hopefully the links with the images work)
Search System – You obviously can search for old posts on here, and I would highly recommend that if you haven’t used them before – to start using tags. Those will be a key way for folks to find certain posts, I believe.
We’re not completely where I want to be, but considering the site has been down for a week, I thought we’d get it back up and running and add new changes and refinements as we go. Comments? Go on over to the message forum and add them there (and if you notice any bugs, please send me a note).