With the advent of more powerful cameraphones, and with plenty of requests from the users, we have revised our file size limits. The new arrangement is the same for free users, a limit of 256Kb on individual posts, but for subscribers, the limit has been raised to 1Mb.

Images are still resized upon arrival at the site, but full-size image storage is an option planned for the future. For more information on how to subscribe, and the benefits you get, see this page

The tag search page is now available for you to play with, and tag links now reference this page rather than technorati. Links to technorati are still available on the image view page, and technorati will still be notified when you update your moblog.

You asked for it, and we delivered - you can now purchase moblogUK branded goods (as designed by our users) from the moblogUK shop. Supplies are limited, so move quickly to secure your official moblogUK tshirts: http://shop.moblog.co.uk

You can show off your new t-shirts at this shared moblog

Please note: secure payment is provided via Paypal, but a PayPal account is NOT required for payment - any credit/debit card will do.

If the shirts sell well, we're looking into printing more designs, and other items such as mousemats, mugs, hats and so on. Your ideas and feedback on products you'd like to see would be appreciated: please see the suggestions area of the forum

tags, and enhanced privacy options

Tags. You can now add 'tags' to your posts, allowing you to contribute to the World Live Web, as indexed at technorati.com. Tags are going to integrate further into the site over time, allowing you to build dynamic collections of yours and other people's images with ease. While those systems are being developed, your tags will simply link to Technorati. See the help page for more information.

RSS feeds for comments - want to keep up on the comments made on a post? Now you can point your newsreader at an RSS feed for each post on the site - see the url at the bottom of the "add comment" box.

Advanced privacy options (subscribers only): you can now control access to your moblog with an option in your profile setting. You can choose "open to all", registered users only, people on your friends list, or password-only access settings. This system is a beta test, while we ensure it's as secure as it needs to be to protect your content. Should anyone experience anything untoward with the privacy settings, please get in touch and let us know.

Please note: setting privacy options may change the url for your latest image and/or rss feeds - check your moblog for the correct locations. Your images will no longer be highlightable on any setting other than "open to all".

Feedback is, as ever, welcome.

T-shirt update: the designs are at the printers, but there will be a few weeks delay while they get printed and delivered - we'll let you know as soon as you can get one!

also bug fixes and competition results.

Competition Results

The moblogUK t-shirt competition was a resounding success, with awesome entries coming in from loads of you. We were also testing our new voting system, which seemed to work very well. The results are as follows:

1st place, distinctlyaverage
2nd place, elizzie
Judges Choice, misternavid

We're in the process of getting the printing arranged now, and the shirts will be available for purchase as soon as possible. Winners will be contacted by email, and prizes sent out. Congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to all of you who entered. (please note, these results were taken when we closed the voting a few weeks ago. Other people may have since voted and changed the order - sorry guys, you were too late!)


New Features!

Site subscribers can now add an avatar next to their name when it appears on comments - just look in your 'edit profile' page to see this feature down in the 'Profile' section.

A much requested feature is also here for subscribers: user-defined stylesheets applied to their own pages. Now you can make your moblog look like whatever you want! This feature appears underneath the theme selector link on 'edit profile'

Free accounts finally get friends lists - keep easy tabs on moblogs you want to watch. Look for the 'add to friends' link at the top of each moblog's sidebar. Moblogs you are watching will appear in a list below the 'recent visitors' box on your sidebar, and will let you know if anyone has updated since you last logged in. This feature does tend to get confused if you stay logged in all the time, so it's good to log out from time to time, if only to check who's updated recently.

Sensible comment updates - now you can tell which post a comment has been made on by the subject of the update email, saving a lot of clicking.

Bug Fixes!

The problem where text from some email clients was arrive on the site still encoded (this kind of thing: ANj34haKI903h5k23hWJ98fg83nq2V) has been overhauled again, and it's looking more reliable now.

More spam filtering (especially for UK Vodafone MMS users) - see the help page for more information.

Please report any problems with any of the new things via the forum or the contact page.

MoblogUK members are invited to participate in Capture exhibition, the first camera phone exhibition to be held in Australia. Send in your submissions via the website www.captureexhibition.comuntil 3 April.

Selected images will be on display in a gallery in Sydney for two weeks (a good excuse for a trip downunder?), and will then be uploaded to the website. There is a People's Choice award and prize up for grabs so get busy and submit.

Now closed

The t-shirt design competition is now closed - thanks very much for all your entries, there's some excellent work, as expected.

What we'd like you to do over the next few days is to vote for the images you like (or vote low for images you don't!) using the rating option next to each image - which will only appear if you're logged in, to stop score-rigging by anonymous users.

You can score each image between one and ten, and you can check the winners progress on the 'top rated' link towards the top of the moblog's sidebar.

Once you've had a few days to score the images, we'll annouce the winners here, and start the process of getting shirts printed and sent out to the winners (and for sale to the rest of you)

Good luck to everybody who entered!

New competition, and recent winners

New Competition

Some of you have asked about moblogUK merchandise, especially t-shirts, so we've decided to see what you guys can come up with and print some of the best - chosen by you, the users - as t-shirts. You can submit anything you want for your design, as long as it fits into 297mm W by 420mm H. Images for print should be as 297mm W by 420mm H size, 300dpi, tagged TIFFs, but as they're huge files, please submit a screen sized jpg as your entry. There's more information available here.

Winners will have their designs printed, and will receive a free t-shirt of all the designs printed.

We're testing a new voting system with this competition - each user (you must be logged in) has one vote to cast per post - so remember to vote for the shirts you like the best. Send your images to tshirtcomp@moblg.net

Before Christmas, we held two competitions - the Fujifilm Hard Copy competition and the Cheech and Chong DVD boxset competition, where your most stoner moments were posted. We're pleased to announce the winners for these two competitions, and to say thank you for posting your images and video in to the contests:

Many thanks to you all for taking part, there were loads of excellent entries from everybody, as usual (making the judging /very/ hard!).

CHEECH AND CHONG BOXSET : moblogbrain

HARD COPY : eversion and Helen

Your prizes are in the post guys, congratulations once again.

and extra spam removal powers

A certain UK network operator has recently started embedding several extra advertising images in their MMS. These should now be removed automatically, and their default "You have receieved a new Message" title stripped as well.

For all users, you can now include a spam delimiter in your messages, to tell the site where to stop recording your message text. Example message:

This is the message text.
----------------
THIS IS AN ADVERT!!

Until now, the advert would appear on your blog as well as the message text, forcing you to edit it out later on. Now, if you include the word .unspam (including the fullstop, case sensitive) at the end of the message, like so:

This is the message text.
.unspam
----------------
THIS IS AN ADVERT!!

The site will remove everything after the word .unspam before posting it to the site, so your message would appear as follows:

This is the message text.

Neat, huh? Feel free to get in touch via the contact page or (better) in the forum, if you have any problems or questions.

Extra feature: shared moblogs now have imagewall links available in their sidebar - check out the wall of eyes - freaky!

and improved profile manager

Last update before christmas: more pages overhauled - the 'edit profile' page has been tidied up, and a nice easy theme selector has been added. The new page should be much less confusing, and much easier to use.

The biggest change is that you can now apply a proper Creative Commons license to your moblog, with our license wizard - simply access the 'license' section of your 'edit profile' page to learn more. The search page has been updated to accomodate the new license system, and smartened up a bit as well.

and backup news

A few small, but helpful upgrades - the shared page has been overhauled, hopefully it will be a bit more useful now. You can also (finally!) add shared moblogs to your friends list, making tracking them much easier.

We'd also like to reassure you that the entire site is now on a nightly backup cycle to both local and remote systems. Once the system has been tested a bit and we've monitored it's bandwidth and cpu use, we're aming to make it almost real-time. We're also looking into the costs for a RAID system in the server, for even more redundancy.

more info, clicky

OK, I've hacked together a quick page which will let you replace images in posts. If you log in and edit the post in question, you should see a 'replace image' option next to each entry. This link will take you to a form where you can upload a replacement image. As ever, we handle all the resizing and stuff, so don't worry about that. It should be robust enough to handle anything you can throw at it, but please get in touch if you encounter any problems.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have given messages of support and thanks; and to all of you for your patience, calmness and understanding in this matter. I'm hoping to be able to sort out some new things as an apology (along with a 100% bulletproof backup regime!)

-mat

click for more information

At around 2am this morning, moblog's server suffered a severe hardware error in one of it's disks. Unfortunately, this was the disk where all the photos are stored. The database is kept on a different drive, along with the website files, so all of that data was safe. Our hosting company, Xilo, performed almost superhumanly well at replacing the damaged disk, and we were back online very quickly. Missing all the site's photos.

Restoration of the files began from my home copy, but disk problems of my own recently meant that my home backups (secondarys, the primaries were on the disk that failed, to save bandwidth - that's how rare disk failures are!) haven't been run recently. So, I'm incredibly sorry to report, we've had to restore from the 22nd of September. This means all images posted after the 22nd of september are lost, unless you have you own backups. The posts are still there, and all the comments and so on, just the files are missing.

Disk failure is very rare, and my minor disk problems came at just the wrong time, it seems. Uploading the files over my adsl connection took a little time, hence the site being down so long.

I cannot overstate how sorry I am about this. I've lost some of my photos, and that's bad; but I've lost some of your photos, and that's terrible. I only hope you can accept my deepest apologies and you can be sure that, once this is all over, I'll be putting in multiple real-time backup systems so that this can never happen again.

The site is mostly working again now, but please get in touch if anything seems overly broken. I'm working on a page which will allow you to re-upload images to your posts, but that's going to take a little bit longer yet. More news as I have it.


-mat (moblogUK technical admin)