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)

Cheech and Chong goodies to be won.

The infamous Cheech and Chong films are now finally together in one phat dvd boxset (5 dvd's!). We have two sets to give away to the most creative mobloggers out there, and you don't even have to be a member of the site! Since Cheech and Chong are the godfathers of puff, the original counter-culture heroes, we want you to send in your smokin'est pics, be creative with this, we're looking out for that flash of inspiration from that perfect stoner moment.

Rules are simple, nothing naked, those pics we will unfortunately have to delete. Pretty much anything else goes! It could be your Amsterdam holiday or a functioning rocket-ship made for toilet paper rolls and wire coat-hangers, have fun! The competition ends early december, winners will be notified on the site and by email.

Also, our infamous PR machine, Alfie has created two new themes for the site, the goretastic Spatter (preview in new window) and the delightful Hopkin Green Frog (preview in new window) Thanks Alfie!

fixes some long-term bugs

A big update to the mail parser has just gone live, which should have fixed a few of the more persistent bugs in the system. The following things should now all be fixed in the submission process:

- Some text appearing twice.

- Garbled text (JJ4H2GDEF19DT2CXU1C2Y24VU7WD kinda thing) appearing.

- messages with no text not having attachments recognised.

- Sprint subject lines (possibly, testing needed. we have no Sprint in the uk to test with)

Please get in touch if you're experiencing any unusual effects as a result of this upgrade. forum thread

search and toprated

The search and toprated pages have been updated, so they work much more reliably, especially the search. Please get in touch if you are having any problems.

and loads of new themes

Many thanks to everyone who took part, and those who helped with the very difficult task of judging the entries and choosing a winner from the excellent designs submitted. We wish everyone could win something, but we do only have one phone and a few runners up prizes to give away, so without further ado:

• First place: Hand Made (preview) by monkeypunk
  Wins a Motorola V600 cameraphone - congratulations!


• Second place: Mohack Coblog (preview) by afternoon
  A very close second - wins a fantastic Pete Fowler Toy


• Third place: City/Countrysnap (preview) by Basseq
  An equally close third - wins a fantastic Pete Fowler Toy


• Special Award: kadamontaga wins a copy of the excellent Street Art for his amazing number of submissions - thanks Dave, and incredible amount of work must have gone into that!

You can see all the entries and their authors here, and all the new themes are available for you to select from your 'edit profile' page.

Enjoy the new themes, and thanks again to all involved.

Congratulations to mikey for this fabulous photo

Our congratulations and a Sony Ericsson K700i handset go to mikey for this fabulous photo. Well done mikey, and well done everyone else who took part, some excellent photos from you all. In fact, it went so well, we'll probably do it again next time we have a phone to give away. Your thoughts and ideas are, as always, welcome in the forum.

The images from the fourteen competition moblog are on display at the Sony Ericsson Art of Imaging site here

Win great prizes!

The first competition we are doing in association with Sony Ericsson and their new 'Art of Imaging' Site at http://www.theartofimaging.com

The theme of this moblog competition is "fourteen days", take your own meaning from that. Send strong and vital images in from your futurephone; something to stand alongside images taken by celebrities like Irvine Welsh and Helena Christensen, who are also taking part.

The best entries win tickets to the opening night on the 16th of September at Camdens' Proud Gallery (You can come hang out with Mat and Alfie, who cares about Irvine Welsh anyway), and the winner will also recieve a shiny new Sony Ericsson K700i.

Send us your best entry, send as many as you like! And tell your mates, anyone can join in.

The shared moblog for the competition is here.

Our second competition is a contest to redesign moblog UK. You need some design and CSS skills, but it seems that among us there are a good load with teh l33t sk177z. If your design powers are great, but you have problems with css, asking in the forum might be a good way to get a little friendly help and advice.

This contest is running until the end of September, and you need to :

Design and CSS a complete re-skin of Moblog UK. The logo, everything are open to your mad design and creative juice.

The design must be an original work, and although you will maintain your copyright of your submitted design, moblogUK will have rights to implement your submissions on the site.

The winner receives a sim free Motorola V600, a wonderful little toy, and the two runners up receive Pete Fowler toys! Can't say fairer than that.

You can grab a sample CSS Style sheet here and you can test your design by passing theme=http://yourhost.com/stylesheet.css to any page on the site, or you can download pages and work on your own machine.

Good luck!

comment editing

Comment editing should now work properly. Our apologies about that, and many thanks to Arlo for pointing it out.