No Adverts For Friends Or Members

I have to admit it, I am not really a fan of advertisements when I am reading blogs.   It is frustrating to see flashing ads and images all over the page when really all you want to do is read the content.    The service is still not open to the public and we wanted to look at ways to keep the service free.   One of these ways was simple text based google ads on the sites (small ads).    The other way was just eating the server costs ourselves.   After speaking with the current members, we have come up with a nice compromise.

As of a couple of days ago, all blogs will have ads displayed on them, but they are only content related and small.    The bonus though is also the following:

1. Ads are not displayed to anyone that is logged in to the service ever.    If you are reading other blogs on the service and logged in, you will never see an ad on a post.
2. Regular readers of your blog are also considered and if someone visits your blog often they will also never see an advertisement.    This is a way not to upset your regular traffic and works extremely well.
3. Most advertisements are served up for traffic from search engines and the “occasional” visitor to your sites.

After speaking with some great friends about these rules, they have found great success and is something that is accepted by their members.    We are also going to be offering the ability for members to “opt out” of having advertisements served on their choice of blog for a small nominal fee.   This will be introduced in a upcoming (soon) announcement on this blog!

Of course, we are keeping with our existing premium services offered to our members for their additional functionality.   If we end up in a situation where the service is running fine without the advertisements, we might retire them after covering all our costs.    It will depend on how we go in the future

Avatars for Comments

We now have all the themes working so that they work with the Gravatar avatar system.   What that really means is that you can signup for an account on gravatar.com and when you make a comment on any site on Onvertigo Bloggers (and around the web) you will automatically have your little “global avatar” follow around when you make comments!

Let us know if you have any questions!

YouTube, Flick Video, Embeds, Etc.

After doing some serious thinking on this issue and the inability to find a video plugin that works for multiple services, we have decided to allow embedding in posts.   So what does this mean?    When you are viewing a youtube video, flickr video or something similar, it usually has a “share” embed code.   Now you do the following:

1. Copy the embed code
2. In “write post” click the HTML tab
3. Paste embed code
4. In “write post” click the Visual tab
5. Finish writing your post

It really is that simple!  Have fun!