There should be a flash video file below by elysiumproductions.com

If you use iBlog, read this entry, and have a spare moment :) please cast a vote in the iBloggers.net forum about how fast iBlog loads on your machine. Link: http://www.ibloggers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1504

[Edit: corrected the URL. Thanks, Rich!]

As of today Mac users can finally get a glimpse of the upcoming iBlog 2.

After a few delays in the past months, it missed the official alpha / beta transition point by a week. It honestly was a close call. A pair of recently discovered necessities, together with the strong pursuit of maximum flexibility, slowed things down.

The good news is that the road ahead is brighter & shorter. I know all too well it has been a long wait. But, iBlog 2 has come a long way. Rebuilding from the ground up with absolute emphasis on flexibility, customizability & user friendliness - based on v1 user feedback and new trends - takes a lot of thought and effort. So, yes, it's not complete just yet, but it's close. There are a few more exciting features on the drawing board, which I'm sure will be well received. So, if you have a spare moment, download it, have look, share some thoughts in the forum and give Sarat a thumbs up :)

iBlog v2 preview - also known as beta 1 - is available from Lifli at ibloggers.net :)

Here are two iPod Color images to use with Now Playing, discussed earlier this week.

Just save the image to your hard drive in the Theme subfolder of Now Playing and rename to theme.png.

The first is a 150px wide blank iPod Color screen:



The second is a 150px wide blank iPod Color with a slightly enlarged screen area. A regular scaled down iPod's screen is too small to contain text at a decent size (plus small fonts often render bad), so I bumped the screen up by a few % :)



Enjoy!

MacDude pointed out that you can use Now Playing to display iTunes track info on your blog. Now Playing is a little widget that checks iTunes every 15 seconds and then can upload the track data to any FTP, .mac or WebDav location. You can either use one of the default themes or build a custom one, which is music to my ears.

Unfortunately the documentation is in Japanese only and to make matters worse their example XML file does not contain all the needed code to make it work. Existing themes only address font styling. So, it took me a while to find trick to get positioning sorted out, by adding an extra variable. I don't know all the ins & outs of how to customize this particular Now Playing xml file; but this is what you need:

Create a subfolder under Theme. In that folder you need a theme.plist file with xml info and a theme.png image as background.



The first two # for PosAlbum PosArtist & PosSong indicate the left & right margin. The third # is the vertical spacing from the bottom.

Add any custom PNG image you wish to use for background, (set spaces & align accordingly) and you get:



I wrote the author asking about some English documentation. Babelfish didn't want to help translate.

Lifli made iBlog 1.4.2 available with the following updates (it's not announced yet):

1. Uses the latest .Mac SDK from Apple for iDisk publishing.
2. Added support for printing entries from the Add/Edit entry window.
3. The next and previous buttons in the photo entry window circle through the photo collection.
4. Fixed some issues in the RSS 2.0 feed file.

This update should help with podcasting & photo publishing.

Still using the standard iBlog template because you don't really have a "green thumb"?

Suffer no more. Thanks to our fellow iBlogger, Robt from naafront.com; you can now put the standard iBlog template set aside and use "Max".

Max is Robt's latest masterpiece; which features full screen width with fluid blog body and fixed side column; 7 color schemes and lots of CSS goodies to spice up paragraphs & images. To make sure anybody can use his design, he created a tutorial site: Blog By Numbers, which covers the design's background, all the features and a quick start guide. Check it out!

I hope a few people think it's worth promoting Robt's work by "word of blog", ( I certainly do,) as he put a lot of effort into it to benefit all iBlog users & iBlog. Do you know anybody that still uses the default template set? Give 'm a nudge in the right direction ;)

Lifli announced an interim build towards iBlog 1.4.2 at iBloggers.net.

You can now print entries, next & previous buttons have been updated and publishing to .mac now uses the latest
.Mac SDK (version 1.1) - which may be of interest to those with certain publication issues.

During a quick "google" to answer a question at the ibloggers forum; I came across RSS Digest this afternoon.

It's a donation supported website where you can create a customized headline version of any valid RSS feed. You copy/paste the RSS (of the site which' headlines you would like on your blogpage), click create the code, choose a few options, copy/paste the resulting javascript link in your template and voila.

Example:
-----------
MacCentral Headlines


Certainly a nice extra tool for our toolbox.

Lifli released iBlog 1.4.1, which fixes some outstanding small issues: jpg attachment preview, extra .jpg files on the iDisk are no more, support for RSS2.0 with enclosure tags, all templates are visible again, etc and better menu layout.

Installed the update. No issues noted.

I posted a request over in the dotmac.info forums today, so that we could find out what the issue is with so many iblogs not showing in the recent entries. Turns out it was the ' in for instance icerabbit's blog that was not accepted. Big thanks to August for looking into it so promptly and adjusting the code to accept '. Just made a test entry, and it was properly listed as updated on the dotmac.info homepage. Hope other people have the same success.

If your blog now shows in dotmac.info as updated, but you don't see your icon / image. Double check the URL you registered. Search for your own .mac username, then view the details of your registered page. On the right you'll see a link to "update this page" where you'll have access to the URL. Also make sure the blogname on that page, matches your blogname in iBlog.

Good luck :)

Lifli just released iBlog 1.3.8, a critical update for iBlog 1.3.7, which fixes an issue that may cause loss of blog data under some circumstances.

If you are using iBlog, then Paul Baily's iBlog Backup is likely THE must have tool.

It automates backing up and restoring your iBlog data and preferences into a few clicks process. I helped a little testdriving it, and it's really a handy tool. No need to struggle with the finder, iBlog Backup will do it for you.

So, don't risk losing your entire blog, ... keep a compressed backup around which is just as easily restored as it was backed up.

Another welcome update with a few new features.

I was actually dreaming about iBlog last night. I know! I must have been thinking about it a little bit too much? It was actually great. In my dream, I woke up, to my greatest surprise out of the blue update 1.3.9 was out and it included ALL these features that so many others & I had given feedback about. It was very polished, intuitive, ... and a scream to customize.

That said, I heard from Sarat about some of the 1.3.6 features and it sounds like it'll be a nice update. I'm tickled already.

Ed.: The iBloggers webring panel (somewhere down the left column) is now positioning properly.

Big thanks to Randall who pointed me out how I can view the external JavaScript code. Turns out it's just HTML with an invisible 250 px table around the nested iBlog webring table. Table 1 forces the DIV to expand. Table 2 is centered in the 250 px and you get the odd padding effect. Easy fix. I currently don't call the external script. I just have my own little stripped down HTML code there.

... it's just great to see it properly positioned.

Available via "iBlog - Check for updates" and at Lifli Downloads.