Simplaris Blogcast is proud to unveil a new support system at bugz.jkwiens.com. If you have any problems with Simplaris Blogcast, please create a support ticket on the site. Additionally, all emails sent to bugz@jkwiens.com will now automatically be imported into the support system.

If you are going to use the support system, I would encourage you to create an account. Accounts are not mandatory, however, it will make your life simpler. Without an account, the only way to correspond with the support system is through email. Since we have no way of authenticating people without accounts, you won’t be able to view your existing and old support tickets.

The support system is still under-development and is missing some key features (ie. File Attachments). Please create a support ticket if you find a bug or have feature requests for the system. I would really appreciate your input. If for some reason the support system doesn’t work or you need to send an attachment, you can send me an email to blogcast@jkwiens.com.

Simplaris Blogcast has gotten a complete facelift. Besides the new visual eye candy, Simplaris Blogcast has added a couple key new features. The first feature is supporting multiple blogs. This feature has been on hold for a long time. I am really sorry about the wait. However, this feature required Simplaris Blogcast to be almost completely rewritten. The second feature is supporting the new business facebook pages. The new business facebook pages have a similiar layout to the new profile pages which were released in the summer. I am waiting on Facebook to add a few features before I can get everything working. The only major feature missing from Facebook Pages is the ability to publish to the wall/stream. However, this feature should be added in the next few weeks.

Like any major software release, the new system might have some quirks to iron out. If you run into any problems, please email me at bugz@jkwiens.com and I will address the issue as soon as possible.

Thanks for your continued support.

I have been hunting down a problem that a few Simplaris Blogcast users are experiencing. The problem was that Simplaris Blogcast didn’t have permission to update their profile/feed/etc when they were offline. It is likely that other people are facing the same problem, so I’m posting a simple solution.

You may be having this problem if you are experiencing the following:

1. Simplaris Blogcast can’t post to your profile, info tab, and wall when using Timed Updates or Ping Automatic. Please note, if Simplaris Blogcast can post to any of these places, this isn’t your problem.
2. Simplaris Blogcast can post to your profile, info tab, and wall when manually updating Simplaris Blogcast (by clicking update on the “My Blogcast” tab).
3. If you go to the settings tab, you do not see a button labeled “Add to Profile” on the bottom right.
4. If you go to the “My Blogcast” tab, you do not see “blogcast it” to the right of your newest article.

If you are experiencing these problems, please try clicking on this link and pressing okay. If you are still having problems, please following the directions on the following post.

For awhile now, I have been measuring Simplaris Blogcast’s activity. The main reason for this is to quantify the amount of exposure Simplaris was receiving by sponsoring us. The main tool that I was using was Google Analytics which has a great set of tools to analysis your web traffic. I haven’t found anything better. Anyways, for the last month, I was starting to get concerned about some of the figures.

Graph 1.1

As you can see, there has been a drop in activity ever since mid-august. Now, let me clarify exactly what this graph is measuring. The number of unique users is defined as the number of people (in a day) that went to either the “My Blogcast”, “Settings”, “Blogcaster”, or “Friend’s Blogcasts” page (also known as Simplaris Blogcast’s Canvas). How could this be? Why did the number of unique vistors go down ever since Simplaris started sponsoring us? After all, Simplaris Blogcast (aka Flog Blog) didn’t even really work until that point. Shouldn’t we have gottin more traffic after the sponsorship?

Ok, maybe measuring the number of unique users on the Canvas was not the best way of measuring the activity of Simplaris Blogcast. How about we look at the number of posts?

Graph 1.2

As you can see, Simplaris Blogcast is blogcasting 2000-4000 posts a day. The big problem with this graph is that we have no way of comparing the number of Blogcasted Posts per day before the sponsorship. I didn’t start collecting these stats until August 23 which is long after the sponsorship. However, this graph seems to show that Simplaris Blogcast is a lot more active than what graph 1.1 shows.

As I see it, there are two potential reasons for this difference. The first reason is that people don’t need to use the Canvas because there posts are being updated automatically (using the Ping Automatic and Timed Update features). However, it is also possible that Simplaris Blogcast’s users really like to blog (which is completely possible). If people blogged 3/4 posts a day (which seems high), we could explain graph 1.2. Lets take a look if the latter reason holds any weight.

Graph 1.3

Before I explain the data in this graph, lets look into exactly what this graph is representing. Everyday, I measured the amount of posts still being displayed on Simplaris Blogcast which had been published (on the author’s blog) between September 1st and September 7th. After averaging these results, I got the above data[1]. Since the maximum number of posts that Simplaris Blogcast can display is ten, we can conclude that most people don’t blog daily[2].

If graph 1.3 wasn’t sufficient, we could look at the active users graphs provided by Facebook.

As you can see from these graphs, the activity spiked around the time of the sponsorship. This is especially noticeable on the Monthly Active Facebook Users graph. These are the results I would have expected to seen after the sponsorship.

After, showing all these graphs, I think it is safe to say that Simplaris Blogcast is definitely growing. We are interacting with far more people than before. However, because Simplaris Blogcast is actually working, users don’t need to interact with it much. Instead of manually updating everything (which would explain the high values in graph 1.1), users are able to use the automatic features.

Foot Notes:

1. At first glance, graphs 1.2 and 1.3 seem to be inconsistent with each other. According to graph 1.3, Simplaris Blogcast averages 4000 posts a day. Clearly this average doesn’t agree with the graph 1.2. However, what I failed to mention (for simplicities sake) is that graph 1.2 was taking measurements three days after the publishing date. According to graph 1.3, the average number of posts after three days was around 3250 (which seems a lot more reasonable). So, if anything, it means that graph 1.2 is lower than the actual values.
2. Simplaris Blogcast was designed for a purely functional purpose. I never dreamed that I would have 30k users using this application. Because of this humble orgin, I never designed the application to make reporting easy and accurate. Because of this, it limits the accuracy and questions that can reported. Hopefully, in the future, I will create the application more “report” friendly.

On my previous post, I was explaining how to fix permission problems using the old Facebook. Today, I will explain how to fix permission problems on the new Facebook.

As I noted in my previous post, you may be having permission problems if you experience the following:

• Simplaris Blogcast doesn’t post stuff to your mini-feed.
• You aren’t receiving friend’s feeds even though it is published on your friend’s mini-feed.
• You can’t add a tab for Simplaris Blogcast when using the ‘new’ Facebook
• Simplaris Blogcast isn’t being displayed on my profile for me or my friends.

If you find yourself experiencing any of these problems and are using the new Facebook, please follow these directions.

First click on the on the Applications menu and click on Simplaris Blocast. This will take you to your “My Blogcast” page inside Simplaris Blogcast. Next, hover on the Settings menu and then click on “Simplaris Blogcast Settings”.

First, we will change the wall permissions for Simplaris Blogcast. We can do this by selecting the wall tab on the dialog box that just appeared. Change the radio button so the “Allow Simplaris Blogcast to publish specific sizes automatically” option is selected. After selecting this option, the sub-options should appear. Select the “Full” sub-option to allow Simplaris Blogcast to publish Full Stories.

Next, we will change the profile permissions. Select the Profile Tab in the dialog box. Make sure that both the Box option and the Tab option say “Added” instead of “Available”. If one of the options says “Available”, please click on the added click beside it. Also, make sure the privacy setting is set to “My Networks and Friends”.

Now click the close button on the dialog box and go into Simplaris Blogcast and press the update button. Everything should now be working. If it isn’t working, send me an email at bugz@jkwiens.com.

Recently, I have been getting a lot of questions regarding permissions. You may be having permissions if you are experiencing one of the following:

• Simplaris Blogcast doesn’t post stuff to your mini-feed.
• You aren’t receiving friend’s feeds even though it is published on your friend’s mini-feed.
• You can’t add a tab for Simplaris Blogcast when using the ‘new’ Facebook
• Simplaris Blogcast isn’t being displayed on my profile for me or my friends.

Since there are two versions of Facebook at the moment, I am going to write up two different posts addressing this issue. This post will address people that are using the old facebook.

First click on the Applications link on the left sidebar which will take you to the following page.

Next, click on the ‘Edit Settings’ button for Simplaris Blogcast.

The next step is to change all the setting to be identical to the image above and press save. Now go into Simplaris Blogcast and press the update button. Everything should now be working. If it isn’t working, send me an email at bugz@jkwiens.com.

Currently, Simplaris Blogcast doesn’t directly support multiple blogs. This is something that we would like to add in the future. However, for now, you can use Yahoo Pipes to get multiple blogs on Simplaris Blogcast.

First go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ and click on ‘create a pipe’.

If you aren’t logged into yahoo, it will prompt you for your username and password. If you don’t have a yahoo account, you will need to create one.

After you logged in, you will be taken to a screen like this:

The next step is to click on the plus sign on “Fetch Feed” (which is in the sources menu). This will create a dialog box on the grid. In this dialog, enter the web feed of one of your websites. In order to add another feed to your pipe, you will need to click the plus sign again on “Fetch Feed” and enter your second web feed in the dialog box. Repeat this step until you have added all the web feeds that you want to pipe.

The next step is to merge all the feeds together. You can do this by expanding the operators menu (on the left) and clicking the plus sign on “Union”. This will create another box on the grid called “union”. Next, click on the circle at the bottom your fetch feed dialog box and drag it to one of the top circles on the union box. You will need to do this for all the fetch feed dialog boxes.

After creating the union of your feed, you will need to sort your feed. You can do this by expanding the operators menu (on the left) and clicking the plus sign on “sort”. This will create another box on the grid. You will need to change sort by field to item.pubDate and the order to descending order. Next, you will need to connect the bottom of the union box to the top of the sort box. Additionally, you will need to connect the bottom of the sort box to the top of the pipe output box.

Now, all we need to do is save the pipe which you can do by clicking the save button on the top right. It will then ask you for a pipe name. You can enter anything and press save again. Once you have saved the pipe, you will need to find the web feed address of your new pipe. You can do that by clicking on “Back to my pipes” on the top right.

Next, you will have to find the pipe that you created. Hover over it and select view results.

After you do this, you will need to click on “more options” and click on “Get as RSS”.

This will take you to your piped rss feed. From here, you can select the text in the address bar, right click, and then copy. Now you have the feed url on your clipboard.

All you need to do now is to go to the Settings page in Simplaris Blogcast and paste the contents of the clipboard to the feed url and press save.

Over the last year, Simplaris Blogcast (aka. Flog Blog) has really grown. I remember being excited when the first thousand people started using my app. I could not have imagined having over 30 thousand people using it. However, this is now the case. I know there are a lot of apps that have millions of users. But this still doesn’t change this accomplishment. Who would have thought that a Junior Software Developer from Canada (and no, I don’t live in a igloo) would get this kind of attention. Anyways, I really have to thank everyone for supporting Simplaris Blogcast while it was maturing and not ‘flogging me’ when I accidentally broke something.

As exciting as the past may be, I think the future for Simplaris Blogcast looks even brighter. With the help of Simplaris, we now have our own dedicated server. This is a big step up when compared to the shared dreamhost account we were using before. Because of this, Simplaris Blogcast will be able to support an even larger user base.

One of the reasons that I created this blog was to reach out to a larger user base. This blog, however, won’t get its full impact without your support. First off, I would like to create articles that you would actually want to read. Since we all have Blogging and Simplaris Blogcast in common, it would make sense to talk about these things. However, I encourage your feedback and ideas on the topics I could cover. Lastly, if you have had a good experience with Simplaris Blogcast, I would be ecstatic if you posted a review on your blog which linked back to this site. This will help with our google ranking.

Thanks for your continued support!

For the non-geeky bloggers, there is a good chance that you wouldn’t have known about web feeds before using Simplaris Blogcast. For many of you, you still may not understand what a web feed does. Well, don’t worry, by the end of this article, we will have everything cleared up. According to Wikipedia, a Web feed is described as follows:

Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a web site. To provide a web feed, a site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or “feed”) of recent articles or content in a standardized, machine-readable format. The feed can then be downloaded by web sites that syndicate content from the feed, or by feed reader programs that allow Internet users to subscribe to feeds and view their content.

Almost every blogging platform will create a web feed for your blog, however it is not always immediately clear how to find it. Actually, this is the top support question that I get asked for Simplaris Blogcast. The first thing to know is that your web feed has an address which looks very similar to your blog’s address. For example, my blog’s address is jkwiens.com and my web feed’s address is jkwiens.com/feed. However, you will notice when clicking on the links that the format between the two are very different. Your blog’s address is meant to be read by humans… however, your web feed is meant to be read by computers (like Simplaris Blogcast).

Typically, there are three different methods of finding the web feed address of a blog. The first method and easiest method is to look for links on your blog. A lot of times, people will post their web feed on there blog. Look for links with words like “Feed”, “RSS”, “ATOM”, and “Subscribe”.

As you may have noticed, I have posted important web feeds on this blog’s sidebar

The second method of finding a web feed is to use a feature that most web browsers have built into them. The right side of your browser’s address bar you will find an orange icon. If you click on it, it will list all the web feeds for this webpage.

If you select one of these options, it will take you to the web feed.

The last method for finding your web feed is to use a special tool that I created for all Simplaris Blogcast users. All you need to do is enter your blog’s address and it will find all web feeds attached to this site.

Simplaris Blogcast can always use a little more publicity. If you are at all interested in publicizing Simplaris Blogcast, please insert the following code into your webpage.

which will look like this: