As you may have noticed we've been making a variety of usability improvements around the site, and this weekend it's the cblogs! Here's a brief hit-list of what's new:

- The functionality of the community blogs editor completely. Try uploading some stuff. You no longer have to flip between tabs to embed photos and images, the nav bar is now caught up with the new site design, and the fonts/margins are a little easier to read. Nothing visually stunning, but it should feel more intuitive/faster to use.

- Photo and video uploading now doesn't require endless scrolling. The photo manager stays docked on top and a condensed list of assets appears below. Its easier to upload a ton of media now, and while it loads the page never refreshes.

- A limit on blog title length. Some people were writing essays in their blog titles. Meh, be concise!



- Same thing with video embeds. Before you needed a doctorate of science to figure out where it was and how it worked. I hope you'll find this new method a little better.

You can also embed flash. Just copy a flash file's HTML and point the code to the domain where the SWF object is located. For example, I went to my new favorite web site (thanks, Diverse) and stole this from the home page, and modified the SWF location.

[i]<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="100%" height="100%" id="glasses" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.tane.us/glasses.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="lt" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#666666" /><embed src="http://www.tane.us/glasses.swf" quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="lt" bgcolor="#666666" width="100%" height="100%" name="glasses" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>[/i]

Next, I put this code into our embed video and convert it to BBcode.

Result! Try dragging the glasses to the dude to have your mind blow:




Fapping explained

- Newb text at the bottom of the blog editor and "Fapping" explained -- One of the things that's always been tricky for us is explaining to people that Dtoid cblogs are shared so people shouldn't machine-gun out 30 blog posts at once, or have to deal with fail blogs while quickly skimming the new posts from the home page. We added a wall of text that explains whatever it is we do on this web site. Vidya games, I think?

So, what's next?

I want the latest forums to appear on the sidebar of the community page (cats and dogs living together!) and a new meet-up area of the site that we can use to chat and sync up to play through private messaging and/or IRC. I need more sleep to figure that one out. People brought this up the most during PAX so I want to get this right and try to unify our mini-communities within Dtoid a little more.

Tons of other tweaks are coming in the next few weeks. Is there anything in particular you'd like to see gutted and fixed? Hit us up on the feedback forum!