We're really planning on expanding the functionality of categories, using it to power Tabulets and to allow for global privacy settings for entries.

To this end, we've disabled categories for free users; we're REALLY sorry about this, but it's just not feasible to offer it as a free service with all the new plans for it

We're really sorry to the free users who're going to get cut out of this ... but it was my mistake to ever release it to the free users ;O

Tabulas has experienced a major problem in its URL redirection file. We're working to restore all the URLs ... a lot of your pages will NOT BE ACCESSIBLE until we fix this.

REALLY REALLY sorry for this ... but we're working to fix this ASAP.


Update: We should of restored all the URL redirects. If you're navigating through Tabulas and find a page that says "Page cannot be found" please let me know where that is.

Also, if something seems to be working funny on your journal (e.g. you click a link and it doesn't take you to that page but rather to the main journal page) please also let us know.

Update 2: We've fixed up the problem with the "Next X Entries" for your page and your friends page.

What would you like to see in Tabulas? Or free users, what would compel you to purchase a Tabulas paid account?

Site Updates:
- You can now set a category as the 'default' category.
- The usericon bug from last night has been fixed

(I'm going to substitute [ for ( and ) for ] in this entry).

Most of you are aware of the (break) feature in Tabulas. We've extended the functionality of the feature to include mid-entry snippets as well as your own customized tag (instead of Read More).

In this entry, I'm going to do the following:

Hello, world! (break=Do you wanna read more?)test(/break)

Note that you must surround the text with the close break tag! (/break)
And it comes out like this:

Hello, world!

(Do you wanna read more?)

For about half an hour today, some entries were displaying [break=] as the whole entry. This was quite troublesome - I could not reproduce that effect in any of my journals ...

In any case, it *should* now be fixed. (Read More)

By request, we've added the option of buying a 6-month subscription to Tabulas. This costs $15 for 6 months.... so if you're short on cash but want to support Tabulas, go buy a paid account!

We've also added categoryrolling. If you have a default template, all you have to do is go to the "Styles" tab, then scroll down to categoryrolling and input: <!--category-->


If you have a custom template, simply put in <!--categoryroll--> in your template and follow the above instructions.

Image uploads were down for about an hour from 2am EST - 3am EST while new server settings were being tested. Sorry for the downtime ... all image uploads should be working now.

Affected images include both usericons *and* gallery images.

[break=For paid/beta users, click here]You may now set a "global" privacy level override for all entries set within a category. This allows for you to quickly set privacy levels for mass entries without having to edit each entry.

When you set a "global" override for a category, all entries inherit the privacy level without losing their individual privacy levels.

So if you were to put an entry (originally set as friends-only) in a private category, it will become a private entry. However, when you take it out of that category, it will once again become a friends-only entry.

You can set your global overrides by editing a category in your control panel.[/break]

For the rest of you...
Entries posted to shared journals ... might get a bit skewy with the new privacy settings. I've been rewriting a lot of the code without really keeping in mind the shared journals settings; the shared journals system is going to be *completely* overhauled (the current shared journals was only created to be a placeholder until I could get other features ironed out first).

As outlined earlier, we have disabled your RSS feeds at http://www.tabulas.com/rss/username.rss. We have moved them over to http://xml.tabulets.com/rss/username.rss (username should be all lowercase regardless).

I have updated the old feeds with a message telling them to update their feeds.

We've also added a small XML button to all default templates. This links to your RSS feed. Custom templaters can either hardcode it or use the >!--rss--< command to input the button directly in.

[break=Paid/Beta Users, read more...]
Ok, so we're testing a new feature that we may pull in the future ... it is media uploads. Officially the feature is said for media uploads, but there is no verification for the files uploaded... they can be EXE, ZIP, MPG, MP3, AVI... whatever. The max filesize is limited to 7 megabytes.

You can upload the files from the Content tab » Media Files.

Once you upload a file, it will how up on your 'content' page. Beta accounts are being granted 4 media file uploads.

In the future, we will be zipping the file up. There are some server limitations right now and I cannot execute the ZIP queries ...

Right now I'm going to test the general interest in such a feature and see if I can expand it to make your journaling experience better.
[/break]

We realize that the admin panel is a mess. It's not consistent, and the learning curve in learning where stuff is is a major prohibiting factor for new users. I've started to make notes on how to organize stuff... the new UI will be under development for a few weeks, but please note that we ARE working on it.

If you have any suggestions in terms of the UI, please let us know!

We spent most of today upgrading the backend of a few pages on this site... some "contact" features were added into your profiles (view Preferences Tab)... you can now add in your ICQ/AIM/Yahoo/MSN information and it will display on your profile.

For the past day or so, logging in has been troublesome for most people. This was the result of a botched attemped upgrade of the user management scripting ... we're terribly sorry.

You should be able to log-in now ... and I've learned a valuable lesson

We've implemented a rough version of a private messaging system for Tabulas. This is by no means done - we will be expanding this feature in the future (we hope to manage technical support with paid users with some future version of this feature).

Right now the messaging system is available under the Community Tab » Message Center.

When you send a message to a Tabulas member, it will show up as an extra box on the main 'add entry' page (send a message to yourself to see what I mean).

We have no added e-mail support for this feature yet, but we will be doing that shortly.

We've just added e-mail support so you can receive an e-mail whenever you get a private message. To enable e-mail notification (it is off by default), go to Preferences » E-Mail Settings » and look at the bottom.

Looks like we're going to keep this feature. I likes. I'll probably expand on this soon as well.

In any case, we've decided that beta/paid members will get 8 files to upload; normal paid users will get 4.

We've also uploaded a MS doc file that outlines future plans for Tabulas. These are the features we will be pursuing (as well as the things we're going to fix with Tabulas) over the next few weeks.

If you have not yet, please purchase a paid/beta account. We hope to clear these out by Friday :D. They are a GREAT deal... plus once they are all sold out, we're going to have an exciting announcement to make for all those people who bought beta/paid accounts (it'll be a godsend for you image-gallery freaks).

Only for paid/beta members.

(Read more if you're interested)

(yes, this post was made via e-mail)
Update of Known Issues:
- I haven't figured out on what end, but for some reason the script is prematurely putting in <br/> tags ... this could screw up any HTML that you input in.

An announcement:

As some of you know, I am currently in the midst of another website project besides Tabulas. This site is Tabulas Gallery on steroids (a lot of steroids) and is being called Tokki Project (although this name will change as soon as the site is brought out of production).

Although the site is still far from being completed, it will rock. In any case, the announcement is this:

- Those of you who purchased a Beta Account on Tabulas will also be issued a "coupon" that will give you a paid Tokki account at 25% of the price; this is a savings of 75%! If you have no use for a gallery system, this coupon is transferrable to anybody as long as your primary Tabulas account remains active!

There will be more news on Tokki over the upcoming weeks; we're setting a public launch date of November 1st for the whole site.

The mainpage (which was getting really slow due to the high memory usage of the site) is now being handled by a cache. The cache is updated every two minutes, so your "new" posts won't update instantaneously, but will update every two minutes.

The speed on the frontpage should now be blazing fast!

Just pushing a blank entry so people can comment without getting too confused

There is now a new entry engine in place; this should make no difference in aesthetics; this new engine was written for performance's sake.

We're trying to rewrite a lot of the core code so that the site doesn't hit the database as much but relies more on memory... let's hope it works

Please let us know if you find any problems with it (anything regarding entry output or display on any pages containing entries).

Note that we've temporarily disabled the "Jump to Date" feature that used to be found on your archives page.

Thanks!

Sorry for the total lack of development - I've been busy with school.

There's been some work in reworking some of the main display/entry addition engines to the site; the new entry addition engine will be implemented within a few days and should help to be more memory efficient.

We do have a few new features we are working on immediately:

1.) Better shared journals control for moderators (kick out entries/users)
2.) Better privacy control (ban IP addresses/usernames from visiting your Tabulas)
3.) Usericons show up as an album in your gallery

Tabulets has been done for some time (all your public data *is* being syndicated). I plan on finishing up the receiving script so you can run it off your own domain soon. SOON!

These are the features that require immediate attention and will be addressed this weekend.

The new entry additions engine was implemented. Please let us know if there are problems with the addition of entries to your Tabulas.

Update: We've also updated the crossposting feature code. Again, nothing aesthetic. Please let us know if you have problems with crossposting.

Please remember to update your profiles page to reflect your time changes if you observe Daylight Savings!

We've implemented a rough version of a "user banning" feature. This feature allows you to prevent specific Tabulas users or IP addresses from accessing your Tabulas; this does not prevent them from seeing entries posted to your friend's "friends page." This will simply block them from accessing all content at your journal URL.

You can find the banning feature underneath the "Preferences" tab in your control panel.

Please note that anyone CAN spoof their IP address via their browser settings; this feature should only really be used to block non-computer savvy people from visiting your journal. This is NOT a "foolproof" solution!

Paid/beta members also have the option of using IP wildcards; you can input the IP address as (for example): 152.23.203.*; this will ban everyone that share that IP block 152.23.203.

This is a feature under more development. Please let us know how you like it and we might expand it in the future.

Here are a series of small changes we've been making to the site:

1.) You can now specify the ability to disable HTML in your comments since a lot of people seem to like to use the > and < commands in comments. This has been disabled by default since the people who would realize that they need this off would most likely not know to check this; conversely, those who enjoy posting with HTML probably know enough to uncheck the box.

2.) Your titles are now HTML-disabled; HTML will not be allowed in entry titles. This was implement for the same reason as the above...

3.) For those of you who wish to sync your personal domain websites with your Tabulas; I highly suggest using the Magpie RSS - PHP Parser to parse your RSS feed; installation for me took less than a minute; customization took a bit longer.

4.) There were some issues with the new crossposting code that affected users attempting to crosspost (HTML was getting stripped out, and extra linebreaks were being added into entries). All issues have been addressed and fixed.