We've been working on help.tabulas.com, which we hope in the near future will be the ultimate help center in helping people learn how to use their Tabulas.

However, we required your help. We need to know what needs to be documented. So please go to the documentation request page and put in a request for some documentation that you cannot find!

We hope that this documentation site will be fully finished within a week or so; it's still got some work left


P.S. We implemented a brand new engine to power the outputting of entry display. If you're having any problems, let us know.

Shared Journals will not be functioning for the next 48 hours or so; you can continue posting to them and no data is lost. However, we are working on new scripting that will replace the old outdated scripting.

We are also implementing various coding changes which MAY result in errors for a few seconds.

We know it's really annoying, and it frustrates us to no end, but most of these errors should last less than 30 seconds while we quickly fix them up

Please bear with us while we make these changes.

We've started to reference Shared Journals as "Communities."

We've brought back the display portion of Communities (you can now see your community page again) ... but note the new URL schema. You now find your communities at http://www.tabulas.com/community/community_name

We've also revamped the "view members" and "info" pages.

We're working on the administrative portions of the site right now, but we'll reveal some plans that we're doing.

There will be better control for moderators; you will be actively able to kick out members and remove entries from communities. However, we're limiting this power to free users.

Free users will only be able to be the moderator of one journal and will only be able to kick out members if the member is within the last 10% of the full membership. So if 10 people are in a community, a free user moderator will only be able to kick a person out if they were the last person to join.

Free user moderators will also only be able to remove entries if they are within the last 10% of all entries posted to the community. So if 100 entries have been posted to a community, the free user moderator will only be able to manage the last 10 entries.

Free user moderators will also not be able to create new templates for communities but use the preset templates.

Non-free users will be able to have full moderation access to communities, as well as the ability to create templates and such. They will also be able to moderate up to 250 communities.

We have completed our work on communities. There are no barriers set (so free users can freely moderate as many entries/users/communities as they wish. These blocks will eventually be implemented in the future.

You can now remove users/entries if you are the moderator of the community; the control panel area also features a left bar for easier management.

You'll also notice we fixed up the link on the members page (it now contains the link to the actual join page) ... you'll also notice the top bar will have a "join (communityname)" if you are not a member.

Note that there is very little support for "styling" communities. This is the next step we'll take (being able to use your own templates). For now you'll have to use the default ugly template.

We will be shortening the wait period for you to verify your account from 30 days to 14 days; if you do not activate your account within 14 days, the username will be re-released back into the public namespace so someone else can use that username.

We has also added png support (it used to give errors sometime because we used to only check for image/x-png file formats and not image/png).

We've revamped the hit logging page to be a little more efficient. To free users, there is no change to the page at all ... however to the paid users, a series of important changes have been implemented.

(Read More)

We've also gone through with our plan to clear up namespace issues by cutting for the "wait" time of inactive accounts being given out to new users to 2 weeks.

Autolinks have also been changed back ... the flag word may only contain alphanumeric characters and spaces.

Update:
We've decided to add the ability to view recent visitors from the past 5 days as we had in the old system. Check under hit logging to view this feature again.

We've also re-added the daily hit count so you can keep track of how many hits you get per day. Instead of the calendar system as we had before, it is now listed in a table format (so we can generate a nice little graphic so you can easily compare various days).

Thus ends our work in the hit logging section

We spent a little time rewriting the backing up engine; the new output should generate clean HTML (with no more styling); the RSS feed should also be corrected. There were some old issues of bad styling being placed into the RSS feeds as well as entries not being properly generated for both the HTML and RSS feeds (due to new breaking features being implemented after the creation of the backup pages).

The backup should now work quite nicely ... you also must explicitly tell the site to generate the backup; it used to generate it when you simply visited the page.

Due to these new changes, we've reset EVERYBODY'S last request date to 1970. This means that everybody (regardless of when they last backed up their journal) can go to the backup page and grab a fresh backup of your journal!

Do it now and save it to your hard drive!

We were finally able to track down that notorious usericon bug (usericon changes when you edit); this should now be fixed.

We also fixed up all bugs relating to your RSS feed; there were some problems with the RSS feeds not generating proper feeds when entries contained break commands.

The Community tab now takes you directly to your Communities, while the Plug-In tab takes you directly to your links page.

The issue with funky characters appearing in your weblogs.com listing ... should hopefully be resolved. We removed (what we think) are the problems there. Edit: Oops, might not of actually fixed them. They should now be fixed (hopefully).

Edit: We've also updated the Feedback Log to not include your comments in the feedback log. This didn't make much sense since the Feedback Log's primary purpose was for you to quickly view all the recent comments in your journal that you could reply to (unless you enjoy replying to yourself...)

Please let us know if there are any problems with any of these issues.

I know we've actually extended this sale for a few weeks too long, but we will finally be putting this deal to rest. Please consider supporting this site and purchasing a paid account.

The deal is: $50 for 3 12-month accounts or one account for $25/year.

We will end this deal at 1159PM on Friday, January 16th. After that, the price will be back up to $28/year for a paid account.

Get them while they're hot!

All communities now have an RSS feed to them; you can find out where your community feed is by scrolling to the last line in each "Community Info" page.

They can also be located by going to the URL: http://xml.tabulets.com/community/COMMUNITY_NAME.rss (COMMUNITY_NAME will be the name of your community, all in lowercase letters).

We are also testing out a new feature ... we'll gauge feedback and pull/expand this feature. If you have enabled community-rolling in your template, you'll notice a bold link "My Community" at the bottom of your communities. This takes you to a page that lists all entries posted to all communities that you are a member of; we originally were going to tie this into your "friends" page but decided it would be better to keep it separate (friends page would be for your friends entries, while communities would help you keep track of similar interests). You can also simply access this page by typing in "mycommunity.html" off your main URL (http://www.tabulas.com/~tabulas/mycommunity.html is an example).

There were a few fixes in the community section, most notably the ability to "reenable" users you denied/kicked out of a community. There used to be no way to let them back in; now you can use the "Verify" screen to let them back in.

For those of you who own your own journals outside of Tabulas, how interested would you be in seeing the development of a stand-alone PHP program that would interact with Tabulas?

It would basically let you sync your domains with your Tabulas journals so you would only post once ... quite similar to what can be done with your RSS feed, but a little more powerful since we would also syndicate the comments and your whole archives so you could access all of them...

Thoughts?

A bunch of new changes for the whole "friends" thing.

You can now filter your "friends of" list so that if anyone who lists you as a friend has some questionable topics you can block them from your "friends-of" list. They will also not appear on your "friends of" listing on your profile.

However, they will still be able to view your entries on their "friends" page.

We've also slightly updated the profile page. Your "friends" may have some bolded text; these are users who have also listed you as a friend (so basically mutual friends are bolded on the profiles "Friends" field).

The "Friends Of" feature now only lists users who list you as a friend but who you have not listed as a friend.

You can also by default choose to NOT display who lists you as a friend and deny users the ability to see your "friends of" page from the Styles page in your control panel; you will still be able to view your own Friends Of page, but everyone else will not.

. . .

We've also updated the output of your links pages to reflect any categories you've created. Categories will not appear unless there is at least one link assigned to it.

Usericons have been moved off to a separate server. You should notice absolutely no changes; if anything usericons should load faster now.

We're going into a developmental freeze so that the more hidden bugs can be fixed (if they come up) ... I'm going to spending some more time on other projects (hopefully they can be a little more financially successful than this site).

There will be bug fixes, and I will continue to help with support queries; I may even hack out a new feature every week or so, but I will not be working as hard as I have on new features as I have for the past few weeks ...

Please consider purchasing a paid account during this period; it would really help me out

If there are any features you'd like to request, please also list them below!

Sorry for the downtime and slow server; there were some server issues that had to be dealt with; the server should now be zippy

Clicking the "Leave a Comment" (or whatever text you have) link will anchor you directly to the comment box.

We've gotten rid of the 'disable HTML' option in the commenting; it created many problems that I didn't foresee when I implemented the feature.

The script that does the work when someone comments has been upgraded for code optimization.

The only visible change is that you will not be sent to a long URL when you post a comment.

Please let us know if you're having any problems with the new comment posting system.