While I've been working on our upgrade system non-stop the last few weeks, I've also taken some time in the evenings (thanks to the graciousness of my wife) to work on a few more community based features.

I just finished the "Top Blogs!" feature (displayed on most of our main website pages) that shows a list of some of our most popular blogs. The listing is based off of HTML page views during the month and it resets at the beginning of every month. The reason I'm having it reset at the beginning of the month is because I want to show a little more of the trend in popularity than long-term popularity and it gives everyone a much better chance of making the list. I imagine that the list will vary greatly every day at the beginning of the month and then start to stablize towards the middle of the month with the long-term popular blogs rising to the top. It's just a guess, so we'll see what happens.

Along with the "Top Blogs!" feature, I also added a News tab that contains short summaries of our Help Blog's news items. It's a place to quickly get information on what's going on in the eponym.com community.

We've (finally!) had some pretty good snow here so it looks like I'm stuck inside for the weekend. This will give me a chance to finish up our upgrade system. We'll be testing it early next week and it should go live by the end of the week, so be looking for it!

There's now a Getting Started guide up on the Eponym Help Blog. The Getting Started guide is mainly to help beginners make their initial posts to the Eponym system. Our goal is to make sure beginners are comfortable with the basics of Eponym as quickly as possible.

We've also added a Spanish language User Manual in PDF format. You can download it from the sidebar of any page on the Help Blog.

We've just put our Eponym Help Blog online!

Currently, it contains our User Manual and an Eponym News section. The User Manual fully describes every feature of our blog software. This is your ultimate reference to the Eponym.com Blog Control Panel. The Eponym News section will keep you up to date on all the events, upgrades, and scheduled maintenance outages at Eponym.com.

For the future, we are working on a "Getting Started" guide, an "Advanced Template Customization" guide, and an F.A.Q.

The Eponym Help Blog is your ultimate reference and support tool for Eponym.com.

There's been a pretty big buzz going around the office this week. We launched this thing just over a week ago and have over 425 users with minimal advertising. I can't wait to see what happens to it as our advertising is expanded and users experience the difference of our service compared to the other popular blog services out there.

Yesterday, Alexa had us ranked a little over 10,000. I know that Alexa rankings can be manipulated and they aren't very consistent for new sites (it's down around 18,000 today), but it's still exciting to already be that high after just a week. We'll have a better idea of how we're doing after about a month. There's a big potential for us to succeed because of the people we have here, what we're doing and how differently we're doing it. We just have to work hard and bring together things that motivate, encourage and enrich the lives of our users.

A big thanks to all you early adopters of our service.

We're now working on our blog upgrade system. This system will allow users to upgrade their disk space and monthly bandwidth allocation for a small fee (it helps us pay the bills!). It gets pretty complex because of the different servers that we have to hit, the security that is necessary, and the recurring billing portion of it. However, it should be coming soon so expect in within a few weeks.

The blog upgrades will allow users to increase their disk space and monthly bandwidth. Free blogs get 10MB of disk space and 100 MB of bandwidth / month, which is great for a free offering. However,  good bloggers could hit those limits, so we want to offer packages that will accommodate the larger blogs.

In doing this, we want to continue to provide the best blogging software and service on the Internet and help you make a self for your name.

We've just added a captcha to the blog sign up process. It's unfortunate that we have to add security checks like this, but this will cut out any attempts at automated sign ups.

We did a lot of research on captcha before adding it to the sign up process. There are so many weak and/or unreadable captchas out there. We wanted to make sure that we had one that was strong yet still easy to read. I think the one we finally went with accomplishes both things. Every now and then I'll see one where it is somewhat difficult to distinguish a few of the characters, but you can just click on the captcha itself to get a new one that is, hopefully, more readable.

Many thanks to the OCR Research Team for their insight into weak vs. strong captchas and their own implementation of captcha, tEABAG_3D, that we ended up going with.