Whew! Yes, we are finally finished. After intensive development and testing, I am pleased to announce that our blog upgrades are here!

First, the sales pitch...well, hopefully it doesn't need one. We just want to make sure you know what you can get when you upgrade your blog. Many people will be just fine with our free blogs which include 10MB of disk space, 100MB of monthly bandwidth, and our Eponym.com branding. They can figure out any issues they have on their own and don't want to add any extra web addresses.

So, you ask us, "Why should I upgrade my blog?" and we answer with, "This is why...". You get:

• increased disk space
• increased monthly bandwidth
• email support
• custom web addresses
• remove Eponym branding (including ads!)

And just to clarify the last two points, custom web addresses will allow you to have up to three total URLs (web addresses) pointing to your blog. For example, besides this blog's normal address of 'official.eponym.com', we could also add 'officialblog.eponym.com' and 'www.theofficialeponymblog.com' (providing we actually already owned 'theofficialeponymblog.com') to our system and anyone going to these addresses would also see this blog. The last point, removing the Eponym branding, will allow you to remove the three required free blog components. These are the Eponym Toolbar (at the top of your blog), the Eponym "Start Blogging" ad, and the general Eponym ad block.

We'll end this post with a couple of thoughts on programming the upgrade system. The development took a little longer than planned (which is always the case, right???) mainly because of the unknown of tying four different systems together: our web server, recurring billing system, payment gateway, and blog system. The crazy thing is, if you consider all the work that went into it, the majority of it just comes down to processing one form. Yeah, I guess the recurring billing system, which runs at the beginning of every month, took some time to setup as well. But that still depended immensely on the form. In theory, I guess the simpler we make it for users, the more complex it will probably be behind the scenes. And that's ok - I love a challenge. So, cheers to the single, lone upgrade form.

First of all, I apologize for the delay in updates over the past few weeks. Needless to say, this upgrade system has really taken over all of my time. But I'll leave that subject for another post.

And one quick note before I get into this post's main topic. I won't be answering support questions on this blog anymore, so for those of you that have been asking support questions on this blog, please read this post! It describes the proper channels for getting support now that we have a much better system in place.

Today I'd like to share with you a little bit of what we're doing here regarding eponym.com support.

To lay a foundation, our support policy is that we provide email support for upgraded blogs, which, more importantly to you, means that we do not provide support for free blogs. I hope you understand the obvious reason for this policy: since a large majority of our blogs are free, we would be unable to provide the resources needed to properly give support for all of our free blogs. In other words, the cost would be such that we wouldn't be able to provide free blogs anymore, thus eliminating the need (and the resources) to provide support for free blogs in the first place (pretty circular isn't it?). Well, bottom line, we don't want to stop providing free blogs.

With that being said, we've really been working on getting as much information as possible up on our Help Blog. We've got a User Manual and a Getting Started guide and are about to add an FAQ and a Tips & Tricks section. We're also planning on adding a user forum in the coming months so that you will be able to help each other (and I'm sure we'll drop by every now and then to help out as well).

There are a few other support issues that we run into from time to time that need to be addressed. That is why today we put up a Support Form. This form is for letting us know about technical issues that you are experiencing with our blog software, billing or account issues such as login problems or inquiries into suspended accounts, general feedback on our eponym.com system, and reporting abuse or Terms of Service violations. And for upgraded blogs, this is the form to use for any of your regular support questions.

We know how frustrating things can be when you can't get the answers that you are looking for, so we will continue to work on our help system to make it as comprehensive as possible.