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.