A serious bug has been fixed in image uploads for Blogs. Images that got uploaded went into one of two of our load balanced web servers and were not properly shared between the two servers, so 50% of the time each image would not show up.
We're not sure how this was overlooked but apparently not many people have been taking advantage of the image upload capabilities in the Blogs, otherwise we would have discovered the problem sooner. We discovered it when we began using Windows Live Writer with the Blogs for our own Equine.com Scam Alerts. Initially, the images seemed to upload fine, half the time, but suddenly the images would disappear or would never show up at all. As it turned out, they were there all along, just on only one server.
Now that the problem is fixed, I'd like to point out two really neat features on our site for working with blogs:
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To upload an image while writing a blog entry, click on the Content Selector toolbar button (
).
(Note that you must be using Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer or Firefox to do this. Some Mac users and/or Safari users might be able to do it, but we cannot support that for this feature.) At the bottom of the dialog box, you should see an "Upload File" option. Once you upload your file, it gets permanently added to your blog images gallery and you can reuse it later from this dialog without having to upload the image again.
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If you are a power blogger and you have a recently purchased computer running Microsoft Windows, you might like to try out Windows Live Writer,
http://writer.live.com/ This gives you a nice user interface that you can use to manage your blog content. You can also make quick edits and effects to your uploaded images.
To set it up, when you begin to set up your Weblog Account, you need to choose "Another weblog service" (do NOT choose "Windows Live Spaces" or "SharePoint weblog"), then after filling out the blog URL (mine was
http://community.equisearch.com/blogs/stimpy77/), username, and password, you need to choose "Community Server" as the "Type of weblog that you are using", and be sure to replace "http://<hostname>/blogs/metablog.ashx" with
http://community.equisearch.com/blogs/metablog.ashx. After selecting your blog, you will be asked if you want Live Writer to post a temporary post in order to obtain the theme / style of your blog, choose 'no', as our blogs are cached by about 15 minutes so Live Writer won't see the resulting blog entry.
Please note that the support for Windows Live Writer is built into Community Server itself, we did not add it ourselves, so if there are issues we will try to do our best to resolve them but for the most part you are on your own, I just thought the feature was worth mentioning.
Remember that there is always a fifteen minute wait (approximately) for all blog posts to appear on the site, so don't panic when your new content doesn't show up right away.
Thanks guys, and happy blogging.