Bigger, faster Blockstar
Hey Blockheads, I just wanted to let you know that we have made several big performance improvements over the summer. First, we built a dynamic page caching system for users' websites. We now only request your page from the database if it is brand new or if you have made changes to your site. Otherwise it will come from our cache. This means that your website will get served a lot faster when people visit it. Second, we just completed moving Blockstar to a new data center with much faster servers than what we were running Blockstar on. Both of these improvements will allow us to grow and keep your site running fast. Now that those are done, we are going to go back to working on our web-based editor. Look for a new fancy pants AJAX editor to come out by the holidays and replace the downloadable version out now.
By: news
Browser Based Website Builder Coming Soon
Just a quick note to let you know that we will be replacing our desktop website builder with a browser based one soon. The new version will allow you to do everything that the old one did, but through a browser. This means that you will be able to access Blockstar from anywhere and won't need to worry about publishing files from your computer to our servers. Look for our new AJAX WYSIWYG website builder to go live in the next month or so. Block On! Chris
By: news
Stand alone content and new page serving system live
I am very happy to announce that we are now serving user created content 10-20 times faster than before. We have made some major upgrades to our backend and moved user created websites onto a much faster system. I hope that you all notice the difference. We have also added the ability to view blogs, galleries, images, styles, and text on their own. You no longer have to put any of these files into a web page in order to see them. This way if you are looking to get some content online without having to build an entire page, you can just create a single object and then view it from your user directory. Create a photo gallery, add images to it, publish it, and then go to the galleries folder on your website where your photo gallery will be waiting for you.
By: news
New stuff to report
Hey All, We have been busy the last couple of weeks, and I just wanted to let you all know what we have added to the site. Before that I want to say hi to all the people down in Brazil who have signed up in the last 10 days. We love the stuff you have been putting on the site, keep on building. So now for the latest round of changes: - We just launched our Superstar Hosting plan. This will give you domain name hosting, no ads on your website, and more storage and bandwidth than the free plan.
- Domain name mapping is now working. If you have a domain name you want your site to appear under, sign up for the Superstar plan.
- Stand alone object viewing: we have expanded our object viewing pages to include a nav bar and the title of the object.
- Full size image views: we have added the Lightbox JS image viewer created by Lokesh Dhakar to handle image viewing. Thanks Lokesh for creating this neat javascript.
We have started to get busy so you might notice some performance slowness, especially when publishing. We have some faster boxes that we are going to be moving to in the next couple of weeks to speed things up. In the meantime, hang tight and keep on creating great things. Block On! Chris
By: news
Index Page and Styles Now Created for Each User
Greetings Citizens, In order to help you with your web page building efforts, you will now get a pre-built index page and a bunch of styles added to your account the first time you login to the website builder. Since Blockstar is a different type of website builder, we thought it would be useful for you to see what a page looks like. The index page is your home page. Please edit and change it to whatever you want it to look like. The styles are there to make your web pages look great. Simply click the Add Style button in the web page editor to add a style to your web page. You can see what each of the styles look like by viewing them here: Blockstar Style Samples Block On! Chris
By: news
Site slowness resolved
The website was running very slowly today. We believe that we have resolved this issue, but will keep an eye on things. Apologies if you were not able to work on your website because of this. Chris
By: news
Linux Version live
We added the Linux version of our website builder to the site today. All of you looking for a Linux website builder can now download our website building software.
By: news
Version 2.0 Now Live
I am really happy to annouce that version 2.0 is now up on the website for you to download. If you already have Blockstar, you can update to this version by starting the website builder already on your computer.
This version features a new:
-Text Editor
-File Manager
-Blog Editor
It also simplifies a lot of the steps involved in creating a website, and eliminates many of the bugs in the first version. I hope you all like it. Please let us know what you think by emailing chris@blockstar.com. Block On! Chris
By: news
Version 2.0 Coming Soon
We are hard at work on the second version of the Website Builder. This version is going to include a new and improved text editor, a redesigned file manager, a simpler interface, and a lot less bugs. The new version should be ready next week if not soon. Chris
By: news
New Flash Getting Started Demo
We just added a new flash demo that walks through the process of creating a website. Website Builder Demo For all of you who would rather see how to use something than read how to use it, this demo should get you up and running in no time. Please excuse the voice over, we will be putting out a better version later on with a more appealing voice than my tired croak. Block On! Chris
By: news
Mac and Windows versions are live
The Mac and Windows versions of the website builder are live. Please go ahead, download the software, and start building your website. There are some bugs with the software, and we will post them on the message boards tomorrow. Everyone who created an account already, thank you for waiting. Everyone else, go and create one now. I need to go to sleep. Block On! Chris
By: news
Almost There
We are happy to report that we have fixed the last really tricky problem we faced and will have the much promised first version of our desktop editor ready this week. Chris
By: news
Website is Live!
I am happy to report that we launched the website last night. The rest of the service is a couple of weeks away, but we wanted to get the website up to work out any kinks and hopefully get some beta testers to join us. This has been a long, long time coming and I am happy to see us so close. If you want to be a beta tester then create an account. We could use as many people as we can get. In order to fully launch the service, we need to finish up a bit of publishing and the some loose ends on the website builder. Both of those should be done in the next two to three weeks. Block On! Chris
By: news
|
