Roundup of Smaller New Features

Here's a quick post to highlight a few smaller features we've added that didn't merit full blog posts. 

Comment By Email

When you get a comment notification email now you can reply to that email to create a new comment and keep the conversation going. We needed to make sure this was in place as part of our current effort to get email subscribers and multiple contributor support ready.

Advanced Site Settings

When you got to "Settings" for you site you will now see an "Advanced" tab where we have added a few things users have been asking for. Here are a couple highlights:

  • Google Analytics integration. Get a free account with Google Analytics and add your tracking ID to get better data about who is visiting your Posthaven blog.
  • Per site profiles. If you have multiple sites and do not want them all using your main Posthaven profile identity you can use this to override the name and bio that get displayed on a per site basis.

It's back to work for us. As always get in touch at help@posthaven.com with comments, questions or to say hello.

Tweet and Like buttons for your Posthaven

This just in, as requested—Tweet and Like buttons at the bottom of your posts. These appear only for your public blogs, and can be turned off easily by just going to your Site Settings. 

We've got some much bigger releases for you shortly. Thanks for your continued support!

Posthaven now supports commenting and upvotes

We've been working hard getting new features to you as soon as we can. Here's the latest — we've added the ability for your visitors to leave comments. You'll get email notifications when they do comment, and you can turn these off by editing your email settings (either click the link in the email, or go to Dashboard > Your Account

Notifications
We'll be adding daily digests for comments as soon as we can. For now, you'll be able to either get your comment notifications immediately, or you can turn them off. 

Built-in anti-spam
Anyone can leave a comment by default, but we do run anti-spam software so that you don't get lots of annoying spam comments. The worst your real visitors will see when trying to comment will be a captcha, powered by Recaptcha, but we only do that if we think the comment looks like spam. 

What's next for commenting?
In addition to daily / weekly comment digests, over the coming days we'll be adding Facebook / Twitter login, the ability to close comments automatically if the posts are old, e.g. 90 days (which will be configurable), and comment-by-email (once post by email is ready).

Easily disable commenting
Don't want commenting? No worries. You can turn it off by going to your Site Settings and just set it to disabled:

Upvotes
We also introduced a new concept: Upvotes. This was the same as "favorites" from Posterous, and if you have imported faves, they'll automatically show up as upvotes now. We were inspired by Reddit, and upvotes are always nice gestures that show people that as readers, you care. No login is required to do an upvote, so it's a great way to give people some love for their posts. Try it on this one. =)

Thanks again for your support. We'll keep shipping these features as soon as we can.

URL Expansions

I just deployed a small but helpful feature. As part of my efforts toward getting post by email ready I added in automatic expansion of URLs into their related embed codes. 

Instead of tracking down embed codes from other sites just try pasting the URL of the content on its own line in the body of your post. After you save we'll do our best to look up the URL and expand it into an embed code for you. It's great for stuff like video embeds, audio embeds and code snippets and works for a variety of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, GitHub Gists, Twitter, and Pastebin.

So insert a URL into your post like this:

https://gist.github.com/brettg/5674325

And after you save you'll see the expanded version:

Try it out and let us know what you think. 

-brett

Posthaven launches fast, beautiful image galleries

We're proud to announce fast, simple, beautiful image galleries are now available on Posthaven. You can upload multiple files all at the same time (press the SHIFT key when selecting files) and our post editor will upload them directly to Amazon S3 where we'll host them for you. One thing we were super careful of this time is that we now preserve the order in which you upload — you've asked for this and we made sure it happened.

When they're ready, they'll appear in the compose window and they'll look like this:

Just click on it and you'll be greeted with a simple way to upload more photos to that gallery, combine that gallery with other images in the same post, or pop individual ones out. 

It's a great way to tell stories. We've also revamped our image gallery code on your blogs. They're the fastest galleries available on the web because we automatically pre-load all images in the background so that your blog viewers can flip through all the photos instantly with as little loading time as possible. Use the arrow keys to flip from left to right too! 

You can also click on the photos themselves and see full screen versions now too. Here's a real live one you can play with right now:

We also updated the mini previews at the top of every gallery so that they are more compact and elegant no matter how many photos you upload to a given gallery. 

All of this is available now at Posthaven. We're working hard to make this the best and most durable place to post. Thanks for your support.