Widget customization introduced

We'd like to announce that from now on the BlogUpp! widget may be used in various sizes and layouts. This comes in response to community's request to provide a better fit of the widget in various blog templates. Dealing with it is simple, as usual. After specifying a blog's address, and once its code is generated, there becomes visible the one-click option to choose between:
• Vertical layout (default), which fits in the sidebars of most blog templates;
• Horizontal layout, for wider sidebars;
• 1-blog widget, showing only 1 blog at a time.

Important to mention is that the 10:9 sharing ratio is valid for any of the sizes or layouts of the widget. It actually means that if a blog uses the 1-blog widget, then for each 10 blogs displayed in the widget, the blog automatically obtains 9 views for its promotion within the community. Whereas with a 2-blog widget (vertical or horizontal), the views the blog obtains double for the same number of readers.

Not less important to know is the following:
• Having more than one widget in a blog, won't affect the number of impressions the blog accumulates or shares actually;
• Altering manually the size of the widget is not recommended, as it'll be treated as gaming the system;
• Placing the widget too low (i.e. close to the footer) will result in either the blog not being approved, or the overall results being less favorable.

The layout and size of the widget can be changed for any blog, at any time, without the historical records being affected. This means that not only the new submitted blogs can use a customized widget, but also the blogs that have been submitted in the past. The only thing that needs to be done in case of previously submitted blogs, is to re-enter the blog address at www.blogupp.com, choose the desired customization option, and get the renewed code to replace the previous one in the blog.

More updates are to come. If you don't want to miss one, just subscribe to our feeds to be among the first to know about other new features.

// Image by Toni Blay

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On The Next Web

In a few words we'd like to communicate that we've had the pleasure to be interviewed by The Next Web Blog, within the "five questions for start-ups" series. The blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference that is held annually in Amsterdam. Many thanks to the editing team.

To access the interview, just click on the image below.

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Giants fall too. It just happens sometimes

For our service to be more reliable it's operated through Amazon Simple Storage Service. This aims to make the service available at any time and from anywhere. Unfortunately there happen outages with Amazon servers occasionally, which results in many web services, including BlogUpp!, not functioning. Such blackouts were noticed lately even with Google services, which tells that absolutely everyone is vulnerable. Obviously the problems get fixed shortly and the services become available again.

Herein we need to apologize to all our community bloggers for inconveniences and for them not being able to make use of BlogUpp! service during outages. The practice shows that Amazon servers might go down for at most several hours, during which we kindly ask everyone to be understanding. In this context we appreciate a lot all the reports that we receive from the community, that help us make sure where the issue is, and react promptly.

The good part is that Amazon is still one of the most reliable web players, with best uptime characteristics for their infrastructure. Hopefully it stays in the same position, and BlogUpp! will be available to you almost at any time, and almost from anywhere. Otherwise, we'll just have to change the partnership.

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