Over the next few days, we will be moving all our billing for Blogzerk from the Adaptive Hosting Solutions billing system to our new Host Orlando billing system. This system will give you one-stop access to all your account information, invoices, and support requests.

As part of this move, we will be changing all Blogzerk billing to monthly billing due on the first day of the month. The new billing policy is detailed on the Host Orlando policies page.

We'll be sending out a formal announcement via email of these changes in the next day or two.

A maintenance window is scheduled for April 7, 2007 for Blogzerk. During this time, the Blogware servers will be moved to a new datacenter:

Date: April 7 - 8, 2007 EDT
Time: 10:00 PM EDT 04/07/2007 - 07:30 AM EDT 04/08/2007
Duration: 9.5 hours

During this windows, blogs and the publisher's control panel will be unavailable.

Due to the update to Blogware this weekend, you will need to use http://controlpanel.blogzerk.com/ Most of you already use this and will not need to change anything. Prior to using the Blogzerk name for our blog hosting, we used blogadmin.adaptivehostingsolutions.com as the control panel URL. This will no longer work.

A maintenance window is scheduled for October 28, 2006 to enhance Blogware:

Date: 2 December 2006 EST
Time: 10:00PM EST - 03:00AM EST
Duration: 6 hours

During this windows, blogs and the publisher's control panel will be unavailable.

The following enhancements will be made:

Creating Reader Accounts:

• "Create A Reader Account" renamed to "Create An Account".
• Clicking the "Create An Account" link in a blog will go directly to the "Create An Account" page. This page has been re-designed to keep the user within the blog instead of an external page.

Managing Reader Accounts:

• Readers can now manage their reader account from a single page. Readers who log into a blog can click ‘My Preferences’, and will be taken to the preferences page.
• Readers can delete their reader account, change their email notifications, or display name.

User Permissions Section:

• "Manage Groups" changed to "List Groups". Existing groups will be listed and new groups can be added.
• The "Edit Group" page has been re-designed to be more user-friendly.
• The "Edit User" screen has been redesigned and email notifications for readers (users with no associated blog) can now be modified by the blog owner.

Once these changes are made, the documentation (link available in the control panel) will be updated.

Since approximately 8:10 AM ET, the Blogzerk Control Panel (http://controlpanel.blogzerk.com/) has been down. Blogware is working on this and we will update this post when we have more information.

UPDATED 10:30 AM ET: This has been resolved and the control panel is working now.

Sorry for the short notice, but we missed the original announcement of this from Blogware. A maintenance window is scheduled for tomorrow to maintain the Blogware databases:

Date: 14 October 2006 EDT
Start Time: 10:00PM EDT - 03:00AM EDT
Duration: 5 hours

During this windows, blogs and the publisher's control panel will be unavailable.

As of October 1 (yes, this message is a bit late), our Blogzerk plans have been upgraded and simplified.

• The Basic plan has been upgraded to 2GB of storage space and 5GB of monthly data transfer. The price is still $5.95/month.
• The Ultra plan has been upgraded to 10GB of storage and 40GB of monthly data transfer. The price on the Ultra plan has been reduced from $27.95/month to $15.95/month.

All other plans have been retired and we wish them well in their future endeavors.

• For customers on the Blogzerk Basic plan (most of our customers), you now have more storage and transfer for the same price.
• If you are on the Plus plan you will be moved to the Basic plan since that plan now has the same limits the Plus plan had (confused yet?). This will reduce your monthly cost from $10.95 to $5.95.
• None of the other plans were being used so we won't talk about them.

If you outgrow the Basic plan, the upgrade path is now to the upgraded Ultra plan. Hopefully the new limits will prevent most of our customers from needing this but it is available if needed for those blogs with a high traffic volume or storage needs.

If you have customized your blog's templates, now would be a good time to download a copy of your current, custom template so you have a backup. While this is a good idea at any time, now is a really good time since there is a rare bug with Blogware where custom templates may be truncated. Depending on which template this is, it could cause anything from your custom CSS not being applied, to articles not displaying, to the whole blog not displaying.

Up until last night, we had only seen this on blogs we were testing or managing. We had reported this to Blogware as a bug a few weeks ago but they weren't able to replicate it. Last night, a customer reported their custom article template had been truncated which was causing the article to not display.

We have reopened this bug with Blogware to try to get this fixed. In the mean time, if you have customized your templates be sure to download a copy of them in case this bug bites you.

Blogware squashed a few bugs yesterday:

• Apache log file format: The logfile format has been returned to its previous format before the implementation of the SQUID caching system This will not be visible until 8/18's stats are run.
• Anonymous posting for blogs that don't allow anonymous comments: The unauthenticated user now receives a message letting them know that they need to authenticate first before posting. Uncustomized versions of article/photo.html were fixed previously and this one will address customized ones, backing up the previous version as article/photo.html.bak.
• Improved SQUID cache handling: These should address issues of displaying cached pages after some actions (like using manage_notices, or after creating a reader account).
• Issues where misspellings of getText causing errors have been fixed.

The following bugs are noted and are being prioritized for a fix:

• French accents in moblogging subject lines not handled gracefully.
• Text server side includes still being cached, but graphics seem okay.
• Some errors are being shown in another language than the blog's default language.
• Problems downloading logfiles for French and Spanish blogs -- errors with "invalid day of week".
• Browsers are caching Web Pages in the blogging environment after they're updated.
• Problems attaching additional photos (or files) to Photo blog postings.
• Posting a comment doesn't automatically refresh the page.
• Some RSS readers (most notably my.yahoo.com) are having trouble parsing RSS feeds.