Technical Support FAQ's | MyST Blogsite®

How do I configure an unused blog channel?

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:54:54 -0500

Steps:

Log in to your blogsite as an author.
Under the Administrative menu (lower left) select Weblogs Space.
Select the vacant weblog channel you want to change. It will have a title that looks something like this:
[Weblog] TODO: Configure weblog #3
Select the Properties icon from the upper right tool bar area.
Change the Name field to show the name of this new weblog.
Enter a brief introductory description in the Summary field.
Optionally enter a more complete description and other promotional information in the Content field.
Enter some keywords in the Keywords field that describe the nature of the content you anticipate writing in this weblog channel. IMPORTANT - do not delete or alter any keywords already present.
Select the Save button at the bottom of the page.
Close the browser window.

Your changes are now complete and your new weblog should be visible on the left navigation menu. If you don't see your new weblog channel when visiting your blogsite as a public visitor, use Ctrl-F5 to refresh your browser cache.

Note: Make sure you use Internet Explorer 5.5 or later to perform any administrative tasks.

Why does Blogsite publish a list of the feeds that I syndicate in Guest Weblogs?

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 15:56:06 -0400

There are many reasons for this.

The intent of blogsite is demonstrate that your entire information set is the most comprehensive and informative collection of content about the subject matter of your business focus. To that end, it makes sense to:

... make it easy for people to connect with the people (bloggers) you regard as like-minded and supportive of your business and ideas. The easier your customers can connect directly with these individuals, the more likely they will continue to read stories that ultimately benefit your business cause.
... make it straight-forward for search crawlers (both inside and outside the blogosphere) to understand which bloggers write about the subjects that are highly related to your business focus. The more links you form to create a web of knowledge, the more likely your site can be recommended by machines and influential people.
... make it easier to subscribe using syndication technologies. Some guest weblog authors do not promote their RSS feeds; this makes it time consuming to find the feed address and subscribe. We take syndication very seriously because people are coming to your blogsite to learn about your area of expertise and save time. Anything we can do to facilitate additional learning while removing friction from the process will ultimately benefit your content consumers. They will find your blogite to be a unified model for access to the important information about your industry or business segment.
... leverage the things that your guest weblog authors will say about your business. If your blogsite recommends feeds to your guest weblogs, those authors are more likely to reference your blogsite content. When they do, we want to make sure search engines and content consumers (indeed your own constituents) see those inbound links because they elevate your visibility, improve your page rank, and increase trust factors in the minds of people and machines.

If you want this feature disabled in your blogsite, simply drop us a note at support@myst-technology.com.

How do I add, remove, or change links on the left navigation pane?

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 12:10:34 -0400

Links [typically] located on the upper left side of your blogsite are known as project links. You may change these with the following steps:

Login to your blogsite as an author.
Select Project Links under the Admin section (see lower left navigation pane).
Deleting a link -- locate the link property that you want to change or delete. Use the button to delete the link.
Editing a link -- Use the button to edit the link property. Select the OK button to save the changes to the link.
Adding a link -- select the New Link button to add a new link. Select the OK button to save the new link. Use the up/down arrows to position the link.
Select the Save button to save the changes to the Project Links.

Other important aspects of Project Links include:

Creating Title links - by default, project links are title links meaning they are bold and larger than sub-title links.
Creating Sub-title links - if you preface the title text with ">", the link will be a sub-title under a main title link.
Example: >CNN
Opening links in new browser windows - by default, project links are opened in the same browser window that the blogsite appears. If you add "|_blank" to the end of any title text, the link will open a new browser window with the link.
Example: >CNN|_blank
Project links can be reordered - just use the up and down arrow icons to position the links in the order you prefer.

Why is there sometimes a delay before a new post become visible publicly?

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 07:05:19 -0500

The MyST Blogsite caching technology delivers outstanding performance but because public pages are cached (secure pages are never cached), there may be some latency between when an item is created (or updated) and when the change is reflected publicly. The cache refresh occurs automatically within a reasonable amount of time. The refresh rate varies from page to page based on how frequently the page changes.

Forcing a Cache Refresh

To force a cache refresh for a particular page, open the public view of that page using the Firefox browser and then hit F5.

Important: this usually does not work with Internet Explorer because of the known problems related to cache refreshing. However, Ctrl-F5 will generally work.

Automatic Cache Refresh

Once a page has been cached, the amount of time a page is considered "fresh" is a function of the age of the page (i.e., how long since it was last updated). In general, the longer it has been since the page was last modified, the longer it will be considered fresh in the cache. Specifically, a cached page is considered fresh if:

it has been in the cache less than 10% of its age (e.g., A page modified 10 hours ago would be considered fresh up to one hour; a page modified 48 hours ago would be considered fresh up to 4.8 hours.), and
it has been in the cache less than a maximum of 12 hours, regardless of its age.

Can I use images in my navigation links?

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:26:16 -0500

Yes.

Simply place the <IMG/> HTML tag in the link title field, a summary in the synopsis field, and the link (where this image should link to) in the URL field. Example:

Is there a spell checker in Blogsite?

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 10:29:01 -0500

No.However, Blogsite forms work great with the Google Toolbar spell check feature. Download and install the tool bar. Whenever you create (or edit) a blog entry, the spell checker can be used to check all words in the Name, Summary, and Description fields. Note - you must be in the create or edit mode for the spell checker to work.

With Blogsite, do I have to tweak my blog pages (with meta tags and such) to achieve high search engine rankings?

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:24:14 -0500

No.

The pages in a blogsite are already structured in a way that search engines will understand and appreciate. The titles, summaries, and keywords that you enter into each blog post will be included in the meta tags automatically.

Furthermore, we discourage any sort of SEO activity for a blogsite. The whole point of blogging for business purposes is that you focus on your strengths as an expert in your field. By telling stories and posting interesting topics about your business and professional activities, you will naturally create optimized content that will attract people looking for exactly what you know and precisely what you sell.

As a business person that blogs, you should do so for the right reasons - SEO (search engine optimization) is a by-product of good blogging.

How long does it take to see keyword results in the QA Reports?

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:16:05 -0400

Rankings for your keywords and blog titles are measured once a week against a search engine. Blogsite presently uses Google to measure against, but that may change in the future.

As soon as your blogsite domain is detected in the top 100 results based on keywords or blog post titles, the ranking data will begin to accumulate. This may take as little as a few weeks or as much as three months from the launch of your blogsite. The timing depends on how soon (and thorough) you register your blogsite with the many search engines and syndication sites as well as how quickly the search engines find your blogsite domain. One way to accelerate this process is to make sure you have links to your blogsite from your main website.

How do I backup my blogsite content to my personal computer?

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 10:35:26 -0400

Backup your content locally as XML by saving a MyST-ML, RSS, and/or Atom feed to disk.

Within our data centers, we automatically back up your MyST Blogsite nightly. We transfer copies of these backups to multiple locations for increased data security. These nightly snapshots are retained for thirty (30) days, so if you ever need to recover anything you've lost, please submit a support ticket as soon as possible.

If you want to backup your blog channels to your own system, we recommend that you save the MyST-ML feed for each channel to disk. MyST-ML is a comprehensive XML feed format that includes 100% of your blog channel's content and meta data (e.g., permissions, author, create dates, and so on). You may also wish to save RSS and/or Atom feeds.

The MyST-ML document for your blog is accessed from the Syndication Options line at the top and/or bottom of the blog display. Clicking the "myst" link will display the MyST-ML document which you may save to your computer as you would any web page. If the MyST-ML link is not visible, you can easily create the URL for the MyST-ML feed by starting with the URL for the RSS feed and changing /rss/ to /object/ within the URL.

IMPORTANT: If automatic archive is enabled for your blogsite (which it usually is), the default behavior for MyST-ML (and RSS and Atom) feeds is to include only the items for the current period (and not prior, archived periods). For backup purposes, you have two choices:

Periodically save feeds, keeping all prior versions.
Force the feed to contain all historic content by disabling archiving on the feed URL.

To disable archiving on a feed request, simply add the following parameter to the end of the feed URL:

?archive=*none

This works for all feed types—MyST-ML, RSS, and Atom

If a channel is very large, it is possible that disabling archives would result in a feed that is too large to access. (Our servers do not permit feeds that require longer than 30 seconds to generate.) In this case, you can use archive parameters to break your content into smaller chunks. For example, you could save your content by year, quarter, month, week, or day. To create a feed for a specific period, add a parameter of the form:

?archive=period+n

where:

period may be one of the following (case-sensitive) value: Yearly, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, or Daily; and
n is an integer indicating which period is being requested (0=current, 1=most recent archived period, 2=second most recent archived period, ...); the current period is the default so +0 may be omitted.

For example, to divide a channel into three yearly chunks, you would request the feed three times, each using one of the following parameters:

?archive=Yearly ?archive=Yearly+1 ?archive=Yearly+2

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR RSS AND ATOM: By default RSS and Atom feeds are subject to a limit of 15 items (as well as any archive settings). So to retrieve all item, it is important that you remove the 15 item limit in addition specifying any desired archive settings.

To remove the 15 item limit, specify a parameter of limit= with no value. For example, to request an RSS or Atom feed for all items in a channel, add the following to the end of the feed URL:

?archive=*none&limit=

Sometimes I see XML in my search results -- what is this?

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:24:37 -0400

Blogsite provides many flavors of XML representations of your content. RSS and Atom are both popular ones. However, less popular formats are also made available and occasionally these formats (in their native form) are found in search engines.

This is the intended behavior and likely to occur more in the future. While the XML formats are generally not useful to people, search engines are beginning to rely on them to better understand your content. And other applications are emerging that rely solely on XML to discover your content and republish it.

Eventually we will provide human readable versions of these documents so that search engines and people can use them to their advantage.

Is there a blog post preview capability?

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 01:34:49 -0400

Yes.

The best way to author and save/preview is to embargo your post.

Below the content body (the rich text editing window), there's a checkbox labeled Embargo. Select this checkbox before saving to preview your post. Continue editing and leave the Embargo checkbox checked to continue to preview with each save. When you're ready to publish to the blogsite, uncheck this checkbox, and click the Save button.

Note - it's important that you save frequently whenever you enter content over the web. The Internet sometimes has interruptions.

Should I create lots of links to other sites?

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:42:19 -0400

Yes, but only if there is good reason to do so.

Visitors to your blogsite will value links to other sites, but only of the links are relevant to what they're looking for. Search engines value outbound links for the same reason.

Adding links for the sole purpose of influencing search engines is a bad idea; search engines can detect this type of content behavior and may reduce your overall visibility.

We recommend adding inline links and link properties in every blog post. Surely there is something of complimentary value on the Web that supports your blog thoughts. The number of links you create in a blog post should be commensurate with the content and very relevant from the visitor's perspective.

The best advice - if you want the benefit of lots and lots of outbound links, create lots and lots of blog posts.

How do I change my email address?

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:57:01 -0400

All account information (including your password, user ID and email address) can be managed here:

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/my-account

If you change your email address, MySmartChannels will send (to your old email address on file) a confirmation notice which you must open and confirm receipt of for security purposes.

How do I change my user ID?

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:56:06 -0400

All account information (including your password, user ID and email address) can be managed here:

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/my-account

If you change your email address, MySmartChannels will send (to your old email address on file) a confirmation notice which you must open and confirm receipt of for security purposes.

How do I change my password?

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:50:44 -0400

All account information (including your password, user ID and email address) can be managed here:

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/my-account

If you change your email address, MySmartChannels will send (to your old email address on file) a confirmation notice which you must open and confirm receipt of for security purposes.