PowerBlogs

Features

All of the features described on this page apply to every plan. We do not believe in reducing features merely because you need less bandwidth.

General

Powerblogs is not just great software and blog hosting. We also provide:

A spam-proof contact form: Why display your email address in some inconvenient format which the spam-bots have probably already learned to parse? Powerblogs provides a contact form which never displays your email address to the world so there's no way for spammers to find it.
RSS and Email syndication: Not everyone can post 25 times a day without ever taking breaks. With syndication, your readers can stay on top of when you post without having to keep reloading your front page. It saves them effort and you bandwidth.
Full support for multiple blog authors: whether you have one or fifty-one people that you want to blog with, the Powerblogs software will accommodate them. Each author has his own set of preferences, and there are a number of features to make co-blogging easier, such as auto-generating the list of authors and support for choosing which author to email in the contact form.
Themes: There are lots of themes via themes.powerblogs.com with 1-click theme installation that doesn't break your blogroll. We're always adding new themes, too, so you don't have to worry that your blog will look like everyone else's if you don't spend a lot of time customizing your site.
HTTP compression: the Powerblogs webserver is configured to use http compression to save bandwidth. This means lower cost for you and faster loading times for your readers. Depending on your pages and you readers, a primarily text blog can serve up to twice as many pages in the same bandwidth. (There are a lot of variables in the final analysis, but it's not uncommon for text pages to compress by around 60%.)
A file upload area: you can upload files of any kind to the file upload area so that you can offer them for download. Whether it's pictures of your hiking trip, a movie of your toddler taking her first steps, a recording of you singing your favorite song, or anything else you can think of, it's easy to share it with your readers.
Powerful Traffic Reports: There's all sorts of things to learn about who visits your site and when. The Powerblogs traffic reports provide a variety of information about who's reading your blog.
A blogroll editing tool: Powerblogs has a powerful blogroll editing tool which automates the process of fetching titles and alphabetizing your blogroll. It also supports multiple sections and headings, and alphabetizes within sections.

Posting

Powerblogs has a highly featureful posting interface, which includes:

Multiple Post formatting options: you can choose from the common break-at-newline style, a powerful recursive descent parser which generates semantically rich html, and leaving your html untouched.
Adjustable editing area: No more one-size-fits-none text editing areas. You can set the text editing area to be as tall and as wide as you like for maximum comfort while composing your posts.
Auto-save: with a configurable auto-save interval, the Powerblogs software will do its best to make sure that you never lose a post.
Revision control: with a very easy-to-use revision system, you can edit or write posts in different ways and see which you like best.
A link checker: with this tool you can easily check to make sure that all of the links in your post work without having to go hit them yourself once you've posted. You can require link-checking if you tend to be forgetful and want to make sure that you ever post a dead link.
A comprehensive HTML tool: our html tool includes all of the tags which you will likely want to use. It can automatically format separate lines into bulleted or numbered lists, and includes a table editing tool. It can also generate the appropriate html and javascript to do hidden text which can be relieved with a click.
Easy image upload: not only is uploading images and inserting them into a post easy, but our software will even automatically create a small version for the front page and link it to the full-size version (if necessary). Posting large images doesn't need to suck bandwidth or inconvenience readers with small monitors.
A post search tool: do you want to link an old post but can't recall when you published it? With this tool you can do text searches of old posts for words and phrases and link to or edit the results.
Scheduled posting: you can schedule a post to be published at any date in the future and specify it in natural ways like "next Tuesday at 3:15am".
Quick access to recent posts: the post interface includes menus to quickly edit or link to the last 20 posts. This is especially helpful for slow connections.
Drafts: If you find that you just can't finish a post, you can save it as a draft and come back to it at any time. You can have an unlimited number of drafts, though they do take up disk space.

Post Chains

Posts chains are currently an exclusive feature to Powerblogs. Every post in a post chain has links to the other posts in the chain which are automatically updated whenever a new post is added. When a reader follows a link to one of the chained posts, they won't have to hunt around to find your other posts on that subject. Because it is so easy, readers are more likely to read them, and the more they read, the more likely they are to stick around afterwards!

Simplied management of related posts: just add a post to a post chain and every post is automatically updated with links to it.
Post chain pages: One page per chain dedicated just to that chain, so that people can easily follow a topic.

Comments

The Powerblogs software uses an integrated, powerful second-generation comment system. Its features include:

Comment accounts: Readers can register accounts. This allows them to reserve a display name, and to simplify posting. You can also require accounts.
Centralized moderation: You can go to a single page where you can see every comment which you haven't yet moderated, regardless of which post it is attached to.
Account Approval: You can require that accounts be approved before they can post.
Comment commendation: the moderation system allows you to mark selected posts as especially good, which causes them to be displayed in a way which really stands out. This allows you to reward good comments as well as punish bad comments.
Duplicate comment detection: comments are checked to make sure that they are not simply duplicates of previous comments. This keep people from posting two or more copies of the same comment because they kept hitting the post button.
Long word detection: comments with long words which would cause your comment page to have a scrollbar and not wrap properly are rejected (long URLs are allowed inside of link tags).
Optional html toolbar: if you configure your post interface to encourage longer posts, readers will have an html toolbar available to encourage them to make use of italics, bold, links, and blockquotes.
Automatic password reset: if people forget the password to their account, they can trigger a password reset to be sent to their email so that they don't have to bother you.

Trackbacks

Powerblogs fully supports the Trackback standard.

Automatically sends trackback pings: the Powerblogs software automatically discovers any trackback information in the sites that you link to and sends the appropriate trackback pings. This will help you to build a traffic by letting people know that you have something to say about what they wrote.
Generates auto-discover code: the Powerblogs software automatically inserts the necessary RDF into its web pages to allow other people to auto-discover your trackback URL and ping you when they write about your posts.
Integrated display of trackback pings: a page is generated for every post indicating the trackback pings which it received. This helps you to find out who is talking about your posts.

Powerful Theming

Powerblogs supplies a large and growing number of pre-packaged themes, and also allows complete customization.

Themes: There are lots of themes via themes.powerblogs.com with 1-click theme installation that doesn't break your blogroll. We're always adding new themes, too, so you don't have to worry that your blog will look like everyone else's if you don't spend a lot of time customizing your site.
100% CSS layout: Powerblogs themes use the latest HTML technology for maximum power and flexibility.
Templating: Powerblogs uses a powerful template system to generate its html so that you can completely control how posts are laid out.
Full control: while we supply lots of themes to make a beautiful blog just a few mouse clicks away, you can edit every stylesheet and take full control of your blog's appearance. You can start from one of our themes or erase everything and start from scratch.
A custom stylesheet: Powerblogs allows a separate stylsheet from the theme stylesheet so that any custom styling you do will not be lost if you install a new theme. For example, you can set the text-indent level that you want on paragraphs and never lose it just because you've decided that you want to try out a new theme.
Separate sidebar content editing: there is an area for custom content in the sidebars so you can have tip jars, book recommendations, etc. that don't disappear if you install a theme.

Miscellaneous

There's lot's more, too. Here's some of it.

Automatically pings blogrolling.com, weblogs.com, blo.gs, and rootblogs.com.
Fair calculations of bandwidth and space. I.e. if you use 6.4 Gigabyte of transfer in a month, you will be charged for 6, not 7.
We use our own software, because we really think it is the best. Our development blog is run using the same version of our software that all of our hosts use.
Support: we stand behind our software and our hosting. If you have any problems, let us know and we'll fix them as soon as possible.
Our software is under active development. We are constantly working on our software and as new features get added and tested, we'll incorporate them into the production software and let you know about them.
New features will not break blogs. We are committed to making sure that a blog started with us will run smoothly from its first day and never stop. We will not add features that break either the blog or the software's interface. In particular, once a post is published, it will always be accessible from the same URL. Archives will always work.
We will discuss features and enhancements in the development blog so you can not only know what is happening, but also know what we are planning. We welcome feedback on proposed features, changes, etc. and will let you know what we're thinking so you can give us feedback before we act on our plans.
Zip backups. Our software allows you to get all of your posts and your style in one convenient zip archive (openable with WinZip or other popular file archive software). Though we also periodically back up your data, this allows you to be absolutely sure of the integrity of your work. Let's face it, we live in an uncertain age. If terrorists or a large meteor destroy the entire east coast of the US, having your own backups will keep you safe even if we aren't. :-) Also, having your files in a zip archive will make your life easier if you decide that you want to host your blog with someone else.
Our software's interface is easy to use. It has been carefully reviewed to adhere to sensible user interface guidelines. Moreover, the help for each page is incorporated into the bottom of that page so that you don't have to go searching for it. Yet being at the bottom of the page, it does not get in your way if you don't need it.

PowerBlogs.Com