PixlBit Changelog - February 26, 2013

Been losing blogs due to being logged out? NEVER AGAIN.

Howdy PixlBit friends! Your friendly neighborhood director-man stopping in to lay a quick changelog on you regarding tonight's update. While there are certainly a number of items on the plate, I wanted to address this one first, based on some feedback I've seen scattered about the blogs.

As it turns out, a few people have lost all of their work on their blog when they went to post it because they were logged out in the interim. This problem is one that can be solved in a variety of ways, but I decided the best way to do it would be an auto-save mechanism - much like games have come to do by standard this generation.

Essentially, your blogging process is not much different than it was before. You click "Post a New Blog" just like before, but behind the scenes, it's creating a shell record in the database that will eventually hold your blog. From there, it directs you over to the edit page (which has been resized to the proper width that your blog will be displayed in). While on this page, every 30 seconds, the site is auto-saving your work. Neat!

You might be thinking, "But Nick, if it's auto-saving my work, does this mean that it's going straight up to the site for everyone to see in all of its unadulterated glory!?" In short, no, no it's not!

There's now a distinction on your blogs between them being a "Draft" or "Live." Blogs that are auto-saved are kept in the draft format in order to safeguard them from visitation until you're ready to release them. As such, you can write all you'd like, and even choose to click the Post button while in Draft format and essentially preview your work.

A new page now exists that holds all of your draft blogs, so you could feasibly queue up a number of blogs, then go in and edit them, setting them to Live when you're ready for them to be unleashed on your legions of readers!

As always, if you have any questions, please, feel free to ask. Also, if you run into any problems, feel free to let me know via an email to nick AT pixlbit DOT com or in the comments section of this article.

Enjoy the changes, I hope they reduce the number of issues you may have experienced and provide some new unique functionality that you might not have had in the past!

#Upgrayedd #Auto-save #Magic #Draft #F*ck it we'll do it live

grimcanuck

02/27/2013 at 12:56 AM

Good stuff! Lovin my new home...got a good feelin bout this place.

Aboboisdaman

02/27/2013 at 01:03 AM

That's awesome Nick! I have gotten in the habit of typing my blogs out in notepad before adding images, videos, and what not. Thanks so much for helping up 1uppers adjust to our new home.

Nick DiMola Director

02/27/2013 at 01:10 AM

Glad to help . I also write my stuff in another program (Word) before bringing it into the site editor, but I suppose with these new changes, everyone should be able to safely blog straight on the site. Kind of a scary thought, but it should work seamlessly (I hope).

asrealasitgets

02/27/2013 at 01:14 AM

This place sure is classy when it comes to services. Five star treatment all the way!

Julian Titus Senior Editor

02/27/2013 at 09:52 AM

We also offer wake up calls, hot towels, and a mint on your pillow.

Travis Hawks Senior Editor

02/27/2013 at 12:43 PM

*Charges applied at checkout.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

02/27/2013 at 03:20 AM

thanks a lot Nick.

Mr. Burns' voice: "Excellent."

Super Step Contributing Writer

02/27/2013 at 03:40 AM

Excellent! I actually stopped having trouble when I started checking the dialog box for "Remember Me."

Excellent new feature though; I try to post in Word if I can, but on my laptop, sadly, Word actually takes longer to open than Firefox! So I appreciate the auto-saving, and it's been working on my end!

Five star treatment, indeed.

Coolsetzer

02/27/2013 at 05:04 AM

More more more! When you get around to it, of course. ^_^;

Chris Yarger Community Manager

02/27/2013 at 06:32 AM

Auto-Save?

That's freaking brilliant! Thanks Nick!

Ranger1

02/27/2013 at 08:04 AM

Amazingly cool and totally unexpected. Thank you again.

Michael117

02/27/2013 at 12:39 PM

Nick, I didn't know you were a programmer by trade. I've been here a little while now and I knew you did programming and feature design for the site, so I should've deduced it, but I never asked about it. One of these days when you have time would you ever do a blog or feature describing a little bit of your history with programming and how it helped Pixlbit become what is has become over time?

I need to start with fundamentals in programming since I don't know anything. The community college here has computer science classes and there's a Logic & Program Design class where they teach some fundamentals and you use DarkBasic and there's supposedly a focus on graphic and game programming. I want to take that class, it seems like a decent start but other than that I'm lost. People always say, "I'm going to learn a little bit of programming." To me it seems like there's no such thing as a little bit of programming. There's so many languages, people have different styles, there's so many different things you can make, it's daunting to look at from a beginner's perspective.

02/27/2013 at 04:03 PM

Sure man, I'll definitely write something up. It's something that has a high initial learning curve, but once you get it, you're set. From there, you'll always hit your rough spots in learning new stuff, but it's all conquerable. It's a skill of mine I deeply treasure and I'd love to share it with whoever wants to learn.

02/28/2013 at 01:32 AM

FYI - No changelog today also, it's not likely there will be anything tomorrow either. Possibly on Friday, but it's hard to say right now. Spent the whole day transferring knowledge at work and the whole evening packing up all the odds and ends left in my house, with more to pack tomorrow.

If I get some time, I've got a few small changes that I need to make and a few others I'd like to make. If I don't manage to get any upgrades in there by Friday, it'll likely be another week or more before I manage to get something else completed. Between unpacking and starting my new job, it's going to be hectic.

However, I will put up a blog post or two showing off my new game room and the collection in all of its glory!

Dandichu

03/03/2013 at 10:05 PM

This happened to me after writing/formatting a really longwinded Ecolibrium review. ;_;

Glad to know it won't happen again!

03/20/2013 at 11:30 AM

How has the auto-save blog function been working for everyone? Any issues? Any suggestions for improvement?

PixlBit