Eventually the long waited new version of BlogExpat has come to life.
This free blog service has become a directory of expat blogs, open to any blog of people living abroad. This is an exciting new feature and it will complement perfectly the information on EasyExpat.
You can immediately add your expat blog in the BlogExpat directory and help us grow the expat community.
You can always allow automatically comments on the blog by logging into the Admin area ->Control Center->Blog setting and change it to put:
Enable comments for all posts by default. Comments can still be enabled/disabled for certain posts when creating new posts or editing old ones.
Notification of new comments.
Or you can do that on each article you put on your blog by editing the article and looking at the right hand side column where you can allow column and get notifications so you know when new colums have been posted.
I remind you also that in order to prevent spams, you can read:
If you receive spams, you can always untick Enable comments in your articles at a later stage, and spammers won't be able to post new comments anymore. This is a very strong method, and instead you may prefer to Moderate the comments, so displaying only comments that you validate before.
After months trying to migrate to an other server, we eventually (cross fingers) made it working on a new machine... We appologize for all the inconvenience and issues it might have caused.
It did not only affect BlogExpat but also all the services provided by ExpatGroup.
Hopefully everything is back to normal now ...with improvement even such as more security against spams for your blogs (you can see the AuthImage at the bottom of the comment form) ...
BlogExpat allows you to easily embed videos in you articles.
The video can be inserted via a popup window (button YouTube in the edit form for posts) where users can type the video page URL (like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8GoJw-7Q7Y&mode=related&search or the movie URL http://www.youtube.com/v/-8GoJw-7Q7Y)
On top of this, users don't need to worry about XHTML compliancy as the plugin will generate the right code using only <object> tags. (More)
With the new version of LifeType blogs (the system used on BlogExpat) we have implemented 2 new features:
Plugin badbehavior
It prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however.
It is activated by default on your blog.
Plugin akismet
Akismet checks your comments and trackbacks against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. (More)
If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with
people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by
submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals
site." or typical Viagra or Poker stuff. This is called comment spam.
(More)
How to make foreign visitors love your website even if they don't
understand your language ? Add Language Translation to your blogs.
This is a simple Step by step guide to provide instant language
translation in your blog. Your site visitors can translate any webpage
by clicking on the corresponding country flag and read your website in
their native language.
Machine translation in blogs or websites is probably the easiest way
of helping readers from different countries communicate. Even if a
blogger writes in Spanish and a reader speaks English, or vice versa,
both of them can still understand each other.
Today, people are blogging in multiple languages to create a
conversation with readers outside the English Speaking blogosphere.
Free language translation tools let bloggers post messages
simultaneously in English, German, French, Spanish and other languages. (More)
Podcast - or videocast - are the two new great features in the blog area. The first one allows to put some audio file on your blog (as we did here) and the second one is showing videos on blogs (using for example vpod.tv).
But how to post a podcast on your BlogExpat ?
1) upload the mp3 file via the resource center
2) create a new post
3) type the contents of the post and include a link to your mp3 file. Please use the "add resource" link.
4) Now the podcast is ready. Take a look at the RSS 2.0 feed for your blog and you'll see an <enclosure ...> tag pointing to your mp3 file. (More)
You like to publish articles on your blog... but you like also people to read them. Therefore you will probably look for enhancing your position in search engines, so people can browse your blog. (More)
When you want to put photos on the Internet you may have a problem due to the size of the document. If you took high quality pictures, sizes might be greater than 500K, even greater than 1M sometime. It's good to have such quality for your record but you do not need to display them like that on the Internet. They are heavy to download, take a lot of space and sometime the software might also refuse to download them. (More)
It is possible for users to select a picture to represent them, as some kind of "avatar". The picture must be selected from the list of pictures currently available in the "resource center".
(More)
New official blogs
16 February, 2012 17:54
Eventually the long waited new version of 
You like to publish articles on your blog... but you like also people to read them. Therefore you will probably look for enhancing your position in search engines, so people can browse your blog. 
When you want to put photos on the Internet you may have a problem due to the size of the document. If you took high quality pictures, sizes might be greater than 500K, even greater than 1M sometime. It's good to have such quality for your record but you do not need to display them like that on the Internet. They are heavy to download, take a lot of space and sometime the software might also refuse to download them. 
