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.
We are certain that many of you will register in the coming weeks and will increase the growing expat network in the world.
If you don't have a blog yet, you should open one on our free blog platform. Because if you live abroad, are expat, back-packer, au pair or just on the road, you might want to share your experience and your comments with others, highlight the cultural differences, your political ideas...etc. The blog will allow you to easily display pictures of your life abroad and podcasts.
In addition, by creating your blog on BlogExpat, your latest posts will automatically show on our summary page amongst all the most recent news abroad.
How to create a blog on Blog Expat? Nothing is easier! It starts here. Choose a name and a layout. Start publishing your articles. It's simple and totally free! With Blog Expat's blogs, you can make your own templates and customize your blog to your taste and your colours.
We have improved our blog service by upgrading to the latest version of LifeType, the blogging interface we are offering for free.
The extensibility of the framework allows plugins and custom code to create, manipulate and use new permissions as required, better even than before. Therefore you will find a list of available pugin that you can activate and customize in the admin area of you blog:
akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
authimage: This plugin offers extra comment authentication for BlogExpat.
closecomments: Allows to automatically close comments for posts that are older than a configurable certain date (default is 1 month)
mobile & moblog: manage and update blog article through your mobile
...etc
Spam is one of the biggest concerns nowadays when hosting a blogging service. One of the most effective anti-spam libraries, Bad Behavior, has been integrated as the first layer of defense against spammers.
The administration interface and the summary/index page have been modified to use a more flexible layout instead of the fixed layout used before.
It's time to open your blog and get a platform where you can give your view on expatriation!
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.
It is a bit more complicated. You can either edit the article in HTML and past the embeddable player code displayed on the video page, or, easier, you copy within the embedded code, only the URL after <embed src=".
Then you insert it into the popup window (use YouTube format for example).
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.
When this plugin is installed, and a comment is received, the plugin contacts Akismet with the content of the comment. The response will contain information whethere Akismet thinks this comment is spam. You have to activate this pugin on your Control Panel and provide a free WordPress.com API key.
Soon we will provide extra comment authentication for BlogExpat by using a 'captcha' image.
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.
Spam have appeared recently on the blogs hosted by blogexpat. In order to prevent them we have set up several tools options that I remind you below.
Enable comments
If you untick Enable comments in your blog interface to write new articles, people won't be able to post new comments anymore. Therefore you will avoid spams. This is a very strong method, and instead you may prefer to Moderate the comments, so displaying only comments that you validate before.
Moderate
When you activate this plugin, comments will no longer appear
automatically on the blog when posted. Instead they will be stored for
your review in MANAGE/Unmoderated Comments. For each comment you have
the possibility to reject it (a spam) or moderate (i.e. validate) and
it will be displayed on your blog.
In order to activate this option you must anable the plugin Moderate in CONTROL CENTRE.
Bayesian Filter
The bayesian filter enable to improve automatic spam filtering. You just need to train the filter by tagging as spams in your dashboard the messages that are spams and the filter will learn to recognise such messages in the future and remove them automatically from your valid comments.
In order to activate this option you must anable the plugin DNS Anti Spam in CONTROL CENTRE.
Blocked Hosts
In MANAGE/Blog Security you have the possibility to block IP addresses of spammers or people you don't want to post on your blog. Add Blocked Hosts will allow you to block a specific address or entire subnet from your Blog. You can select if you want them to be able to see it, but unable to post or simply unable to access it at all. Copy the offending address into the spaces provided and choose the proper subnet address space if necessary.
Example: To block just the address of 192.168.1.123 you would choose the '32 bits' option to match the entire address. This blocks just this one address and works well for banning someone with a Static IP address.
Filtered Content
In MANAGE/Blog Security you have the possibility to Add Filtered Content. Anything added here will not be allowed as valid text in a comment in
any of the blogs available in this site. Any attempt by a casual user
to post a comment with blocked content will block the comment (and display the reason given in the field Reason that you can set yourself).
Regular
expressions or a simple string can be used. Regular expressions are
much more powerful but they're also much more complex and you should be
careful with them, because you could potentially block all content with
the wrong regular expression.
NoFollow
A lot of spammers try to raise their Google rank (the way they try to reach to top page on Google search for some queries). From now on, when Google, Yahoo! or MSNSearch see
the attribute (rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks, those links won't get any
credit when we rank websites in search results. This isn't a
negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a
way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas
like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
Therefore by flagging the option No Follow you will remove the attract of your blog for spammers.
In order to activate this option you must anable the plugin NoFollow in CONTROL CENTRE.
We are always trying to add new methods to avoid spams on blogexpat. In the future you might see options such as image validation or specific question before to post comments, thus making life for spammers more difficult.
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.
The most popular free Web-based language translation tools are offered
by Google, AltaVista Babelfish and WorldLingo. Using these services,
web audiences who speak English, French, Spanish, German, Italian,
Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified),
Japanese, Korean or Russian will be able to translate websites into
their native language.
With over 65% of web users speaking a language other than English,
providing the means of translating websites with English content to
another language is very essential. Your multilingual website becomes
more accessible and popular if users can translate your website content
into their native language.
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.
You can include a link to the file by inserting a ressource in the text box of your post. You can also have a look directly in you ALBUM on the blog, to see the file ready to be downloaded.
In order to put some button to run it like on EasyExpat's blog, you can use Dewplayer, with a piece of code that you insert in you blog directly (you need to insert into the html directly. To edit your text into HTML format, use the button < >). It will be such as (replace the name of your album and your_song):
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.
Below is a list (to be completed...) of search engines for blogs:
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.
The solution is to downsize the images. You can either do that one by one with your favorite software (using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks...etc) or proceed to a massive downsize of several files all at the same time using a Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP:
Image Resizer enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click, while you are using the explorer in Windows. You choose the size and whether you want to replace the original file or save them appart.
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".
The picture can be shown anywhere in our templates, and the templates developed by EasyExpat (easyexpat, std_2col, std_rightcol, std_leftcol... etc) show it in header.template or footer.template with the description of the user if you put any:
In order to add a tag provided by Xiti (or any other javascript tool providing stats), you can just implement the code in between {literal}...{/literal} (smarty code to allow javascript), such as:
Blog Expat, the blog portal for people living abroad and expatriates
10 February, 2009 20:21
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.
