Testing to see if Twitter Integration feature works on CBS blog.

Some have asked if we offer a Follow feature for CBS blogs. The concept is that everytime a blogger posts, their followers would be notified. We do not have that feature, but if we can get the Twitter Integration to work, it will do the same thing.

Update: The Twitter feature works.

Once again the rumors have started up that Facebook is going to charge a fee for their service. Facebook has officially stated they will not charge a fee for basic service. What does basic service mean?

If there is any truth to the rumors that the fees will start in June, maybe it is time for us to reconsider the idea of creating a Christian Social Networking site.
http://administrator.christianblogsites.com/blog/post/2009/09/20/christian-social-networking-site

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I am asking all blog users to pray for this ministry. Yes, it is a ministry, not a business. Every month I have more expenses than income. Since our inception over 4-1/2 years ago, I have received approximately $200 income to cover several thousand dollars in expenses. Thank you to those who have donated or have had me do minor web work.

Along with expenses, there is time involved to keep this blog site functioning. I do my best to keep this site free of blogs that have advertising, pornography, etc. This requires me checking the site each day for violations of policy. Each day, I am removing blogs created by spammers.

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Do you want to read what others are posting on ChristianBlogSites?
Go to our Summary Page. It is located at http://www.christianblogsites.com/blog
There is a link to it on your blog homepage.

The following are features that are available with your blog. Go to the User Guide or FAQs for full instructions.

Modifying Blog Appearance
These can be changed by going into Control Centre-Blog Settings
a. Name-title of your blog-should not be very long
b. Description-A description about your blog.This should not be too long-see how it looks using various templates.
c. Global blog category. This determines what category your blog will appear in the Summary Category Section.
d. Template Settings-Choose a template. (We can create customized templates at a minimal fee.)
e. 'More' setting. This is so you can add a 'more' link to your article so that you can keep your article short on your homepage-thus more articles shown on the homepage.
f. Visual Editor. If you enable this you will have many more features to write and edit your articles/posts.
g. Pull Down Menu. With this feature enabled, it is much easier and quicker to choose the various features of your admin control panel.
h. Enable Comments-must be turned on for you to receive comments.
i.  Default Send Notification. If you want to be e-mailed when someone posts a comment, be sure to have this feature turned on.
j.  Time Offset. If you want your blog postings to match your time zone, you must change this setting. Pacific time would be -3, Mountain Time would be -2, Central time would be -1.

Various User Settings
These can be changed by going into Control Centre-User Settings
a. E-Mail address. Make sure this is an e-mail address that can receive e-mails from our domain.
b. Bio/About Me For most templates this should only be a couple of sentences.
c. Photo-You can add a photo to your blog homepage with some templates. (You must add the photo to your resoruces first.) If you add a photo, it will appear next to your blog on the Summary page.

Other Features
a. Share Feature-Most of the blog templates give the ability for you to email, print, post on facebook, etc. articles/posts that are on yours or other blogs.
Just click on the 'Share' link that is located next to the post.
b. Edit comments-if someone misspells a word, makes inappropriate comments on you blog, you can edit their comment. Just go to 'Manage' and 'Comments', click on edit icon.
c. Moderate-forced on. You must approve all comments made by posters.
d. We have plugins for AddThis(Share), Gravatar(small image next to your comments, Twitter (Follower), Crystal Poll (Vote/Poll feature), Recent Comments(shows recent comments) on your blog homepage.
g. Host Block-Use this to block the IP address of spammers.

Tips on Posting Articles
The following are helpful tips regarding posting articles:
a. When you are working on a new article, make sure you hit the 'Save Draft' button on the bottom of the page on a regular basis. This quarantees that what you are writing is not lost if the system times out.
b. If you don't want make the article you are writing be live on your blog, go to the drop down to the right of the post area and choose 'Draft'.
c. We recommend not copying info from Word and pasting it into the post area. Word and other programs add html code that can cause various problems with your blog. Use the html blog editor to format your text.
d. If you need to copy some of your text within the post window, highlight the text and click Ctrl C on your keyboard.
e. If you are editing an existing article and need to save it to work on it later, make sure it is a Draft and then click 'Update" at the bottom of the page.
f. When writing an article do not click on an tab at the very top of the blog page unless you have saved your article.

This is a notice that we will be deleting all blogs that are inactive on January 1, 2010. This is the only notice you will receive besides the e-mail you have already received last week.

In order for blogs to be considered active, they must meet the following conditions:
-They must have more than one post/article
-They must have at least one new post/article per month.

I really need to decide what to with ChristianBlogSites. Every month for four years I have been incurring expenses with this site. When I had full-time employment it was not an issue. With no employment it is becoming an issue.

Several months ago, against my own policy, I started putting a banner ad on the sites. The ad promotes buying gift cards (not greeting cards) and other items at discounted prices. Buy 4 gift cards get 1 free, discounted pricing on thousands of products, free shipping. What more can we do? We are helping people to save money on items they are already buying and yet no purchases whatsoever.

Someone asked if they could make a donation, so we put a donation button. Still no funds have come in.

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Someone asked me if they could make a donation to ChristianBlogSites without buying anything. The answer is yes.

I have put a PayPal Donate button on my blog. Go to http://administrator.christianblogsites.com/blog and the Donate button is on the bottom of the left column. Any donation amount is greatly appreciated.

If each blog owner donated $8 a year our expenses would be more than covered.