Lol Goldenpig, it's not just personal details I'm thinking I should be concerned about - although I've shared more of those than I think I should - it's all the random instances of me saying something idiotic that worry me! ^_^ Bring on the faultfinding trolls...

Greg, thanks for all your explaining. The example blogs look amazing.

Goldenpig, regarding "a section on the main page listing all the YLF blogs": we plan to do something like this but haven't figured out exactly what it is yet.

Greg, this new creation will enhance everyone's participation in so many ways and I want to get started. Thank you for building on something that is so wonderful and having the patience to answer all of our questions (I'm glad there are no limits). One thing I noticed was that when I clicked on MaryK's link that you shared above, it automatically wiped out her name and was just the lookfab link. Yet, I was able to open goldenpig's so I don't know what happened. I'm going to work on mine right now. ETA: I just realized it's "not open for business" yet. I'll happily wait for the unveiling.

Vicki, I think it's because she changed the title of her blog to "fun with fashion" so it's a different link now. Here's MaryK's blog:
http://funwithfashion.lookfab.com/

The default blog title is your username which is what I have. I didn't realize when you change the title it changes your link too so I think I'll keep mine the same even though it isn't very creative.

Great feature. I was looking forward to such a thing on YLF. Congratulations!

Have you seen onsugar.com? I liked their blogger features when I was blogging. It makes it so much easier to link to products as well as your own pictures. Food for thought for the future...

What tremendous fun! You guys constantly amaze me.

Goldenpig, it actually doesn't change the link when you change the title. There are two settings:

- One setting for the "address", which changes the word before "lookfab.com"
- One setting for the "title", which appears at the top of your blog

LoP, thanks, we haven't looked a onsugar.com, but will do so.

Greg, this is an amazing idea! Considering that there are a lot of WIW posts here in YLF, it is only fitting that members can have the option of turning this into a blog post! I'm really curious to see what you guys will do with this!

Thanks, goldenpig, that link worked this time, and thanks, Greg, for giving more details. I'm looking forward to this for the WIW's.

Greg, will there be a way in the future to create new posts or edit our posts from within the blog instead of having to go back and look for the thread in the forum? Sometimes I like to fix typos or grammatical mistakes. Not a big deal but just trying to save a few steps.

I am really giving this some thought but want to clarify something. I would able to choose what I put on the blog. For instance I could choose just to post outfit pictures.
Another queston is how do we know a member has a blog (this may have already been asked). I would name the blog something else if I did it. debbiek is really not a creative name.
I hope I am making sense. I am not blog savvy.

Goldenpig, yes. The fact that you can only create a blog post from the youlookfab.com side is temporary.

Debbie, yes, you can choose to only put certain posts on the blog. You can also take them off the blog if you change your mind about a particular post.

Right now one way to find out that a member has a blog is to see the little message at the top of the thread that says "This post also appears in my blog". See the top of Ana's thread here for any example:

http://youlookfab.com/welookfa.....m-on-denim

And yes, you can name the blog something other than "debbiek".

Thank you Greg for pointing out the message at the top of the post. I had missed that. When this goes live I thing I am going to try it. I would love to keep track of the outfits I post from time to time. Thank you for answering my tech challendged questions.

Greg, is there a way to add the blog links to bloggers' profiles (subject to them wanting to share that information with us, that is)? Because it would handy to find, say, Shannon's blog link (which let's assume I don't know) when she mentions her blog in an unblogged thread...

ManidipaM, yes, we will do that when the blogging feature is fully launched and no longer in beta.

Greg, can we make some blog posts YLF only, and others public? Can we also have a private setting where only I see a particular post?

Fruitful, neither of those things is possible right now.

If you have a minute it would be great to hear more about the scenarios where you would make a post only visible yourself. Is it for collecting things for your own reference, or is it more about creating a draft post? Something completely different?

Both of those Greg.

I have used a journalling platform called InsaneJournal that had this feature (I assume some other platforms probably have it as users of InsaneJournal tend to also use Livejournal and Dreamwidth, which serve similar purposes).

To be honest, I didn't use this feature often. It's not a dealbreaker. I did use it when I was testing to see exactly how the page looked, so that once it went up people didn't have to see me messing around with corrections. (I was playing with photos and html). I imagine if someone wanted all their inspirations etc in one place for their personal reference, it might be useful. I took it for granted so didn't give thought as to what else it might be for; it was simply one of 3 options to be marked when posting an entry (the other 2 were Public (Anyone Can See This Entry, and Friends Only (Only Friends Can See This Entry)).

Again, not essential, and thanks so much for your consideration Greg.

ETA I think I also used it to keep posts in the chronological order I wanted even if they weren't ready for publication. Does that make sense? This might not be an issue for a style blog.

Thanks Fruitful. Very useful to know details like that.

Greg -- i posted a WIW yesterday and was thrilled to see my new Blog! This is an amazing feature. I've thought about having a blog but was concerned that I would put a lot of work into it but no one would look at it, which would feel too discouraging. This way I can have a blog with no added effort plus I know people will look at it via a the forum. Brilliant.

As for functionality, no glitches. Everything seamless.

I went back and forth on the question of changing the blog name. A part of me wants to reach out to other over 50 year old women so we can inspire each other to be fashion fab. If I changed my blog name to something like "Fashion After 50" (just an example, not a name I am considering), how could I work it so that other women could find me? I know that gets a little into SEO questions, I hope you don't mind answering when you have a moment.

Thanks CocoLion, it's so nice to hear that everything worked well.

SEO is such a tricky question. Once we have launched the blogging feature broadly this is something that I will return to. What I envisage is that bloggers will get to choose whether they want their blogs to be available to search engines (Google). I will optimize their blogs for SEO as far as I can, so this is something that individuals don't have to worry about.

What we will also do is allow people to tweak some settings that might make it easier for Google to find their site when people search for related things.

The title is an important part of SEO. The likelihood of Google putting your site in a search result is definitely higher if your title contains words from the term that a person is searching for. So a title like "Fashion After 50" would be effective if you expect people to search using the words "fashion", "after" and "50" in the search term. It would be even more effective if your site address contains these words, for example, "fashionafter50.lookfab.com".

That said, I wouldn't make this a top priority in coming up with a title. One can never predict what people are going to search for, and I think it is more important that the title reflect what the blog is about, the personality of it, etc.

Also, it can take a very long time for SEO to start kicking in, and in the beginning you are much more likely to get traffic from the forum, and from other bloggers that link directly to your blog (in their posts, or also in their blogroll). We will also help to make lookfab.com blogs discoverable by featuring them on youlookfab.com from time to time (only blogs that want to be featured, of course).

Thanks Cocolion for those points about the needs the YLF blogging feature meets so elegantly and thanks for the informative answers Greg.

Thank you Greg, I now understand this question much better. As usual you have explained something technical really well. I *might* change my blog title later to something in keeping with my style/blogging/outreach goals. Maybe I will do that when you have launched lookfab.com and I can choose the searchable option.

Greg, is there a way to save your posts on other people's threads as a blog post? I posted a long response with a bunch of pictures onto someone else's thread and decided I wanted to save it as a blog post so I started a new thread and copied my response and pics to my thread, but I think the original poster didn't like that there are now two threads on the same topic on the forum. I couldn't think of any other way to do it and really wanted to save the post/pics on my blog, but I also don't want to clutter up the forum with duplicate threads.

Natalie, I really hope this can be done, but going by what Greg's explained so far, I'm expecting not. In that case it might be good if an etiquette or convention was established (i.e. waiting a fixed period of time to blog your comment; signposting in your title so it's clear it was a comment round-up and not a new topic; perhaps limiting to a certain number of comment round-up posts per week, etc). If we could use tags, a comment round-up post could be tagged with the topics you covered so they wouldn't get lost, even if they weren't in your post title.

I hope you don't feel badly about Modgrl's comment as your experience is precisely what beta testing is all about. I can see this coming up again and again for those of us who like to put a lot of energy into commenting.

Hi Greg, I just wanted to suggest the possibility of tagging our posts for searchability and topic reference. Thankyou ^_^