The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

Buttons, Sweet Buttons

I hope you all have been having as much fun as we have checking out all the cool sites that are featured on the top 100 list for the contest.

We marveled at what we thought was an unstoppable early lead by Buen Amigo only to be overtaken most recently by Survival of the Feedest with a recent surge. Standings are updated every 15 minutes so be sure to come back on a regular basis and click on any new links and join those that you like. There's lots of great stuff in there! Root for the underdogs too!

As the contest heads into it's final week, some of you have asked about buttons that will make it easy for your readers to click through to your profile and join your community. I want to give a shout out to Nate Whitehill for his inspired designs which got us thinking. Today, we've added a badge configuration page to your Communities profile where you can select from a number of badges to suit your fancy. You'll find our badges on your Community profile page behind the Buttons link. Manny went a little crazy and built a bunch of buttons. Let us know which ones you like best or, better yet, if you want to make your own - tell us about it!

UPDATE: Be sure to check out Mani Karthik's designs over at DailySEOBlog - he's whipped together a gallery of 20 designs the suit anyone's tastes.

It’s Invitational

Now that we're hooked into the Yahoo backplane, we can take advantage of a couple of things to make things a little easier for you. Tonight we released a new invite feature which takes advantage of the Yahoo Address Book and pulls down your Yahoo address book entries so you can send out invitations to all your friends.

At the bottom of the checklist of names and addresses, we also search the MyBlogLog member database to see if anyone in your address book is already a MyBlogLog member but not connected to you. Each of us on the team here were suprised to find a few long lost friends in there already using MyBlogLog and we didn't even know it. Kind of a "what are you doing here?" moment.

We'll update the Help documents in a few weeks while we give time for this feature to settle in but for the time being, here are some things you should know:

1. You must be logged into Yahoo to use this feature. MyBlogLog will then access your Yahoo address book to get the list of contacts that you can invite.
2. If someone isn't in your address book, you can send up to five additional invitations by entering in their email address yourself. You can only have five outstanding invitations at any time. As people accept your invitation and sign up to MyBlogLog, these spaces will free up again.
3. If your friends have not accepted your invitation to join after two days, you'll have the opportunity to "nudge" them with a follow-up message.
4. If they have not accepted after five days, their name will be removed and their space will free up again so you can invite someone else a little more responsive to your overtures.

Let us know how it works and, as always, if you find any kinks, let us know in the comments below!

Updated Contest Standings

For those of you in the Problogger contest that want to keep track of your place, we've updated the standings page to make things easier.

If you're not in the contest, get on in there!