BigBlueHat

Looking to build a new web site? or migrate an old one to a content management system? As of today, you can sign-up for a web site powered by our BlueInk Content Management System.

BlueInk provides a usable, focused interface for managing your web site’s content. Check out the feature list, screenshots, and demo for more information.

BlueInk comes in four different sizes, all available for instant setup on the BlueInk pricing page.

Yesterday, we pledged our support for saving developers over at SaveTheDevelopers.org. If you’re a fellow web designer or developer, you’ve likely lost hours of sleep, gained or dropped several pounds, and may have even damaged furniture because of an all too commonly used piece of software known as Internet Explorer 6.

SaveTheDevelopers.org has put together a site and a widget for promoting the planet’s migration from this wayward browser. We’ve added the widget to our front site, so if you’re using IE 6, you may have noticed it.

Thanks for doing what you can to keep your local development community alive, well, and sane.

dotProject is an open source project management system that we’ve been using, hosting, and customizing for the last 3 years. Over the last month, we’ve been working to get automated purchase, installation, and setup of dotProject available online. Today, we’d like to announce immediate availability of dotProject hosting via our sign-up site: getdotproject.com (it may look familiar to some).

In addition to much faster setup time (thanks to the little robots we’ve built), you can get dotProject without needing your own domain name. Your new options include:

1. your own domain name (ex: myreallycoolprojects.com)
2. a sub-domain of your sites domain (ex: projects.yourdomain.com)
3. and as of today, a sub-domain of gotdotproject.com (ex: yourcompany.gotdotproject.com)

The first two require you to own or purchase a domain name. The last one, though, is free as the wind. The only caveat is you have the be the first one to get your dotProject site. So don’t waste time reading any more. Don’t even comment, just run over to our purchase site and get some dotProject.

We hope you’ll enjoy the speedy setup. We look forward to adding more and more new features to our hosted installation. We’ll also be happy to manage and host your customized dotProject installation. Just let us know how we can help.

Most web sites build with a Content Management System (CMS) do not send the correct “Last-Modified” date to the browser. The average CMS (include WordPress which runs this blog) show the current time as the date the page was last modified. The truth, though, is that the average web page or blog entry hasn’t been touched for some time (and certainly not in the last 30 seconds).

BlueInk, however, outputs the date the page was actually modified last. If you view the home page, for example, and click “Tools | Page Info…” (or the like for your specific browser), you’ll see “Modified: 02/13/2008 11:19:30 AM” That is, in fact, the last moment I made a change to that page. Yesterday, though, before we added this marginal but useful feature you would have seen whatever your current date and time are.

So why should I care?
While this may be the first time you’ve ever bothered to look at the page info for a web page, this data is useful to other web sites and web services that may interact with your web site. Search engines would be the first most obvious group of services to perhaps use this info. The growing number of “Web 2.0″ applications and even what are being called “Web 3.0″ or the “Semantic Web” applications could (and likely will) make use of that data.

We hope that our increasing “geekiness” about HTTP, REST, and other web standards will continue to pay off for our users in ways none of us may yet have envisioned. We’ll keep the future in mind.

Regular users of BlueInk may have noticed that BlueInk now has backend search functionality. Brad began work on this near the end of last week, and got it rolled out on Monday–which also happened to be National Inventor’s Day, though, like most inventors, we forgot to celebrate.

The new search functionality provides a quick and easy way to find content items without needing to remember its name. Additionally, users will see a list of pages the content item appears on. This allows the user to know exactly where the item is in use before they decide to edit it.

If you’ve not tried BlueInk yet, please check out the demo. We’d love to know what you think about it.

One of our primary goals with BlueInk is to save web content editors as much time as possible. We hope this adds to the arsenal of usability BlueInk already offers.