If you look at the home page, or on this page, you will see a new search box. This is for Google Custom Search, and it is set to search bgviews.com, bgviews.com, bgvewssports.com, bgviewsnetwork.com, and bgviewsevents.com. Not only is it potential to bring in revenue, it off-loads the work of searching the database of every blog on this site.

There is even a custom results page that I setup. Go ahead and check it out.

While we would like it (very much) if you would register for a BG Views Network account, we know not everyone wants to do that. That is why we are offering a whole lot of Services to login as, most being OpenID based.

There are a couple plugins I use in Movable Type that are for administrative tasks. I really hope that Template Shelf sees an update for MT 4.23 soon (yesterday) because I miss that one.

With many thanks to Richard Benson, the Action Streams template for BG Views is almost complete. Sadly, Mootools conflicts with jQuery, at least with jQuery Form, which is used to process the polls, and will be in heavy use once Motion ships.


The layout is complete, however Mootools was used to roll up all the Last.fm or Flickr Actions posted in one day's time.

Using Google Apps for BG Views has been great. Since they launched Labs in GMail I have been waiting patiently until they would distribute it to Google Apps too. Well, as of today, now BG Views users can use Google Labs in their email.

I also notice they updated the basic theme to that of the new "Default" theme in GMail, but alas, no Themes support in Google Apps yet.

They roll these updates out at different times for different sites it seems. The Google Apps account for Blogcritics has had Labs available for a couple months now, even though I have "New Services and Features" turned on in the Google Apps admin, we just got this feature today.

Using the tag BlogCategoryCount, we can determine if the blog is using categories or not. This allows me to put a Category Widget in a column, and auto-hide it if there are no categories created.

Technically it is not the first thing to launch for BG Views, but it is the first to launch with content. We have a soft launch of our Housing Guide already, but this is the first real launch we have had, and it is the Editor-in-Chief's food blog.

I am still working out kinks here and there on the new dedicated server. But the blog seems to be running pretty well. Freddy can't believe how much easier Movable Type is to use over Blogger. Well, duh.

The second beta of Motion is out and I have it installed. I already talked a little about Motion, but the second beta brings even more exciting new stuff.

Motion comes with Facebook Connect built in, though I notice the Userpics template module is still not updated to bring in the user pics. Motion also ships with Google account login, something that is not available otherwise.

Beta 2 added a bunch more services for logging in, though most are Japan-centric: Yahoo! Japan, livedoor, Hatena and mixi - mixi being the big one there. They have also finally updated the name change from TypeKey to TypePad. Other changes include support for Google Blog Search and Google News, as well as additions to the Community Pack with showing Friending and Following users in your Action Streams.

I can't wait for the final release so I can start integrating it into our site.

All the images will be broken until mtvU sets up the blogs.bgviews.com record to the new IP. Sorry but it will look kinda drab until then.

Alternate title: We are dedicated!

And we are back. It has been a few days since the last update to the Dev blog, but for good reason. We are moving from development into production, and we need a dedicated server for that.

To keep cost down during the development, we used a shared host, Host Monster. They are a great choice and I highly recommend them for those who do not require intense database activity. However we have Movable Type, Joomla and Helios Calendar all running.