We have been putting our heads down, and working hard to push out the next release (soon!). Then we noticed a surge in traffic and users from the Czech Republic. We haven’t done any marketing over there, of course. In fact, we haven’t done much in terms of marketing, period. So it’s quite interesting to see.

Apparently, we got coverage from one of the Czech blogs, and the rest is history. The article is all in Czech, but we got the gist of it thanks to Google’s translator. It goes to show the power of the blogosphere, and how far-reaching Internet apps can be.

So to our Czech friends, and especially the author of the blog: Welcome and thank you.  If there’s enough interests like this, we may just have to put a mirrored site in Europe to facilitate your access.  But that’s a later story…

We have a new blog - well, blogging software anyway. You may not notice it; it looks kind of like our old blog. But for geeks, that’s pretty exciting. Now we have all the features you would expect from a blogging platform. Specifically, anyone can comment now - plus other bells & whistles, such as adding image/video to the posts.

So….will our blog posts get better? Hey, miracles do happen - we will see But feel free to send us your thoughts.

Just last month, Google released their new open source web browser named Chrome. It has been recognized as having incredible speed performance, especially when using robust Web 2.0 apps like WebSketch. As a result, we have recently updated our application to support Chrome, and are happy to say it’s quite a speed improvement over other browsers, particularly when editing WebSketch sites. If you haven’t already, give WebSketch on Chrome a try.

Sometimes the best way to show off what your product can really do is through video. With that in mind, we are producing a series of videos to help showcase our service. Here’s our first one, which we think will show you just how easy it is to create a stunning looking site in a matter of minutes.

We had an opportunity to showcase our service at the TechCrunch50 Conference in San Francisco last week. Along with that, we had a show-only drawing for a brand new Apple iPod touch. We are happy to announce that the winner of the iPod touch drawing is Ben Choi. A hearty thanks goes to everyone who participated.

Internet radio, that is. We were recently interviewed for the PricewaterhouseCoopers Startup Show regarding our launch of the WebSketch service. You can catch it here:

http://wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/PricewaterhouseCoopers-Start-Up-Show/archives/date/selected/09-04-2008.html

Comments Plus

Comments just got a whole lot more fun because when someone leaves a comment on one of your sites, we now let you know! New email notifications let you know as soon as someone comments on one of your site. And when you log in you can see all the new comments since your last login, or in the last day, week, or month even. You can even see comments you’ve left on other people’s sites in case you want to keep an eye on the ones you’ve commented on. We also figured out that dates are pretty much useless for communicating how recent a comment is, so we ditched the date and replaced it with when a comment was left. So now you’ll see comments as being left “25 minutes ago”, “2 days ago”, “1 week ago”, etc.

Featured Sites

You told us that seeing featured sites on the home page is cool but that you wanted to see them when you logged in too. That made sense to us, so we did it. Of course we don’t want to make you see them if you don’t want to, so you can hide or show them whenever you feel like it.

New Page Properties

Now you can set the link color, underline style, hover color, and hover underline style so your links will stand out and look great! We also picked a new default line height that works better for a wider variety of Web content. But don’t worry, if what you really want is to be able to change it yourself, now you can.

That’s it for this post. As usual, we’re already busy working on more cool stuff, so check back again for more updates from the team!

It’s a new week. We’re back with another site update. And we’re here to tell you about it. Who said that Mondays aren’t fun days? Wasn’t us!

Comments

It’s no secret that we believe in choice - your choice - so we made sure we added in a little bit of that when we did the new Comments object. “What kind of choice?” you ask. Well, maybe you want comments at the bottom of your page. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you want them on the left. Perhaps on the right. Middle anyone? Maybe you want to let only WebSketch users leave comments. Or maybe you want to let anyone leave comments. Of course they have to fit in with the rest of your page design so they probably should automatically adjust to the choices you make for your page text - things like the font, size, and color. Then again, maybe we should just let you pick the font, size, and color yourself. Oh, and maybe you like dividers between comments - Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you like them so long as they go well with the color of other stuff on your page which means you get to pick the color! Well, you get all that choice and more with the new Comments object. So have at it, and have some fun with it.

Speaking of text..

We realized that we sort of left font size out of the text section in the page properties. And that means that when you wanted to use something other than the default font size, you had to, you know, change it on every text object on your page. Can you say “Whoops!”? We can. We did. We fixed it. You can now set the default text size in the page properties.

Ask and ye shall receive!

Some of you asked us for colored dividers. We thought that was a pretty cool idea. So we added that in this week too - with a twist! We’re not saying what twist. We’re going to let you find that one all by yourself. And when you do, you’ll probably think it’s pretty cool.

That’s it for this post. As usual, we’re already busy working on more cool stuff, so check back again for more updates from the team!