We released Blogware v1.21 today, and now my blog is finally cool. Well, as cool as I can handle anyways.

Tons of bug fixes went into this release. Some you'll notice, some you won't. None that I'll talk about here because that's what release notes are for and I hope I never have to hear about some of them again ;-)

BUT, on the uber-super-exciting end of of things, we've finally release a few features that were supposed to make it into v1.2 but didn't because of timing considerations. These have been hanging around for almost a month while we took care of other business and are very, very nifty...

First off, you'll notice that I've jammed a bunch of headlines into my left hand column. This is thanks to a new Blogware feature called "RSS Headlines" that allows you to parse RSS directly into your weblog templates simply by specifying the URL to the feed. Of course, we've got a nifty cache on the back-end of this to ensure that the target feeds are only being pulled once for all of Blogware-land instead of grabbing it each time we parse the page in. Quite responsible of us, dontcha think?

We've also done a ton of work to our outbound ping interfaces. Usually when you want to get a ping from a hosted weblog platform like Blogware, you'd have to suck up to a company like Tucows. However, we don't particularly need the suckup (you should see the gift baskets we get from our suppliers at Christmas) so we've created a pingAPI tool that allows you to add yourself to the list of sites that we ping when one of our users posts a public post to their weblog.

Neat eh?

You can sign up to receive our pings here: http://www.blogware.com/pingAPI Not everyone will make the list, we'll need to sort out the wheat from the chaff, but if you have a legitimate need to get pings from us, please make sure you fill out a request!

We've also finally added a few hooks into Technorati that allow a blog owner to include a link with each post to allow their readers to check the Technorati Cosmos for everything they post and additionally, we've created an enhanced search component that gives your readers the capability to search not only your weblog, but optionally, the entire blogosphere courtesy of Technorati.

There's a whole whack of other things as well, but I'll leave you to read the official announcements when they come out tomorrow. I realize that this isn't a major release or anything (I mean c'mon, this is nowhere near as impressive as adding a WYSIWYG post editor and stuff like that) but we're pretty proud of it. Blogware continues to rock pretty hard. Hope you like it as much as I do.