It’s Christmas on Monday for LexBlog Network members

LexBlog Network members have been asking for features and updates to our blog publishing platform. We listened.

LexBlog is delivering a system-wide update of your blog publishing platform this weekend.

We will be updating our servers at the same time, providing greater speed, security and stability.

As with presents under the tree, LexBlog Network members will have to wait a few days. There will be a maintenance window that will include a posting freeze and a moratorium on scheduling posts. No posting and scheduling of posts from Thursday night at 8 PT until Sunday at 8 PT.

Come Sunday night and Monday we open the gifts.

• Big time search improvements. Your readers will enjoy a much enhanced search that will vastly improve their ability to find something specific on your blog.
• Responsive publishing environment. In addition to a more modern design and color scheme, your publishing platform will be running on responsive design and development. As with responsive blogs, your publishing dashboard will automatically adjust to the size of your screen, whether you’re working on a non-mobile device, smartphone, or tablet. No more pinching and pulling for viewing. Big for me as I am always editing posts on my iPhone.
• Fixed editor menu. Now you have to scroll back to the top of your draft post to get to the bold, link and other html editing buttons. No more, the editing panel will stay with you no matter how long your post is.
• Drag and drop images right into your post. It’ll be super easy to add images by just dragging them from wherever you have them saved directly into your post.
• Quick image editing. You will be able to edit your image right in your post by cropping and scaling.
• Improved paste from Word. No more separate box to paste into – just drop your Word text right into your blog, no extra steps.
• New media embeds. For Slideshare, Spotify, Rdio, imgur, Instagram and SoundCloud.
• Better auto-saving. No more worries about when the last time you saved your draft, we’re saving it for you.
• Post locking feature. Working on a team? – No more overlapping revisions that can wipe out your work.
• Constant and never ending iterative upgrades. Unlike other WordPress based publishing platforms running outdated versions of WordPress leaving them insecure and unstable, your LexBlog publishing platform will be upgraded regularly.

Want a personalized tour of your upgrades? Attend a 30-min Webinar on Wednesday, February 25 from 1 to 1:30 ET.

LexBlog’s Training & Community Manager, Kristina Corbitt (@kriscorbitt) and LexBlog’s Director of Product Management, Josh Lynch (@joshua_lynch) will walk you through the new features and benefits of your upgraded LexBlog platform. You’ll also find out what’s in store for the coming year. Register here.

Big Kudos to everyone on team LexBlog for their work on the upgrades over the past months. It was a real team effort across technology, development, design, products, marketing, account management, training, editorial and finance.

As with everything we do, we’re delivering the upgrades to better serve you and enable you to accomplish even more.

We’ll all go through a few blogging withdrawals the next few days. It’ll probably do us a little good.

See you on the other side .

Image courtesy of Flickr by Ricardo Motti