We’ve initiated a Friends social networking system for onMason. As of this week you will be able to friend other bloggers, be friended by other bloggers and assign an avatar to both your username and each of your blogs.

There are now two associated widgets that are available on all blogs. The friends widget allows you to display the other onMason bloggers that you are following. The blog avatar widget allows you to display the avatar you assign to your blog. 

You can access the friends system through your dashboard. There you can find friends by email or username. You can also see your current friends and see notifications about who is has marked you as a friend. When you friend another onMason user you will receive an email notification unless you have marked to not allow onMason to send you emails.

You can now find global tags for all onMason blogs through our global posts area.

The color scheme is not final.

The global tag page was built using a combination of plugins and displayed through the Tagnetic Poetry plugin. 

It will be interesting to see how the page does under a heavier load. Please comment if you encounter any problems.

Note: This functionality only covers posts that have gone up after it was turned on. 

All onMason sites have now been updated to support standard iFrame and embed tags without any issues or errors. 

You can now use most common HTML tags without any problems.

You can now use advanced podcasting functionality through the Blubrry PowerPress plugin.

PowerPress is the same plugin used by professional podcasters worldwide and supports full iTunes compatibility for both audio and video podcasts. 

You can activate it from the Plugins tab of your dashboard. 

This functionality is currently in testing. Please comment on this post if you encounter any issues using the plugin.

We will be testing other Podcast plugins as well, looking towards the best way to automatically support podcasts site-wide.

Internal support for Google Analytics has now been engaged on all blogs as well as holistically over the site. 

You can find your personal control panel for gAnalytics under the settings header in your dashboard. Full instructions on what gAnalytics is and how to properly activate it can be found there. 

This plugin is still undergoing initial testing, to conclude at the end of the week. If you have any issues please post them in the comments.

Today we’ve brought the SEO and Sitemap plugins online. As of last check, all plugin functions are working and generating files and fields correctly. 

What this adds:

• The sitemap functionality will automatically generate a Google-compatible XML sitemap for each blog generated on the site and it will update this file as you update your blog. This XML sitemap is essential for ensuring that Google will properly read your content for in-depth searches of blogs.
• SEO functionality has now been added to every blog. This means you can add custom information in order to optimize your posts for search engines using the fields provided under the heading “All in One SEO Pack.” The plugin is modified to automatically generate keywords and descriptions based off of post content, tags, excerpts, and categories. This will allow for full optimization of all posts, even for those uninterested in manually adding terms to their posts. 

The ability to upload WordPress archive files into blogs seems to be functioning.

Anyone who is having trouble importing their blogger blog using the system’s built in tools can use the following site to convert their blogger XML file into a WXR file for proper import.

http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/