Charter member Account Preferences have been updated to allow Sift Bloggers to control three new settings:

1. Blog Title - You can specify a title by which your blog can be identified


2. Custom Sidebar - You can define contents for a custom sidebar panel displayed on all your blog pages


3. WYSIWYG Editor - The "What You See Is What You Get" blog editor can now be disabled. This is mainly for bloggers who would prefer to edit the HTML of their blogs manually, rather than letting the fancy WYSIWYG editor do the work.

As a side note, it came to my attention that several bloggers have been including images that are well above the 540px width limit. In FireFox they were just being auto-cropped, but in Internet Explorer (IE) browsers it was stretching the page out super wide and/or pushing all blog contents down to the bottom of the page below the sidebar. Now all images, regardless of actual size, will automatically be shrunken to fit by your browser, so if you're using an IE browser and are still seeing any such problems, do a hard reload (ctrl+shift+reload) to get the update.

Please note that when embedding videos and other such objects, you must not exceed the maximum width of 540 pixels or it will severely mess up the browsing experience of your readers. Unfortunately there's no way for us to automatically adjust those to fit.

It's been only a short while and this Sift Blog thing is really taking off! I'm having a great time reading your blogs, especially those with your photos. All you charters who are abstaining, please don't hesitate to jump right in and start posting.