MomentVille is today announcing the launch of activity feeds for your wedding websites! We have long felt that your wedding website should be more than just a place to put your photos and stories. We feel it should also be used as a way of effectively communicating with your guests!

We recently launched a ‘What’s New’ element which lets visitors to your website see what’s been changed recently. With the new activity feeds your guests can begin to follow you updates without need to keep checking your website for updates. Instead they can get notified about the updates!

Your wedding website’s ‘activity feed’ uses something called RSS (really simple syndication). To see what it looks like go to www.momentville.com/<your_site>/feed/site

To see an example check out this feed: http://www.momentville.com/wedding_example/feed/site

If someone has an RSS feed reader they can easily subscribe to your updates. More excitingly, it is also possible to use this feed to update your profile on other sites such as Facebook, Friendfeed, and others. Just imagine how great it would be to have your Facebook profile updated when you make changes to your MomentVille wedding website! We’ll be writing new how-to articles about that in the coming days so stay tuned!

MomentVille is constantly adding new themes and features.  Naturally, we want to make sure that everyone knows about these.  This will allow you to make use of all these great features for your wedding websites.

In order to let you follow our updates in the way that you prefer, we are today announcing new ways to learn about what’s new on MomentVille. There are a number of options to choose from, so pick your favorite!

Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MomentVille/28036723048

Follow us on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/momentville

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MomentVille

Follow us by RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MomentVille

Follow us by email: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1409389&loc=en_US

We have some exciting news coming soon so stay tuned!

Today we’re excited to announce a ‘What’s New’ element is now available for your wedding websites! This new type of element is available to add anywhere, on any page on your website, just like every other element.

The new ‘What’s New’ element is very special. It keeps track of the 10 most recently updated elements on your website and lists them all in one place, automatically! What does this mean? Well, suppose you change some detail about your reception, or have added a new picture. Instead of everyone having to go through your whole site just to see if anything is new, they can now see very clearly what has changed, and when it changed.

We believe this makes your wedding website much more useful to your guests and it becomes very easy for them to see what you’ve changed. You can add a ‘What’s New’ to any web page on your wedding website but we recommend putting it on your first page.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think!

We recently launched a new approval feature that is available to all premium and free wedding website users. When a guest posts a comment to your wedding website via a guestbook, questions and answers element, or RSVP, you can now require that you must approve it before it is shown to other guests on your wedding website.

Your wedding website is a place for you to share information with your guests, but also a place for your guests to interact with you. When someone leaves a comment on your website, it currently goes through a commercial spam filter. This ensures that the comment is not spam. If it passes the spam filter it is shown on your website.

What if, however, you have a friend that has a ‘unique’ sense of humor and makes a comment on your wedding website that you’d rather not have your other guests see? Well, now you can deal with this situation.

On your wedding website details page select the option pictured below. Once selected, guest comments will not be shown to other guests until you approve them.

When you have a comment to approve you will see something that looks like the image below. The comment will be surrounded with yellow and have 3 buttons for you to choose.

The ‘Approve’ button marks the comment as okay and it is shown to your other guests. The ‘Delete’ button deletes the comment. The ‘Mark As Spam’ button tells our spam filters that you think the comment is spam. This means our spam filters are more likely to block a similar comment in the future.

In our continuing effort to provide you with the information you need, we have added a new bit of information to your wedding website. From now on, in the top left of the ‘user area’ (the bar that appears on top of your website when you are logged in) you will see an indicator showing the amount of storage you have used. This information had not previously been available to users.

Our free wedding websites now come with 50MB of free photo storage. When you upgrade your wedding website to our premium option you will have 500MB of photo storage available! It is very rare for someone to go beyond this amount of storage. (Rest assured, however, if it is needed we will find a way to provide it!)

We’d also like to take a moment and explain a little bit more about how photos work. For the majority of our wedding website users, all they need to know is that they can upload a photo to a Photo element, a Photo & Text element, or a Photo Album element. In essence, that’s the easiest use of photos. Each time you upload a photo it is uploaded to your website account. You can view the photos associated with your wedding website by going to http://www.momentville.com/my/photos (you need to be logged in to see this).  When you delete a photo on your website, it isn’t deleted in your account.  This allows you to reuse the same photo more than once, for example, when using the new image feature in the advanced text editor.  If you want to delete some photos permanently you’ll need to delete them from you /my/photos page.

We’ll be writing more helpful article about photos, widgets, and other features in the coming months.  We’ve  also got some exciting new features for your wedding websites coming down the pipe which we are very excited about (and think you will be too).  Stay tuned and keep the requests coming!

We are constantly striving to find the perfect balance between making sure information is easy to access, and making sure that the focus remains where it should be: on your special moments!

Currently, at the bottom of your wedding website pages you see a number of links.  In particular, there are links to how-to articles, demo videos, and other resources to help you learn about how to get the most out of your wedding website.  Many of these links are probably extraneous for your wedding guests, so, we are moving to a more lean set of information that will be shown to your guests, while maintaining the easy access to information for you.

We feel this new balance makes sure you can get the information you need about making your own wedding website, while your guests get the information they need about your wedding.

You may have noticed recently that we now have a link for wedding vendors on the bottom of your website.  This again was in response to some feedback.

Many of our users have been so impressed with how easy it is for them to make their own wedding website on MomentVille that they wonder what else we can help make easier.

We’ve started listing some vendors that you may find interesting as you are search for things such as wedding invitations, honeymoons, etc.  Many of these are online retailers that offer good quality products at discounted prices.  (And we all know how great it can be to find great wedding deals!).  If you are looking for a wedding related service, please have a look in our wedding vendor directory.

As always, please keep the great suggestions coming!!!

We have some exciting news to announce today!  Starting now, you have new ways to edit your wedding website.  This is especially great news for those who are happy to get right into the html itself.

We always try to find a good balance between making things very easy, and allowing you to customize your own wedding website so that it suits you perfectly.  Today’s update has 3 big features.

1. Safari users can now use the rich text editor just like IE and FireFox users!

2. You can now use the rich text editor to insert pictures into text elements just like I’ve done below.  This means you can put a picture wherever you want in the text. (left, right, center, wherever!).  This feature doesn’t allow you to upload photos directly, so you will have to upload them somewhere online first.  This can either be to your MomentVille website or to another online photo service.  All you need to know is the url of the image you want to use.  Have a look at the 2 new buttons highlighted in the image below.

3. You can now edit the html directly within a text element.  If you are familiar with html and consider yourself a power user just click on the ‘html’ button in the rick text editor and you will see a pop-up dialog with the html you are editing. This gives you all sorts of control over what you are can do on your wedding website!

Happy wedding website editing!

- The MomentVille Team