If you've been following BYOND Labs, you know about the new notification system that's been in the works. With this system, you can now receive pager or email notifications for:

• New comments on any post
• New posts in your favorite BYOND blogs

To receive notifications for new comments on a particular post, you now "subscribe" to that post's comment thread. Every comment page now has a Subscribe or Unsubscribe button.

To receive email notifications on subscribed comment threads, you will edit your site and check the option Send an email when someone comments on a subscribed comment thread. There is a similar option for receiving pager notifications on subscribed comment threads. Both of these replace the old options for receiving notifications on your own posts.

To receive email notifications when one of your favorite blogs gets a new post, you'll check the option Send an email when a friend posts a new blog entry. Similar for pager.

There is also a new option to show the list of your fans. Your fans are the BYOND Members who have listed you in their friends list. By default the option is turned off (only you will see your fans list; nobody else), so check Show the list of people who are fans of your website to turn it on.

Before showing your fans list to the public, you may want to check that it looks good with your blog's CSS. Your BYOND Website will show a partial list of your fans (currently up to 10), while the full list is here. CSS properties that you may want to update include #fans, .fan_list, and more.

Finally, for those who didn't already notice, we've been running the site for a few weeks with an improved blog post filter. It's similar to the filter that is applied to all comments, but is not as restrictive:

• Automatically add HTML line breaks
• Auto-convert http:// and byond:// urls to links.
• Close any unclosed quotes and tags you may have left open by accident.
• Break up long words to avoid horizontal scrolling.

It's also optional - you can turn the filter on or off for each individual post, as well as set your default in your website preferences. Without the filter on, you have complete control over your post's appearance. In that case, we add no line breaks or anything else, so it's up to you to use the appropriate HTML if you want them (this post was written with no filter, using <p> tags separate paragraphs).

All comments are welcome!