Rombla

Rombla Update

Many thanks for all the feedback! We depend on your feedback to help us improve Rombla.  Please keep the suggestions coming. We are constantly working to improve usability and incorporate your feature requests.  January has been a productive month and we have just released an exciting new Rombla update.  Please check it out and let us know what you think.

Interface enhancements
We have improved Rombla’s skin, buttons and navigation.  The publish, save and undo buttons are much more obvious.  Publish status is now a dialog box showing progress. We also removed the top tabs for selecting content and moved them into a drop-down menu on the left panel to free up screen space. Rombla also now uses a single browser window for both the editor and account dashboard.

Search Engine Optimization
We have added spider friendly HTML pages behind the flash site that will allow the search engines to fully index and link to your site content.  Rombla also uses deep linking unique URLs for each page which will allow other sites to link directly to specific pages in your site rather than just linking to the home page.

Edit menu added to object handle
We have added a new drop down menu control onto the object handle .  The new menu options include; bring to front and send to back, duplicate object, and delete object.  Duplicate is very useful, especially when making multiple containers or forms.

New HTML text object
We have added support for HTML text objects in addition to our single style text objects.  When you set your text box style to HTML, you will have much more control

to style individual words in the text box.  Highlight a word or words and change the text properties for just those words.  You can easily add links and use more than one font style, size or color in a text box.  You should still use single text styles(not HTML) when you want to apply the same style to multiple text objects.

Add photos to your site via a web link
We added a new option letting you add images via a weblink(URL).  So if you have images stores on a server other than Flickr or PhotoBucket your can now include them in your site pages.  The upload of images from your hard disk directly to your Rombla account will be in our next release.

Duplicate objects and containers
You can now duplicate any object including container and forms.  If you have made the perfect container or form, now it is easy to duplicate that container and use it on any of your pages.  No more recreating it each time!

Edit and save color palettes
We’ve had many requests for this one. You can now edit and save your own custom color palettes for your site.  It’s now much easier to get the precise colors you want and use them across your entire site.

Tags: new stuff, Update

Download and move your site to a personal domain

In our latest software release. We enable you to download a zipped version of your website and move it to your own domain (such as www.mydomain.com). In order to do this you must first save and publish your site. Save it using the disk/save button in the top-right menu. Publish it using the publish button in the top-right menu. Once this is accomplished go ahead and close the editor and go to the manage your sites page on the Rombla website. Look for the download ZIP file button. Click this button and you will be prompted to save a zip file. This zip file contains all of the necessary files to make your site active on your own domain.

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file to your computer, you would usually extract the files to a folder and then  FTP them to the root web host directory where you want them to be active. Soon, you will be able to do the FTP straight from the Rombla website as we work rapidly to make this FTP process easier for you. If you have any problems or questions or concerns please let us know. We will be happy to address them.

Rombla New Year’s Eve update release

First of all we would like to wish you all a happy new year! We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks since our last release to get you some new features we promised and fix some of the bugs that we found. We appreciate all the feedback, help, and activity we are seeing on Rombla.com. Please continue to provide feedback and let us know what you would like to see in the future releases.

New features in this release

Our most exciting new feature is that our sites are now portable; external publishing is available via download. You can download your published site in the form of a zip file and then FTP your site to your own personal domain. This download feature can be found in the manage sites page. Please remember, you must first publish your site in the Rombla editor before it is available for download.

A few other new features to note include a new RSS feed widget which allows you to get live data from your blogs or news feeds, and a  new photo pop-up widget that gives you another way to display your photos and artwork. We’ve improved the color picker to have more colors and to be more intuitive. You can now create and save custom color palettes for your sites. We have done a few cosmetic changes to the ‘manage my sites’ page from a form and functionality standpoint.  In the published sites we have added deep linking so you can bookmark directly to an individual page in the flash site; this is also the start of our dedication to create a more search engine friendly sites for our users.

Tags: color picker, External publish, Search engine friendly, Update, your own domain

Welcome to our Spanish speaking friends.

We greatly appreciate the kind words for Rombla from several Spanish bloggers including; www.wwwhatsnew.com, www.genbeta.com, www.geeksroom.com, www.infoconocimiento.com, www.albertoaranda.net. The number Spanish speakers in the Rombla community now out  numbers English speakers by a wide margin.

My apology for the poor support of accented characters in our initial release. A special thanks to Fernando Checa for engaging with Chris(in English) via Twitter to help us find and correct several important bugs.

We released an update to Rombla yesterday to improve support for accents and fixed many other errors. The overall stability of Rombla is much improved and we have added a few new features for you.

We depend on you to share your experience and your needs to help to us improve Rombla.  Please keep the feedback coming… in Spanish or English!

Tags: accented characters, community, Spanish

Bienvenidos a nuestros amigos Hispanos

Apreciamos profundamente las palabras amables en referencia a Rombla de varios Bloggers incluyendo a www.wwwhatsnew.com, www.genbeta.com, www.geeksroom.com, www.infoconocimiento.com, www.albertoaranda.net. La cantidad de clientela que habla español sobrepasa los que hablan ingles por un gran margen

Discúlpenos por la falta de apoyo de acentos en nuestra presentación inicial. Nuestro agradecimiento a Fernando Checa por twittear con Chris para ayudarnos a encontrar y corregir varios bugs.

Presentamos una nueva versión de Rombla ayer para mejorar el apoyo de acentos y arreglamos varios otros errores. La estabilidad general de Rombla ha mejorado y hemos implementado varias nuevas adiciones.

Esperamos contar con el apoyo de la comunidad para que compartan sus experiencias y necesidades para ayudarnos a mejorar. Por favor sigan dándonos sus impresiones y sugerencias… sea en español o en ingles!<-->

Rombla update: December 12, 2008

The Rombla team has been hard at work improving Rombla since its introduction last month.  We completed an release Yesterday that fix many bugs.  The overall stability is much improved and we also added a few new features:

1. Improved support for accented characters.
2. Fixed video linking problems
3. Deep linking support with unique URLs for each site page.  This allows other sites to link directly to a page in your site rather than just the home page.  This will improve Search engine optimization(SEO) for your site.
4. Expanded undo functionality to include design and layout changes.
5. Added palette editor.  Double click on the palette in the property list box to open the editor.
6. Added advanced color selection tool.  Click the small color ball at the top of the color picker and you will open the advanced selector to pick from millions of colors.

The team has also made significant progress on two important features that many of you are waiting for.

1. Publishing of Rombla sites to external domains.  Our testers our now validating FTP transfer of Rombla sites to several large hosting companies. Initially, you will be able to download your site and ftp it to your existing hosted domain.  Shortly after, we will add the ability for Rombla to automatically publish to other hosting companies without the need to download and transfer files.
2. We have also added the ability for Rombla to auto-generate a background copy of each page content in HTML format to help search engines to index content and dramatically improve your site’s search engine ranking.

These two features are currently being tested and will be included in our next update release before the end of the year.

What’s in a name?

A little over a year ago, I was on holiday in one of my favorite places: Uruguay, South America. I was sitting in a café on the Rambla, a bustling boulevard along the coast, contemplating starting a new business. I was trying to come up with unique names that would have a URL and trademark available. The internet land grab has made this a frustrating task. It dawned on me that there were interesting words all around me and as Uruguay is just a side road on the web they may still be available.

I was in the beautiful seaside village of Piriapolis, founded by Francisco Piria early in the last century. I wandered over to the local internet café and quickly registered several domains that became our company and product names. So what about Rombla? It is a gringo variation on Rambla. I would like to tell you we changed the name from Rambla to Rombla because people had a hard time pronouncing Rambla. Truth be told, it was a twitter from Rafe Needleman. Back in April at the Web2.0 show, Rafe was kind enough to blog about our Alpha version. We were following his twitter when he mentioned “nice app but pity about the name. It sounds like NAMBLA.” A quick Google search later I decided we had to change the name. Rombla was available and easier to pronounce.. so here we are.

Tags: Piria rombla rambla name rafe needleman

Who is Rombla for?

In short, business owners AND design professionals.  When we started the Rombla project we set out to create the best website design tool for small business owners.  We wanted to eliminate the technical skills gap that prevented them from building and maintaining their own sites.  At Alpha stage, I put on my small business owner’s hat and set out to create sample sites to test Rombla’s capabilities.  I had no problem creating content and laying it out but I was quickly frustrated that I could not get the sites to have a clean professional look.  I called on a professional designer to help me with the site’s style.  As is often the case, necessity quickly became the mother of invention.  We were sending the sites back and forth and I could not work on the content while the Designer was working with the site.  Piria’s engineering team put together a framework that made it easy for us to share the site.  Then the designer started asking for more design control capabilities in Rombla.  We added many more design features but made sure that they were easy enough for me to use too.  That is how Rombla developed into a tool that improves rather than replaces the relationship between businesses and web designers.

Currently, we are working on ways to improve upon the traditional web design marketplace.  We are developing an online community where businesses and designers can meet and work together.  The Rombla community will offer social networking features for business owners and designers to collaborate and improve the effectiveness of their sites.  We will include a marketplace where designers can promote their services and sell their designs.  We are very interested to hear from you and get your input on the community features as well as the business model for the marketplace.

Please join the dialog.

Tags: Rombla rambla piria