Word.

Wow, this has been a ton of work, but hopefully the vast improvements to the site will inspire some of you "Anony-mess" users to get your act together and join the fricking club.

So, now that the semi-pleasantries have been dispensed with, won't you join me on a little tour? I promise it won't take three hours and does not involve minnows of any sort.

Before we start, keep in mind that we use Flash for some of our headers and the billboard on the front page. If you don't see them, you need Flash. Get it here.

"What the hell is new?" You ask. Everything, biiiatch. Let's start with...

Interactive Features:

You might not see it immediately from looking at the front page, but BM is now a full featured, kick ass, user-driven interweb device! You can view all the mental peeps page-by-page by clicking on the "The Mental" icon in the left hand block. Click on a user and you'll be taken to their user page, where you can read and view their entire, comprehensive profile including the following features...

Personal Blogs:
Yep, join and you get your very own blog with its very own feed. Epic bro.

Personal Image Galleries:
Not only do users get their own personal blog that works and doesn't look like some MySpace or Friendster suck-ass garbage, they get their very own image gallery complete with a simple, easy to use management interface. You have 10MB of space to start with for images, and we'll increase that if we see a demand. If you want more images, make sure they are no bigger than 420 wide by 600 tall and no larger than 400K. That way they won't need to be scaled down and you will save space. ARTISTS! Use the image galleries to showcase your work! Coming soon BM will have user profiles specifically for musicians, painters, illustrators and new media artists, but the gallery is a great way to get exposure.

"Peeps" List:
Yes, you can now add other users to your "peeps" list if you think their profile, blog and gallery don't blow ass.

User-To-User Messaging:
This feature is not visible to anonymous users, but exists all the same. BM now features a site-wide messaging system that allows "The Mental" to communicate right on the site. It will also send users an email message once per-week to let them know if they have new messages. We don't want to bug the crap out of you so once a week seems cool to us.

RSS Feeds (For Every User!):
Each BM user has their own feed for their blog, accessible via the feeds page or the user's profile.

Images In Blogs:
You can include images in your personal blog or link to images in your gallery, or even to images in another user's blog. Images in blogs are scaled down to keep things clean, but each scaled image is a link to the original version of the image. Just click on the blog image and you'll get a pop-up of the original. You include images with special code, but more on that later.

Personalized Profile Headers:
The main header on each profile page can be customized by the user. To do so, just edit the "Profile Header" field on the "Edit Profile" page. Change it daily, weekly, monthly or never. We could give a shit.

Mental Control Panel:
The Mental Control Panel is the place where BM users do all their crap. Things like adding blog entries and gallery images, sending messages to other users, editing account information and profile stuff, searching and gallery management. As you can see by the image at right, it's pretty straight-forward, clean, easy to use and understand. No "how the hell do I delete or edit that image?" crap. Users can also submit feature and improvement requests to support@skatemental.com. We aim to please, biiitaches. Stop being such a wuss and sign up now. It's way better than the alternative crap sites for losers that want a date.

Coming Soon:
• Personal video uploads
• Personal music players
• User managed groups
• More feed types including user image feeds

In general, tons of new shit.

General Improvements

The Forums:
It was a major fricking pain, but now this scuzbag can tell his good blog-mate E.L.G. that he finally has some support and should no longer be message-bored. That's right, the forums are all new and radical with way better usability, looks, commenting and everything else. Comments are colored accoding to the type they are. Primary posts are grey, secondary are light blue and any post made by a user in your peeps list is pink, with a link to message the poster. All that plus now that bad-hair-day photo of you will show up in your posts.

Downloads:
The downloads page will be coming soon. Hey, I can only do so much. Look for icons, desktop images and a BM OSX widget real soon.

The MMP:
A.K.A. the Mental Music Player. The MMP is roughly the same but works much better now, and will be filled with tons of new music all the time, just like it is now.

The BM Billboard:
That display on the front page and in the features sections (Skate News, Skate Rock, Art Dorks, etc.) is the BM Billboard. The BM Billboard will be updating you on the newest BM Features including stories, new music, media, users and all sorts of other crap. You need Flash to view it.

Content Access:
Everyone can, regardless of whether or not they are members, access and view all of the content on the site including -- member profiles, galleries, blogs, peeps lists, music and the forums. We have disabled the anonymous commenting and forum submission feature because we were innundated with spam from losers that have nothing better to do. Like I said, stop being such a wuss.

New Feature Section Links:
The links to the Feature Sections are now in the top navigation bar and support links are in the botttom navigation bar. This is here in the event that you are so dense you can't figure that out.

The Layout and User Interface:

In an effort to clean up our act and provide a more user-friendly environment for our peeps, we've completely revamped the site to be more usable, intuitive and far better looking in general than its predecessor. Not only that but we've also made the site more compact so it will load faster and prevent crappy browsers from pooping out on you. Speaking of crappy browsers...

We've spent a fair amount of time making sure BM works as flawlessly as possible in the big three:

Safari 1.0 or greater
Internet Explorer 6 or greater for Windows
Firefox, any version

For those of you on the PC - I hate them, but I won't hate on them - IE6 is going to be your best bet. BM is made for Safari on the Mac, but just about 99% of it should display and work fine in IE6. We haven't thoroughly checked Firefox yet, but we'll do that soon. If you are using FF and see something out of the ordinary please send me an email at madmin@skatemental.com.

If you're on a Mac, use Safari. If you are using IE5 on the Mac, you are a complete fuckwad and there is no hope for you. You have the best browser in the world at your disposal - Safari - and you are using the worst - IE. We do not support IE5 for the Mac. Let us know what you think of the changes, good or bad.

We haven't posted the new FAQ for users yet, and I anticipate some questions. Here's the answer to two that I believe will be at the top of the list:

Why can't I login?
• You should be able to login with the same user name and password you used on the old blog. There were a couple of users who had special characters in their names - I.E. *! @# and stuff like that - and those users have had their user names slightly changed because BM no longer supports special characters in user names. Send an email to ,a href="mailto:support@skatemental.com">support@skatemental.com and we will reply with your new, slightly altered user name. or you can just create a new account.

How do I include images in my blog?
• Easy. When you are in the process of adding a blog entry, do the following:

1.) click "choose file" near the bottom of the blog entry submission form.

2.) Choose an image file from your computer.

3.) Once you have chosen a file, you can use the following special text to include the image in the body of your blog post:

The "x" represents the number of the image in the sequence you attached them. I.E., the first image you attached is "1", the second "2" and so on and so forth. You may attach as many images as you want. The "left" and "right" are used to designate where the image should be in the post. Images with "left" are placed on the left. Do I have to explain what happens when you use "right"?

4.) Once you have entered the special text, click either "preview" or "submit". Preview is optional but is good to use to get an idea of what your image will look like in the context of your post.