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Free blog hosting for members at DonationCoder - might be a good idea?

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tomos:
now a question for the bloggers.
i am going to try to figure out a way to have both options, so blogger can choose, but in general do people think they would rather each of their completely independent blog with their own custom look, or be different bloggers on a single blog.

i am guessing the former; the real advantage of the latter is that if you had 20 bloggers who only posted once a week you would still have a lively vibrant page that visitors might grow to enjoy and visit.  wheras if you each have your own individual blog, you might get lost in the crowd.  on the other hand, im assuming most of you will want to have your own blog which you can use for your own circles.  maybe we can find a way to do both..
-mouser (July 20, 2006, 06:35 AM)
--- End quote ---

for myself, I was thinking of the latter (different bloggers on a single blog), but maybe as you say both would be possible, or people could choose, or they could overlap?
 - someone could choose "the best of" (or simply the more suitable stuff from) the individual blogs to go into a mixed one?

or as mouser suggests above:
"it might be fun though to have a page where the most recent post from all dc blogs would be shown, like our our previous blog columns."

housetier:
I already have my own blog. But since drupal is so super, there are feeds available for almost any type/group of content; so it would not be a problem to grab the feed and aggregate it on blog.dc.com. Sorta like planet.debian.org or planet.ubuntu.com et al do.

And it would still be possible for others to uhm blog locally or directly. I am absolutely positive wordpress could handle that: local content and aggregated content.

Carol Haynes:
Actually you can use w.blogger to easily write blogs off line (and therefore keep backups) and also transfer stuff from other blog sites (such as blogger and drupal based blogs). W.Blogger supports a lot of blog formats and to transfer stuff all you have to do is connect via your existing account/blog and then upload it to the spanking wordpress forum.

Wordzilla:
i will set up the blog software this weekend.  I think we will use Wordpress.

-mouser (July 20, 2006, 06:19 AM)
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Would it be great if we allocate some space, let's say 10MB, for each blog, and "preload" Wordpress as the default blogging software - rather than the ONLY one allowed? It's never possible to have people agree on the same favorite blogging platform.

So people get to choose their own fav blogware later if they want to - be it a different blog system, just some additional plug-ins, or customization. To offer the maximium degree of freedom lies within the philosophy of blogging, I think. The less restriction we impose, the better end we would achieve, at least IMO.

not sure yet carol.. i will look into smf integration.
-mouser (July 20, 2006, 06:49 AM)
--- End quote ---

If "the maximium degree of freedom" is allowed, then smf integration would be a big headache in terms of implementation. One of the most important features ww should have, IMO, is to allow other people to have a glimpse of the up-to-date info about a member's blog, without having to subscribe to their blog RRS feed using an aggregator, or even having to actually check out the blog site themselves.

Well, simply put, it's like Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Spaces services, which allows you to know and preview your friends' recently updated blogs - once they update, and actually have a peek into the content before you donate your time to click into the blog site itself.

The idea for DC can be different, though similar. It works like this:

1. Allow a member to submit a RSS feed to his own profile (should be from his own blog, by default)

2. He will then have the option to "Display an extract of my latest blog entry on the Forum" or "Keep other members up-to-date about my blog"

3. Not bad-looking, huh? ;)

Wordzilla:
Oh, wait, was I suggesting another 'seemingly' big feature?  ;)

Let Really Simple Syndication, the "notoriously wide-open" standard speak on behalf of us -

1. No need to tweak each blog to ensure compatibilty, no ultracomplex code hacking - a relief for mouser, I think.

2. Members can stay where they are - no need to unwillingly switch to DC forum if they don't want to. And still enjoying virtually the same thing (except when they get something awful from those blog hosting comglomerates  ;))

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