An Idea: Make it Easy For DC Users To Show A Page of Their Posts

[mouser]

I had a thought today that it would be nice to make it really easy for users to display a page (or a series of pages) of their posts on DC in a way that was fun for users.

One option would be to make it so that EVERYONE with a forum account would automatically get a page at like:
donationcoder.com/dcUSERNAME

And that page would be a little like a users forum profile but much more formatted nicely to be like a standalone blog page.  The idea would simply be to give users of the forum a way to have a presence here that was more suitable for showcasing their posts.  Perhaps we could make it easy for users to catagorize their posts, etc.

Another option would be to make it easier to embed such info about a users posts in a users homepage.  This might be as simple as providing an rss feed for a user, to providing various other ways to dynamically grab info about a users posts and stats that could easily be embedded on a users external homepage.

Again idea is to make it easier for users who participate at donationcoder to use the content that they write on dc on their own external homepages so they don't have to feel like they have to duplicate content, or that stuff they write on DC is being "lost" to people who visit their homepage.

Thoughts?

[allen]

Sounds like a great idea! Throw in some customization options (colors/fonts), and maybe the ability to decide whether you want to show titles, full posts or x-length "previews" of posts and you'd have a unique forum/blog hybrid.  I think it sounds brilliant.

[Josh]

Horrible, Terrible idea. Why would you do such a thing? Wow, what a waste of time.

Nah, just kidding. I am all for it! Sounds like a great idea and project. Perhaps this will turn out better than your A/C endeavors mousey ;-)

[mouser]

Throw in some customization options (colors/fonts), and maybe the ability to decide whether you want to show titles, full posts or x-length "previews" of posts and you'd have a unique forum/blog hybrid.

yes that's what i was thinking.  and/or make it easy to incorporate these features into an existing (wordpress or other) blog.

[wreckedcarzz]

http://userblog.donationcoder.com/ForumNameHere (just a thought)

Be an interesting idea, but you then have to take the extra time to manage it and make it co-exist with the forum counterpart (assuming you don't directly integrate it)

Sounds really cool, but it might take some time and effort, depending on how it is setup

[app103]

I love the idea!

It could also be nice if one could customize it to only show selected posts. That way a coding snack author could use it as a mini website to show off just their coding snacks and other software they have created as a result of being a DC member, and not include any other posts, if they don't want them.

Maybe even allow users to publish to it from their private area and actually use it as a blog, if they want.

As far as the look and style, I think it would be cool if it had the look and feel of the DC blog.

Might be easier too. You could allow users to promote their own posts to their own blog page in the same manner that posts are currently promoted to the dc blog. 

[mouser]

As far as the look and style, I think it would be cool if it had the look and feel of the DC blog.  Might be easier too.

indeed it might.. the custom "blog" system i wrote for dc basically allows you to take any post and make it a blog entry, with it's own excerpt, a thumbnail image from the post or one from a collection.  there is a publication date for each entry, and a rudimentary tagging system.  with a little bit of extra work i could let each user create and manage their own "blog" using this system, with different sections corresponding to tags.

[superboyac]

This is an awesome idea.  Kind of like what I'm trying to do with one of the sections of the website I've started.  Maybe, once you figure it out, I can copy it somehow into my website.  That's all I do anyway...copy everyone else's great ideas.  I can't help it, good is good!

[mouser]

That's all I do anyway...copy everyone else's great ideas.

well, now you really are ready for grad school 

[cranioscopical]

now you really are ready for grad school

I too, except in my case you left off the 'e'.

[superboyac]

That's all I do anyway...copy everyone else's great ideas.

well, now you really are ready for grad school 

Haha (really?)...

[Deozaan]

I like it!

[Armando]

IMO, very good idea mouser.

[mouser]

Im definitely going to do this.  I'm thinking we can use a cool new banner with cody that nudone did, and have some different sidebar widgets and other fun stuff. like:

• recent topics started by the user
• recent posts made by the user
• recent replies in topics started by the users
• users bio
• dc awards won by user
• profile links to other sites the user is a member of
• current forum activity of user (online, what post they are reading)
• bookmarked posts
• donation link
• custom text chosen by user

any other ideas?

I think it would be easy to get carried away and make the mistake of trying to make this like a super customizable page that is yet another myspace/facebook page, etc.  and i think that would be a waste of time and effort.  no sense doing what other sites do better.

But i do think it would be fun to have a kind of standardized dc page automatically generated for each user that looked cool and showed all these things.