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Creating blogs in Links

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Creating blogs in Links
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding among people I talk to about what a blog is. I’m not sure whether the following definition is complete but it should cover the main aspects of blogs.

Points identified in blogs
1a) Blogs allow users through a semi-WYSIWYG system to post content and generally allow them to preview it before publishing
1b) Several bloggers can post content to the same site
2) There is generally a system for categorizing and/or tagging articles/content
3) The articles are published on a page that displays the user or users articles. Most blogs are a page of a specific person’s articles/content
4) There is generally an indication of the time and the categories the article is posted in
5) In nearly all cases there is a form below the article for posting comments that can be activated or deactivated by the blogger per article.
6) Comments that have been posted about the article are usually displayed below the article in the same page. In some cases a short summary is displayed with a link to the full article followed by all the comments (regardless of the number of comments).
7) With blogs there is a system called trackback or pinging that allows a first blogger to alert a second bloggers’ readers that he has posted something about the second blogger’s article as well as updates.
8) Blogs have a system of blogrolls that are just links to sites that the author wishes to display (generally) in the sidebar.
Note Both 7) and 8) are important factors for blogs since they link bloggers together and help to get blogs known.
9) A calendar that displays events or previous posts
10) The last comments
11) An about the author page
12) RSS feeds

The same points handled by Links
Follows my approach to the above which is by far the only way to do it !
With a few modifications 1a) is feasible in Links through the browser.cgi script. Also 1b) is can be managed using the editor status and browser.cgi
2) This is obviously easy in Links
3) This can be obtained through a script like the Personal Page plug-in I explained but I’m guessing you could maybe get something working using user templates in pagebuilder.
4) This is already available in Links
5) This is just a case of using an include of the add_review template.
6) This requires a few minor modifications at most
7) This is not yet available in Links
8) This is not yet available in Links
9) This is not yet available in Links (but isn’t in all blogs either)
10) This can be obtained using globals that have been posted in the forum and just need to be user specific (which can be done with the Personal Page plug-in)
11) This can be done using the personal page plug-in, pagebuilder, using a text field in the user database…
12) This is simple, I used pagebuilder but there is also and XML plug-in I think.


One issue I can see at the moment is a blogger being able to validate comments posted about his blog if there are lots of other users in the same situation…

What Links also lets you do. Obviously Links can offer far more and with the Personal Page plug-in (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...i?post=286271#286271) for example I can let users decide what templates to use to display the short descriptions of their articles (you could have loads of different sorts). It is possible by using CSS to define the general page layout and/or colours as well as fonts and hyperlink colours… All this can be done with select options so that any user can click to choose with example images how to change the look of the page without needing any html or programming knowledge.

Some strategic/conceptual ideas :

Not offering blogs to users because they can get it for free elsewhere is a mistake in my opinion. More and more sites are using the “get your free blog here”, not to provide something new but to keep up with the competition.
I have seen on some sites plain simple articles with a comment on this that links to a forum and with better integration this may have looked OK but in this case it just looked weird. Why well because more and more people are used to the blog format of an article followed by comments.
A blog is not only a good community tool it is also becoming a norm for content that people give their opinions about, people are used to at the end of an article being able to give their opinion.
If you have a links site then letting people create content for your site is a pretty good idea, bringing in turn people that will comment on the content created…

Obviously this type of system provides you with a similar type of offering to MySpace, when properly implemented...

Let me know what you think...

John
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Last edited by:

Jag: Apr 7, 2006, 10:14 AM
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Re: [Jag] Creating blogs in Links In reply to
Interesting analysis - thanks!

I think gossamer's Forum (rather than Links) would be good with some blog-type functionality. Specifically, I would like to be able to do trackbacks, so that people who do not have their own blog can write entries in my forum, and refer with trackbacks to the blogs of other people. They could use links, but the links do not appear on the source blog, which is the point of the trackback.
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Re: [tora] Creating blogs in Links In reply to
Hi tora,

I have discussed trackbacks with GT and they have a white paper that would enable them to easily build this functionality into Links. When you look at systems like technorati you see all the advantage of trackbacks and pingbacks not only from a simple notification standpoint but also with Search Engine Optimization in mind.
I wrote an article about the differences between blogs and forums on my own blog http://www.ubikann.com/...efinition-for-blogs/and it's true that blogs are a current phenomena and I think a lot of blog functionality is here to stay including trackbacks.

In my opinion forums are more open and less personified like blogs. To quote a funny article at Adage that the Media guy wrote :
Quote:
...the spider that crawls through these feeds is highly attuned to a very specific blog demographic: Blogs created by precocious teenage girls. Which means the market is huge, since all bloggers are either teenage girls or just act like them
http://www.adage.com/...le?article_id=108942

I have recently started blogging quite a lot and even though this quote is supposed to be a bit of a joke, I feel there is some truth to be read into it. Forums allow a multitude of members to start a post, respond to a post etc. Blogs usually rely upon a person or a group of a few specific people to post content and people then can respond.
There is a certain icon aspect to the blogger that is fueling peoples interest in blogging since they can be viewed as stars. Blogging is in this way attuned to the whole "everybody will be famous for five minutes" idea. It's a kind of 'you can be a star' type promise.
Since blogging has only just really become mainstream it's only recently that more and more interesting writers are getting past the whole ‘blogs are for teenagers’ attitude and starting to write themselves. Many writers and journalists I have met and spoken to don't like the idea of people talking back ! But I'm hoping this will change too.
In this context blogs will start to be considered as a real medium rather than a bit of a joke as above. Newspapers are both offering blogs as a means for their journalists to write and technorati to show who is writing about their articles but also (maybe an idea for Andy, if he is still alive) the most emailed articles along with other ‘collaborative’ functions.

Myspace is also a system that is pushing this “you can be a star” idea with the myspace pages. I realized when I created my own Myspace page that this would also be pretty simple to create with the Personal Page Plug-in http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...i?post=286271#286271. Most of the other services on offer are available through GT anyway. Think GT could have created MySpace !

As I said previously I think that to drop concepts like blogging and the myspace personal page because others have done it is not always the best strategy. Blogging and the blog type presentation as I describe it in the article on my blog is not going away, on the contrary, many of a blogs' characterizing elements are here to stay !
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