RFF Community Blog?

kaiyen · 03-16-2006

Hi all,
This idea came to me in RayPA's PDF book swap thread.

I know that many folks on RFF, myself included, already have photo blogs. And that those blogs take many, many different forms, from just pictures to pictures with stories, etc. But...what if we had a community blog that fit in between there somewhere?

For instance, with enough categories, we could cover a lot of different types of blog posts. That way, it would be useful to just about everyone as something that his/her own blog is not.

Let's say your main blog is a presentation blog - these are your best photos, perhaps in place of a formal gallery. But what if you have test shots you want to put somewhere? What if you have images that are interesting but not terrific? They could go here.

What about that thread "a photo and a story" (or something like that)? My personal photo blog goes that way - I try to explain the story behind the shot. But not everyone wants to do that on his/her main blog. Many go for a simplistic approach. So this community blog could be that. Again, a different category.

We could make use of pages for things like mini-portfolios, a series of tests shots, etc.

Any interest? I am willing to host it with WordPress. I'm not a wordpress master, but I can dig around in a style sheet and/or a template when I need to.

allan

RayPA · 03-16-2006

I think it's a GREAT idea. I'd love to see it "going"! I'd visit it and contribute.

Goodyear · 03-16-2006

Yes indeed.

kvanderlaag · 03-16-2006

Definitely a good idea.

JoshRoot · 03-16-2006

That is an easy enough thing to set up. I could do it in an afternoon.

But what might be cooler is a blog that was set up to use RRS feeds to pull posts from everyone's personal photoblogs. So you make a post on your blog, and it appears on the RFF photoblog.

In any case, if Jorge or Joe want to look into the idea, email/PM me.

kaiyen · 03-16-2006

Josh,
that would be a great idea. I have been meaning to build a blog out of site feeds from other blogs, but have not yet done so. Since you have already done that, perhaps it makes more sense for you to do so.

another thing for me to learn...
allan

Gid · 03-16-2006

Allan,

Cool idea! I don't have my own Blog, so I'm a novice, but would love to participate.

Cheers

Gid

kaiyen · 03-16-2006

Okay. I just added that feature, too. So far I've only added Shards of Photography.

My mock-up is at http://photos.kaiyen.com/rffBlog

I originally set this up for RayPA's book swap project. But I created a category called "feeds from other blogs."

allan

Doug · 03-16-2006

Not being familiar with blogs, I don't understand the concept. How would that be different from RFF itself?

kaiyen · 03-16-2006

Doug,
Well, blogs aren't really discussion forums, so that's the key difference.

There can be a lot of overlap, no question. But, for instance, let's say you want to do a series of tests on Tri-X and Microphen, or about disassembling and reassembling a Vitoret DR. You could do that here, but it's probably not ideal. You could make your own web page, but that's kind of a pain. A blog would give you the publishing features to do that pretty quickly. Upload a few photos, type in some text, click "bold" when you want bold, etc, and there you go.

We could put that in a "repairs" category for the latter example.

You could also provide some cool information you found about something. You find a cool link to a new method for doing something, and you want to make it available. But that kind of quick "hey, I found something random" gets lost pretty quickly in a forum like this.

Like I said, there can be a lot of overlap. It's just another way of getting information out there.

allan

RML · 03-16-2006

Sweet! My blog is the first!

I'm not sure how to get my other blog on it as well: _my photo portfolio blog_. Can someone explain? I tried to register but the username rml was already taken. Did you create an account for me, Kaiyen?

BTW, I love th red theme.

kaiyen · 03-16-2006

RML,
Yeah, I think when I added your blog as a contributor an account was created for you automatically. I'll PM you in a minute with your password and other account info.

I've added a bunch of other blogs - just the first several from RayPA's thread he started a while back collecting blog links. As long as Wordpress can find an RSS feed, it can pull from that blog. Having said that, a few blogs don't have RSS feeds (Todd, if you see this...).

I will eventually set it up so that every night it checks for all the new posts on all the linked blogs.

allan

Stephanie Brim · 03-16-2006

Now that my own photography blog is up and running, I'd love to participate. Note, though, kaiyen, that my NEW blog is different from my old blog and that I haven't updated that thread yet.

I can't remember how early I posted in that thread.

Goodyear · 03-16-2006

There's definitely something cool about folding in the content from contributors' other blogs, is it possible that with so many things going on at once any new content specifically on the group blog could get easily lost? With so much else going on, it would be very easy to miss that test, or repair walkthrough...

{thinking cap}
How would it look to have specifically a "Contributor's Other Sites" page or somesuch, that displays going down the page the contributor's name and the most recent post/excerpt of from their site?
{/thinking cap}

Rich Silfver · 03-17-2006

Allan, this is a really cool idea. I did however notice that the photos I have in my blog entries doesn't want to display through your community blog. Weird...

RML · 03-17-2006

Rich, I found that when you open the photo in a different window (in Firefox at least) and let it load, that after closing that new window the photo also shows in the blog. Maybe that helps? BTW, my photos from _my photo portfolio_ all display correctly on the blog.

kaiyen · 03-17-2006

Many responses...

Stephanie - so which one is your current blog? It's unclear to me. Should I un-syndicate the one I have on there?

Rich - Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Since they show up after you load them via direct-clicking, my feeling is that it's truly just a timeout issue. That happened on my old hosting company. Performance sucked so you had to load the thumbnail directly at least once before it would load on the general blog page.

Mark - I'm not 100% sure what you mean. Like have a WP page that is still in the blog but has the feeds from other sites, as compared to being dumped into the main blog? I don't think the plugin I'm currently using allows that - it only goes into blog entires. But perhaps there is a different plugin I can try. Keep in mind that, even with, say, 30 blogs feeding into it, unless everyone posts every single day, there shoudln't be _that_ many new posts in that category per day . I don't think.

All - WP automatically creates logins for all the blogs I've syndicated. If you go in and are able to self-register, great. If, like RML, you try and you get an error saying the account already exists, let me know. I'll reset the pwd.

allan

Byuphoto · 03-17-2006

How do I get my blog linked?

kaiyen · 03-17-2006

Done.

allan

Stephanie Brim · 03-17-2006

My current blog is mentalexperimental.org. That will be my only blog for a while.

Goodyear · 03-17-2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by kaiyen

Mark - I'm not 100% sure what you mean. Like have a WP page that is still in the blog but has the feeds from other sites, as compared to being dumped into the main blog? I don't think the plugin I'm currently using allows that - it only goes into blog entires. But perhaps there is a different plugin I can try. Keep in mind that, even with, say, 30 blogs feeding into it, unless everyone posts every single day, there shoudln't be _that_ many new posts in that category per day . I don't think.

Fair enough - once all the other blogs have had their initial syndicaiton done (10 posts, or whatever's in their feed) then I guess it will become much simpler.

kaiyen · 03-18-2006

Okay. I've gone through a lot of blogs and have syndicated them into mine. Phew.

However, a lot of blogs don't have feeds at all. If you have a blog, please look into setting up a feed...

allan

Rich Silfver · 03-18-2006

I think I figured out why most of the photos from my blog doesn't show though the community blog. Going to see if I can fix it this weekend.

Rich Silfver · 04-02-2006

Again, Allan thanks for putting this consolidated blog together. I just went back today and loved that in 10-15 minutes I could catch up with some of the best blogs from members here at RFF. Great work!

The link, for anyone wondering, is http://photos.kaiyen.com/rffBlog/ (make sure you bookmark it)

taffer · 04-02-2006

I think I replaced RSS with Atom 0.3 on a recent template change, tweaking has a price

http://singlecoated.blogspot.com/atom.xml