Your very own, REAL personal blog

[Mike]

Ok, heres the deal. I've recently been tinkering with a blog for the website http://blog.fishlore.com/ (just started it, still quite plain) and I was wondering if any of the members would be interested in having their own blog hosted here, for free of course. I'd setup your domain (such as mike.fishlore.com) and then install the blog software for you (wordpress blog) I may even be able to walk you through creating your own look and feel or setting up one of the tons of templates. That is once I get everything ironed out.Here's a list of themes you could use or you could even make your own if you're handy with css: http://themes.wordpress.net/

I think it'd be kinda cool to have a little network of blogs on Fishlore. I would have to come up with some rules and guidelines first, but I wanted to see what everyone thought first.

Would anyone be interested in this? Is this a good idea or a dumb one?

Please lemme know your thoughts.

[atmmachine816]

Cool, though what exactly would we use it for, kinda like a myspace?

[COBettaCouple]

We'd be interested in that. Sounds like fun. Been a little bit since i worked with CSS, but i think it would come back pretty quick.

[Stradius011]

I think that'd be cool. So is this blog about fish or about everything?

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Stradius011

So is this blog about fish or about everything?

Cool, though what exactly would we use it for, kinda like a myspace

It'd be your blog, so you could blog about almost anything... Well, let me restate that - it would have to be kept PG since I plan on linking to them from Fishlore and they would technically be a part of this website. Ideally, I think it'd be cool to have a network of fish and aquarium related blogs, but obviously you may not want to talk about fish all the time. But those interested in reading these blogs would be able to bounce from blog to blog and know that they'd probably be reading something that interests them.

What's cool about blogs:
- It's essentially running you own website
- User friendliness, if you know how to use Microsoft word or a similar document editing program, you can easily make posts and administrate the blogs (approve or deny replies to posts)
- Talk about what your interested in and get feedback from visitors
- Upload your photos and videos
- Wordpress has tons of pre-made themes and tons of third party plug-ins (add-ons) and the blog owner would be able to install these plugins

Obviously, there will need to be some rules to keep it clean and I still have to work through these rules and guidelines, but I wanted to see what kind of interest there would be for this sort of thing before diving deeper into the technicalities.

[COBettaCouple]

It's a great idea! I think it would make fishlore even better and be a lot of fun for us.

[capekate]

Hi Mike,
I think it would be a great idea! Where you can link to one place and find photos, videos, information and shared interests. wondering if the software would be MAC compatible? Since I dont use windows.. just wondering?? BTW, its a very nice gesture on your part to go thru all this trouble to set up Blogs for us.

[atmmachine816]

Well I'd be interested then

[Gargoyle]

It would be cool to have a place to stick all my tank pics and be able to explain what they are all about... Sure I would try it..

Just wondering though... How would one go about editing the css.. Is there a user admin panel that allows access to the css file or would you have to use FTP to change it ?

[Mike]

capekate - I'm not sure about MAC compatibility... I would think wordpress definitely is, but maybe some of the themes are not? I think it would depend on how they structured the CSS in the particular theme.

gargoyle - there is an admin panel to edit the files, upload pics/movies, etc. I looked into several different blogging tools and I was most impressed with wordpress.

I always wondered what the big deal with blogs was, but after tinkering with the fishlore blog I can see how it could become addicting.

Ok, so it sounds like a few of us are interested in this... Lemme try to come up with some rules/guidelines and a procedure for adding new blogs. Give me a day or two and I'll post back here.

[Bonochick]

I like the idea. We have blogs at another board I go to, it's a cool feature.

[Marc]

Wordpress should be entirely compatible with Mac. Though that depends on what browser you use.

Keep in mind, though, that if something was intended for, say, Internet Explorer, it may not look the same in a different browser. Not all of them follow the proper standards.

[Gargoyle]

Originally Posted by Marc

Not all of them follow the proper standards.

Just an FYI... The ONLY browser that does not follow standards is IE.. Ie has more "built in features" and is more widely used so software developers tend to bend the rules for IE.

[COBettaCouple]

Originally Posted by Gargoyle

Just an FYI... The ONLY browser that does not follow standards is IE.. Ie has more "built in features" and is more widely used so software developers tend to bend the rules for IE.

LOL.. yea, I'm much happier running firefox.

[Mike]

I'm all too familiar with the IE bugs. I always test out CSS in Firefox and then once I get the design hashed out, will add the necessary work-arounds for it to work correctly in IE.

[COBettaCouple]

Originally Posted by Mike

I'm all too familiar with the IE bugs. I always test out CSS in Firefox and then once I get the design hashed out, will add the necessary work-arounds for it to work correctly in IE.

Way to go Mike! Long live firefox and open source!

[Marc]

Actually, FireFox doesn't entirely follow the standards.
Look up the "acid2" test (if I remember it right) and you'll see.

[Mike]

okey dokey smokey, If you're still interested in setting up a blog, I've attached the terms of service that you must agree to before I'll create the space for you.? Please read and understand this agreement before asking for a blog. I've tried to keep it simple.

I'm going to limit the number of blogs to the first 5 people that respond that are at least a "Full Member" here on the forum (trust factor here). Exception: For those members that have already replied to this thread in the above posts or global moderators, I'll keep a spot for you if you're interested, but you have to let me know asap. Ok?

I've set up a new domain http://www.fishloreblog.com as a place to host the blogs. Given the questionable service that we've had lately (slow response times, cpu errors, etc) on fishlore.com, I didn't want to add more "stuff" to the server load. This should help all of us as Fishlore.com continues to grow since any slowness on this site shouldn't affect your blogs since they will be on different servers.

Any questions, please post here and I'll respond to them here. Again, you must agree to the terms of service that is attached to this post and then email it to admin@fishloreblog.com with your preferred blog address - for example: mike.fishloreblog.com - where you replace the "mike" part of the URL with the preferred name of your blog.