community news blogs
Posted by Brent Finnegan on March 19th, 2007
Yesterday Waldo Jaquith posted about the growing number of community news blogs in Virginia. There was a flurry of discussion on je ne sais pas about the topic back in January, which I totally missed.
Compared to a lot of other states, Virginia has a fairly well-connected community of bloggers. Between Waldo’s statewide political aggregator, blognet news, alliances like Old Dominion, and Blogs United in Hampton Roads, bloggers in the Commonwealth know what everyone else is up to. But I still think most areas lack a sense of “local internet” in their community, which is a shame, because people spend so much of their time online these days.
But it looks like people are doing some really cool things with it. I only wish I had any web/code experience whatsoever, and the time to post more often and add more features, like this. I still haven’t even upgraded to WP 2.0 for fear of messing something up. I do not understand code, host files, or any of that stuff. I think it’s funny when people assume I’m a tech geek.
-finnegan
finnegan,
In setting up Petersburg People’s News, I took the code behind Church Hill People’s News and made it fairly portable. If there are features from pburgpn.net that you like, I can probably help you add them to your site pretty easily.
I think you mean wordpress 2.1, the site is currently running on 2.0.3.
Like I said, I don’t know. I’ll email you guys and try to figure this out.
While were on the topic, what sort of features would you like to see (assuming I can figure out how to use this)? Flickr badge? Weather? Newest comments?
I’ve found that “recent comments” keeps discussions going longer. The main post will drop off of the front page and folks’ll still keep hitting it through recent commens. Sometimes posts a few months old will get a comment and spur a whole ‘nother round of commenting.
Yeah, I definitely need to add that.
Referencing John M’s comment, the “subscribe to comments” plugin also helps to keep the discussion moving.
Jim, where can I get the WP plugin for that? There seem to be several on WP. Which one should I install?
brent,
it’s not a plugin, it is just another feed. It can be found at http://hburgnews.com/comments/feed/
the normal (posting) feed is at http://hburgnews.com/feed/
It is fairly standard practice to put these links somewhere on the page, like the footer, in case someone isn’t using a browser like firefox that finds them for you.
Done, David T. I added them above recent comments. Don’t know how to get the little orange cube to appear next to it, though.