We're doin' it live

October 26, 2010 4:35 PM

On WordPress, how best to live-blog?

I run a multi-author blog, hosted on Dreamhost, running WordPress 2.9.2. There's an..event...coming up, and we'd like to run a live-blog of it. We've done this before, using CoverItLive, but I'm looking for a better solution. In an ideal world, I'd like it to update one post in reverse-chronological order with some kind of Date/Author:Text listing in front of each micro-post. Are there any good solutions/plugins out there that can do this?

Secondarily, is this a good time to update to WordPress 3.0?

Thanks!

posted by General Malaise to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It's generally a good time to update whenever there's a Wordpress update because there's always some new security flaw that gets patched. At least, that's been my experience.

As to liveblogging, I guess you'd need to use something in the language of the post to make it clear that's what you're doing. Also, I JUST discovered the wonder of the "Press This" plug in. If you go to your side panel and select Settings>Writing there's a feature called Press This that you can drag and drop in your browser. It's intended for impulse blogs: you can just click on it, it opens up a wordpress entry page, and you may publish or save to draft. (You can't, alas, schedule from there, which is what I prefer to do.) So far it's pretty handy and works in most scenarios - I can see it coming in very handy with a liveblog where you might write multiple entries in a short space of time.
posted by medea42 at 5:28 PM on October 26, 2010

Best answer: Yeah, I like Wordpress 3.0+. I thought the update was in many ways very good. (A couple downsides but.)

CoveritLive is popular and people SEEM to like it? Like, it gets used? But I hate it.

It also doesn't give you any pageviews, if I may be frank about it!

Generally for liveblogging I, you know, stay in the post! And republish it regularly, with the newest stuff on top, and write in a time-stamp! (Make sure you have any advancing caching off.)
posted by RJ Reynolds at 5:30 PM on October 26, 2010

Response by poster: RJ Reynolds - Normally, I'd do exactly as you said, but there'll be a few of us doing it at the same time, so it's not ideal, or even workable, sadly.
posted by General Malaise at 5:42 PM on October 26, 2010

Response by poster: Upgraded to 3.0.1 with surprisingly few problems.
posted by General Malaise at 8:30 AM on October 27, 2010