What's the best method for adding a staff blog to my college paper's existing web site?

January 22, 2007 2:18 PM

I am the editor of my college student newspaper. What is the best way to implement a staff blog on our paper's web site, which uses a proprietary publishing package called College Publisher?

I'd like to implement a staff blog aimed at my writers, photographers and other newspaper staff to communicate various staff information and highlight links to things which they might find interesting or inspiring. In other words, the blog is only for my staff members, and it would not be accessible via our site's front page.

Furthermore, I would like to integrate it seamlessly with my paper's existing College Publisher web site and domain (i.e., www.theaccent.org/staffblog). In addition to being the publishing platform, College Publisher also hosts our site. And although they allow the creation of custom HTML pages (via their web interface), there is no FTP access and they do not (as far as I know) allow any sort of third-party programs/scripts to be installed (i.e., wordpress or movable type).

Therefore, I'm wondering if there's a good way to use a service like blogger.com or wordpress.com to seamlessly integrate a new third-party blog within our existing site, short of just loading a blogger.com page with a frame, for example. Or is there a better strategy I'm overlooking?

Any suggestions?

posted by dustinAFN to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Could you get some server space from the college and change your DNS records so a subdomain (something like staffblog.theaccent.org) would point to the college's server instead of the College Publisher account?
posted by bcwinters at 2:36 PM on January 22, 2007

You need some way of putting data on the site to host a blog.

If you had control of the domain name you could redirect http://blog.theaccent.org to http://theaccent.wordpress.com. This could be done by using your own DNS (ZoneEdit, for example). However, it looks like the domain is registered to College Publisher, so that won't work unless you can control it yourself. A simple meta refresh or frame would be crude, but would work.
posted by null terminated at 2:42 PM on January 22, 2007

This would be a great question for The College Publisher 's technical staff or your account rep. They might be able to work with you to get something hosted on their servers, even if it's a framed page, or to add a subdomain record to DNS so that you could host it elsewhere.

Otherwise, I'd vote for getting a different domain completely and just linking to it.
posted by SpecialK at 3:05 PM on January 22, 2007

If it runs Apache, then it's trivial to make some URL path be handled (a technical term) by some other software like a weblog program.

If it's not running Apache, then you can use Apache as a proxy, passing through all traffic to the "real" server on another server or port, and handling the web-log normally at some URL.

Hosting the content somewhere else is certainly the simplest route. I'd go that route unless you have a good reason to host it in the same place.
posted by cmiller at 3:25 PM on January 22, 2007

College Publisher also hosts our site

Sorry, just noticed that part. Ignore the first two parts of my message, except as ammunition against the tech-support people or sales-people when it comes time to request features or renegotiate.
posted by cmiller at 3:27 PM on January 22, 2007

I've done exactly this when I was Web editor of my CollegePublisher-hosted college newspaper site. I'll post back after work today—if I don't, please e-mail me to remind me! (E-mail in the profile.)
posted by limeonaire at 1:29 PM on January 24, 2007

Okay, I'm back. Been kinda busy.

In any case, here's what we did. There's probably a better way of doing this, but it would involve knowing how to do server-side includes or something JavaScript related, and I certainly didn't and don't know how to do those things.

We got CollegePublisher to set up a redirectish thing for us to www.ourdomain.com/blog. The actual page that would display was a custom page with a really awkward name (hence why we got them to give us a nice clean-looking URL redirect). If you were to go there now, you'd see that it's just a custom page with a set-sized iframe in the middle of it. That's the gist of what we did: we hosted the actual blog on Jablog.com, a now-defunct blogging site which at the time I administrated, then just displayed that through an iframe on the CollegePublisher-hosted custom page.

That make sense?

So given that. here are some options you should think about (and run past the CollegePublisher programmers):

-Hosting your blog on Blogger or on a newspaper-owned server of some sort with Movable Type/WordPress/something similar—which you choose depends on your level of technical expertise—then running it through an iframe or CSS div of some sort on your custom CollegePublisher page. An iframe is simple, but it has some problems, namely that search engines will hate your blog, and will sometimes only index the blog page itself, not the custom CollegePublisher page the iframe is displaying it on. The CSS div would be the way to go—but good luck trying to implement it.

-Hosting your blog on LiveJournal or another hosting provider that automatically generates an RSS feed for it, then somehow funneling that RSS feed into your custom CollegePublisher page to duplicate your posts there. The problem with this is finding a way to make it so people can comment on these posts without leaving your newspaper's site ('cause you don't really want them to leave, and you do want to encourage commenting).

-Simply using the CollegePublisher backend to update a static custom page. The downside of this is that then there's no way to add comments, unless you were to somehow rig up an external comment service (HaloScan? something like that) to provide a comment function.

-Talk to the CollegePublisher people (their contact info is in the control panel somewhere, as I recall) and ask whether they've successfully provided a blog kind of thing for any other newspapers. If not, ask them to develop it as a feature. If so, find out how they did it and see if they can set the same thing up for you guys. It may be that they can host a Movable Type/WordPress solution for you on their server, or that they have some way of using the normal "article comments" feature in a blog-like way on a custom page.

Also, I'm looking at the CP control panel now, and it looks like these days they give you the option of creating your own www.yoursite.com/whatever redirect for each custom page. So that simplifies that quite a bit. (To create a custom page, all you have to do is go to Presentation, then look at the Custom Pages area on the left. There you have the options Create Page and Edit Page.)

I hope that helps—please e-mail me or comment back if you have any further questions!
posted by limeonaire at 4:59 PM on January 26, 2007