Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with blog and community

Print is dead; help me replace it

TochterAusElysium — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:16:34 -0800

What's the best platform for a local community news and events site? I've volunteered to set up a site which will serve as a news source, events calendar, and community hub for an area encompassing three or four small cities. I've done personal blogs, and a single-area blog in Blogger, but for this larger project I'd like to expand my options. Is Wordpress a better way to go?

Are there other platforms I should look at? I know Ning is dead or dying (or so I've heard) but it seemed to have the flexibility to do something like this. I don't mind learning a new system, but I'm not a programmer, so I don't feel ready to build a site from scratch. Ideally, there is a pre-existing community news platform that I can customize to be exactly what is wanted.

Also, do you know of any local blogs or community news sites that are well-designed and useful that I could look at as reference?

Many thanks in advance!

Do no harm

rosswald — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:41:18 -0800

Any recommendations for (preferably) online Public Health Journals, Communities, or Blogs? I sat in a room with Commissioner Frieden today and that, plus my friend giving me all of her GRE equipment, has motivated me to pursue my public health career.

Help make grandpasboringstories.com a reality!

Magnakai — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:09:43 -0800

What's the best software to start an easy-to-use community blog/wiki website? The focus is on ease of use for a wide range of users, allowing people to write articles, upload photos, sound and potentially video. I'm totally out of touch with the modern state of blogging software and wiki software, so I'd appreciate any guidance here.

I've been charged with starting a site where a large number of (mostly middle-aged and older) family members from across the world will be able to write about their memories, tell stories and generally ramble on in an entertaining manner. They'll also need to be able to upload photos and (less importantly, but it'd be nice) other media, such as audio and video.

We don't want them to get discouraged by a complicated interface, weird markup or anything else like that. The lowest possible point of entry would be the best one. I'm considering making it totally open, without any need for a login, though that might be a bit dangerous around the spam-bots.

I've searched through the Expression Engine plugins and couldn't find anything relevant. I've also looking through some of the Movable Type one and tried to look through some Wordpress ones, but to no avail. There are tons of each, though, so I may well have missed something useful.

Actually, as I'm typing this, I just realised that something like MeFi could well be useful, especially if there was a way to easily upload and embed images into posts.

Any suggestions would be most welcome! Thanks!

Also, that's a joke URL. Honest!

Best non-Flickr Collaborative Photo Sites?

clever sheep — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:44:33 -0800

Do you remember a global online photo project where individuals took pictures of themselves in their room? If it's still out there, I need to find it, as well as other examples of collaborative, possibly community-building blog-style photo sites that aren't Flickr. My Google-fu has failed, although I did find some neat things along the way (laundry swapmeet, tabblo). Help me, o hivemind!

I am trying to convince my somewhat skeptical big'n'traditional employer that two work teams, separated by distance and culture, could possibly feel a bit more connected if they had access to a corporate-sponsored place pooling voluntarily shared images and a bit of explanation about why a particular poster is offering up a particular shot. I'm looking for models of intriguing & inspiring but work-safe topics, clean and thoughtful presentation interfaces, and any administrative best practices you can share from experience. Thank you in advance for your help as I try to give some good people a chance to get to know each other better!

one people, one live. one earth. we. like.the. moon.

es_de_bah — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:33:44 -0800

Where do I find your country's b3ta? that is, all of you non-US mefi's, what site is a good example of exported national consciousness...(before you flag, a bit more inside) (i'm not trying to paint anyone in broad strokes here, but:)
Now I've been visiting b3ta.com for a while (since before rathergood was in fucking Quizno's addy's!!!) and I've always found it an interesting (if limited) window into the British mindset. Not just for the standard fair of absurdest gif's, but because the topics seemed to follow the papers and the rags and the tabloids in equal measure, and that gave me a unique outsider's view into the UK's national character, much like somethingawful or, dare-I-say, fark might do for the states.

so, Canada, France, japan, Venezuela, Australia, Nepal, Zaire, Uzbekistan, and all the rest of you...

What collaborative site do you think best projects your national character in a humorous and web-friendly way.
If only so the rest of us can get a quick glimpse of your world.
(ok, so i'm looking for broad strokes)

What communities let me set up my blog posts to appear automatically?

misha — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:44:00 -0800

I have three blogs. What communities will allow me to automatically send new blog entries to the community--say in a journal form? One of my blogs is geared towards Moms and families (Mommy blog). I belong to a "Mom" community which allows me to set up my blog so that each new post appears automatically in my journal there (updated daily). In this way, my community friends know when I have made a new post that interests them. My other two blogs deal with relationships and gaming respectively. Anyone know of communities I can join which will allow me similar functionality? In addition, any other Mom communities besides Maya's Moms that will let me do this?

Is there a community for self-hosted bloggers?

raddevon — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:13:36 -0800

BlogFilter: I found the blogfarms too confining for my blog, but I miss the social features. Is there any way to duplicate this for my self-hosted blog? I tried several blogfarms: Wordpress, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Vox. I ended up choosing Vox and started blogging. Then I found their system was quirky. There were some post editing bugs and some features that seemed obvious but just weren't there. Now, I've purchased hosting and setup my own blog with WordPress. I'm very happy with the WordPress Engine, but I miss the social aspects of the Vox site. In particular, I liked the interest groups. I could join and then cross-post a blog entry to an applicable interest groups to get it out there in front of the people who might enjoy reading it. Is there any community site which would provide these types of features but let me bring my own blog? I'm not much interested in the straight-up social networking sites like myspace and facebook unless that's the best option. Is there something targeted to bloggers?

I should also mention that this is a personal blog.

How to build a family website?

mono blanco — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 03:43:45 -0800

How do I build an interactive family website? How do I build an interactive family website?

I'm just now getting up to speed on XHTML and CSS thanks to all the great suggestions in this thread (I'm almost finished with the Head First book, woo hoo!). Now I want to try my hand at building a simple family website which would (1) require a password for entry (2) allow family members to post text and images (3) allow for thread-like discussions and, perhaps (4) permit members to have their own separate pages or sections of the site.

Suggestions? So far I'm doing everything through a text editor to make sure I learn the concepts, but I'd be happy to use appropriate website software. Is this something I should be able to do with, say, WordPress or Moveable Type? Does the interactive element mean I need to learn PHP? My website host says they provide PHP and MySQL Replication, if that's any help.

Free Community Website Hosting

divabat — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:53:22 -0800

Looking for a service to set up and host community websites/blogs for free. Our WorldSmart semester is looking for a place to use as a community website/blog. We want to host writings, photos, other media (files, videos, etc), and possibly a forum.

We don't have a lot of money, it's pretty much unofficial, and we only really need the space for about four months, so it would be a lot better for us to have it hosted on somewhere free. We do have a YahooGroup, but it's private and doesn't offer everything we want.

We're looking for a place with the following features:

* Blog
* Photo Gallery
* Forum or some other form of communication
* Some place to upload files
* Multiple authors (some sort of profile section?)

Limits are OK but there's a lot of us so we may need to accomodate that. My Google-Fu isn't working so well, so many apologies if this has been asked before.

Thanks!