REPOST TO KEEP DISCUSSION ALIVE
To thread or not to thread?
I have had many requests for establishing a real open forum off of this blog and have been exploring various forum software and message board packages. I have not been convinced of any ONE system as being both the best to use, best to read, and easiest to administer. While everything is a trade off I would appreciate more help for the readers of Dvorak Uncensored. I will repost this message as often as needed at the top of the blog. Thanks,
John
Telligent Systems Community Server has blogs, forums, and photo galleries. You can turn any of them off and use just one piece, like the forums. And CS runs on .NET, is free, and you can modify the source all you want. It’s also used by some of the largest forums on the web, such as forums.asp.net and the XBox forums. As a dislaimer, I do work for Telligent.
Split the blog into three forums, like your California idea.
Dvorak Left forum
Dvorak Center forum
Dvorak Right forum
And while you are at it, you might as well provide Spanish for non-English reading readers. It seems to work good as it is now. A text only version might be good for PDA and mobile users. How about some biofeedback buttons…Just kidding.
Take a look at JForum, same funcionality of phpBB, without the security holes:
Dear John,
T.C. wrote, “All I want is an indicator for Jim’s comments that sez “non-sensical blather” or “at least mildly relevant”, and a way to toggle the former on and off.” I wonder what T.C. will pay you for this functionality!
Geez it’s just a blog T.C.. It’s Johns blog, so if he wants to delete all of my comments that’s just fine. I think blogging is going to fizzle out sooner or later. Here’s a thought. Beware of the ‘Halli-bloggers. Click Fraud and Halli-Bloggers http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/16/technology/16online.html
Many blogs are just propaganda. The only reason I read this blog is because John writes a column I find worth reading. If John stopped blogging, I’d read his column. If John stopped writing his column, I’d read the blog. When John announces that he is quitting the column writing business and just blogging, you’ll know blogging is here to stay. I sort of believe that we’ll be reading a column by John about the death of blogging before we’ll be reading a blog post here that says John quit writing his column. Reason: Blogging has no major support among mainstream advertisers. Good content is expensive to produce (advertisers know this) and that’s what makes it worth watching, reading or hearing. You can write the news yourself, if that’s what you want to do. Don’t expect to be considered a news source because you have a blog. News has an editorial process that usually works well. When it doesn’t work, blogging may have some value. That value doesn’t translate into any significant revenues for the average blogger. Blogging is great as an academic idea, but as far as making a business out of it, you are wasting your time. Go for broke if you want. Charge a subscription fee to a blog and see who signs up, then you know what it’s worth. Maybe nothing! Most blogging is worthless and the bloggers make demands. Blogging is a big something for nothing shell game. Write a letter to the editor and get some ink. This blog bubble is going to burst. Luckily nobody has a lot invested into blogging, so the damage won’t be bad. There are always the free forums to write and books. Stop blogging and write a book. Don’t give the book away for free! THE END
Sincerely,
The Retired Blogger
P.S. I’m going back to books, papers and real reading.
Hey Mr. Dvorak,
I did a fair amount of research before putting my own site up. Installed a fair number of CMS/blog/community/whatever systems, fiddled with them, weeded out the ones I did not like.
Point Number One: At that time, I didn’t know about http://opensourcecms.com/, which lets you try out the various systems available. They’re pre-installed at the tryout site so you don’t need to bother with that. And you can usually try BOTH the administrator and the reader interfaces. An excellent resource!
Point Number Two: having tried a bunch of systems, I settled on Drupal (http://drupal.org). I’ve been using it for a year and love it. With the right addon modules it includes everything you need – forums, comments, frontpage news, user blogs and so on. Any feature can be turned off or on as you choose, and with the them engines it’s easy to edit your look and feel. Best of all, everything is well integrated so you don’t have a hodgepdge makeup of several systems duck-taped together. I’ve been using Drupal for over a year now and it’s a solid system. I’m not the only one; some pretty big players (Debian Planet, Linux Journal, Yahoo) are also using it.
My $0.02,
Bryan