So we now have project blogs on Openplans. The next obvious step is to set up personal blogs for our users. When we were talking about this today morning, David Winslow brought up an extremely good point:
If he wants to write a post on his personal blog, and he wants it to show up on the Opencore software blog as well, does he have to write the blog post twice?
Some people want all their blog posts (whether the posts are associated with a project or not) in one area. Nick and I started thinking about ways to do this. One way is to introduce personal blogs and get rid of project blogs. On a user’s personal blog, he can categorize each of the blog posts. If a user wants his post to show up on a project “blog” page, then the user can categorize his post to be the name of the project. So if David blogs in his personal blog about project A, B, and C, he would categorize his posts accordingly.
To make this happen I think we should first enable personal blogs. We should then migrate project blog posts, to their writer’s personal blogs (and then categorize them accordingly). Then make it so that when the url www.openplans.org/projects/opencore/blog/ is hit, we aggregate all personal blogs that have the category of “opencore”. What do people think?
I really don’t like this — I think there’s a lot to be said for a real project blog which is distinct from the aggregation of all its users. It just *feels* very, very different and I think it would discourage people from using project blogs as an “official” place to publish.
Other possible solutions:
* ability to post content to multiple places (so I make a blog post and post it to my personal blog and also to my project’s blog)
* don’t have personal blogs at all, but have *personal* blogs just be the aggregation of all *project* blog posts written by the user
* have a blog dashboard screen per-user where a user can easily write a blog post to any of his blogs (whether his personal blog or one of his projects’)
But I can see downsides to all of these too, so I dunno.
Comment by ejucovy on November 20, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I wonder if we can keep project blogs and just have better ways to aggregate external content? I wonder if there might already be a way to grab a blog post from another place in the site and re-post it.
Of course with some of the fancier feed aggregating things this can happen in the sidebar. That is, you subscribe a user’s tag feed to the blogroll of the blog, and their posts start appearing on the side. Well… it’s not a blogroll exactly, but there’s several plugins for this sort of thing.
Having the external post show up as a “native” post of sorts is harder, I think. Where should comments go? Is it a copy, or just a reference? In the *feed* it’s really easy to do a reference, since feed items can link to arbitrary locations. In the front page, I don’t know. I think it’s worth exploring what plugins exist for this sort of thing, as I’m pretty sure there are things that already address this basic style of work.
(Is the text size on this comment form just crazy small for me, or everyone?)
Comment by ianb on November 20, 2007 at 2:34 pm
So the comment I made to Nick originally was more oriented toward the way the the site works, rather than how it’s implemented. I haven’t given a lot of thought to how the blog posts should actually be stored, but it seems to me like there’s not really such a thing as a blog post from a project, as distinct from posts about the project by its members. Basically all I was saying is that the user’s blog should include posts they’ve made in the context of projects as well. Both views (all posts for a project and all posts from a user) seem useful and worth having, and I don’t think they conflict.
To be honest, I’m not sure what the distinction is between tagging posts to show up in multiple places and posting the content to multiple places. Would they be separate entities, with their own comments and edit histories? That seems like an unnecessary fracturing of the content.
As for the blog dashboard screen - what i had discussed with Nick and Anil was having a project list for selection available when the user creates a post. if the user clicks ‘post to this blog’ from a project’s blog page, then this will be pre-filled with that project selected, otherwise it won’t have anything selected. the blog post always shows up on the user’s home page blog, and also on whatever projects he/she chooses to associate with the post
Comment by David Winslow on November 20, 2007 at 2:48 pm
I like ejucovy’s third suggestion, because if I want to publish a post on my own personal blog and two of my project blogs, then a dashboard like this, will make it easy. Some things to think about - if I want to edit/delete/etc to one blog post, do I have to go and edit all three? Or should this automatically happen?
I also like ianb’s idea of a blog roll, where non-native posts will show up on a side bar. However, if I am writing a blog post, that makes me make an extra decision. I have to decide which blog my post will show up natively on and which it will show up in the sidebar. Does this imply that a reader has to make a decision on which blog he wants his post to be more relevant on? I am not a huge blog reader, so I am not sure if native blog posts are given more weight/credibility/attention than non-native posts, so maybe this concern of mine is unjustified.
Comment by anilm on November 20, 2007 at 2:56 pm
blogroll posts don’t show up in the feed at all (unless there’s some plugin that does this). They are only viewed in the sidebar, and different implementations do it differently. Some are just static links to blogs (the default WP way, which I find rather useless). Nicer ones come from feeds, and show the most recent post from the linked blogs, maybe sorted by last post. But however it works, only people who actually visit the page see anything.
Now, feeds themselves aren’t restricted like this. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t aggregate or manually include a post from another site on the feed. But I don’t know how easy this is in WordPress. It’s kind of possible right now, since you can give a “link” for your post, which is this kind of retro thing where when a person clicks on the title of the post (on the blog or in a reader) they go to the linked post. And the content is typically a reaction or annotation of the post. This is a really weird flow, so most people just put links in the body of their posts.
But maybe this largely latent piece of functionality is something we can use for moving posts around. Because you could put the entire body of a post in a WP post, and it would show up in the feed and on the front page, etc., but when you click through to it you’ll generally go to the original post. (I’m not sure if you’ll *always* go through to the original post, though; some links will probably take you to the copied post).
I dunno… it feels kind of complicated, but all of this feels a bit complicated. Linking to all your blogging options isn’t complicated though!
Comment by ianb on November 20, 2007 at 3:44 pm