The Basics

[Simon Thomas]

I just wanted to post a quick summary of what this group is about, and why it exists.

I suggested a while ago that it may be a good idea to have a blog representing the Building a Better Blog community. I suggested this for two reasons. Firstly, we're all bloggers so having a place where we can experiment and learn as a group, can only be a good thing. The second reason is that a blog hosted elsewhere provides a nice method of attracting new members, introducing them to the concept of the community and generally promoting this group.

I think it would be nice to have a list of things we would like to achieve through the Building a Better Blog, Blog. These could be SMART objectives or something more wooly (like learning wordpress). So what would you like to achieve from this blog?

[Christine Martell]

Something that could be interesting is to use the blog to come up with a base set of plugins and features that we suggest as a group. So, we might install one, then run a poll to see if it should stay or go. Get feedback about what would make it better. We could do the same thing with themes, so we get to experiment.

I do recognize that this could get really confusing. However, I find myself guessing a lot when I set these things up (esp when there are options to select), and would love to be able to see what it was really like without having to put my own blog through all the experiments. I'm thinking if the blog was set up with experimentation and exploration as part of the goal, it could be a positive aspect?

I also think it could serve to provide more links to members, and to give us all another platform to link to and from. I would like to see a blogroll page that listed everybody by niche. Right now it's hard to see what people are up to on their own blogs without a lot of effort.

[Simon Thomas]

That's an interesting idea Christine. With regards to plugins, I run a number of blogs and I tend to install exactly the same plugins on all of them. I may not activate them but I find it's just easier to manage. I have a folder on my computer that has the latest versions of all the plugins I use, I download the newest version when one comes out, test it locally, and then sync the folder with my blogs. The only downside is I have quite a lot of plugins to it can take a while to sync, so it's not an ideal solution.

Another thing we could do is show the latest member posts int he sidebar. This would be fairly easy to set up by picking up the RSS feeds (we could use something like Yahoo Pipes or Google Reader or combine multiple RSS feeds into one).

[Michele Martin]

I like Christine's idea of using the blog for experimentation--maybe we could also do some multimedia experiments, like practicing with podcasting or something? Or maybe we try out different tools, etc. and then write reviews?

I also like the idea of using it as a way to attract people to the community here, but then I wonder what we want to write about to do that. It seems like there are a lot of blogs about blogging, so I'm not sure how we would add to the conversation in that way. As a community of bloggers here, what keeps us coming back are the various ways of interacting and the challenges--are these things to somehow recreate in the blog? I'm trying to think about a niche for the blog if it's going to be something besides a place for us to play around.

[Simon Thomas]

I've thought about that exact thing Michele. What can we do with a blog that we currently don't, or can't do here. One thing i came up with could be to summarise the weekly challenges and how the different members of the communities approached them. Some of the weekly challenge threads get quite large and difficult to follow if you come at them afresh. I do like the ideas of reviews. Personally I find some reviews difficult to write (stepping outside of the comfort zone especially), so some practice would be good.

One of the things I like about the idea of a blog is that it's fairly risk free and there's n pressure to perform. Considering one of the main focuses of the blog is to simply experiment and play around, it doesn't really matter whether we get 100 readers or 1000, we're always going to acheive at least part of our goal. So I'm not really concerned about being in a highly competitive niche. I also think we have a unique appeal over the other blogging bloggers in that 1) We don't profess to be experts, 2) We're learning all the time and are willing to share the knowledge and experience with others in the community (and presumably with readers of the blog) and 3) we are a fairly diverse group of people with different skills, experiences and knowledge. I would image that makes for an interesting and varied read.

But then again, I'm always overly optimistic.

[Michele Martin]

I think that everything you're saying makes sense, Simon--you're right that it doesn't really matter as much about the number of readers as it's more of a playground for us. Writing up the results of the challenges might actually be a good approach because that would also be a service to the community.

I had thought about the blog as a potential content management system for us until/if we get wiki capabilities here, too. I've been tagging good articles and resources I find, but I think it would be easier for people if we had some way to manage them. We could potentially do that on the blog, using tags.

[Maya Norton]

Hi Simon,

1. I am interested in your suggestion, but have an informational question here: would a blog or a wiki be better if we are talking about multiple users? I'm not that familiar with wikis so I don't know. Is a wiki it's own beast entirely?

2. I really like the idea of having a place where we can see what our friends in the community did with each challenge, for instance each posting an entry they did that illustrated their efforts to achieve it.

3. Also, I was looking at all the community members listed and was surprised. I didn't realize there were so many because I see the same enthusiastic group of names. Maybe we should focus on integrating all of our own members before we try to attract more-- although more would be nice as well.

Maya

[Michele Martin]

Maya--I agree that one of my personal goals is to try to figure out ways to draw in the rest of the members. You're right that we have a lot of people, but the same smaller group who respond to posts, etc. Do you have any thoughts on how we could do that? I'd love to see more members of the community actively engaged here.

[Maya Norton]

By the way, I tried to join this group and Ning wouldn't allow it.

I wonder if it is an error in the system or just a temporary snafu.

Maya

[Michele Martin]

Hi Maya--you're in the group, so it must have just been a temporary hang-up. I don't think you would have been able to respond to the messages without being a member, actually, although I could be wrong.