From New Voices:
Ten innovative citizen media projects have been selected as this year’s New Voices grant winners and will each receive up to $17,000 in start-up funding.
Many of this year’s winners focus on special-interest communities as well as geographic locales. One grantee will create a new model for regional news coverage in Ohio and Indiana. Others will start news and social networking sites for war veterans, families of prisoners, aviation buffs, immigrant and Native American communities and the eco-conscious.
I like running Blog Peoria, although I don’t have nearly enough time to devote to it as I should. I’m going to be upgrading soon, and after the fine folks at BuddyPress are done working out the kinks, I’ll be making this site more of a social site. If it all works out, I’ll be moving Peoria Pundit posts over here, and pointing the PeoriaPundit.com domain here. It’s gotta take less energy running one WordPress installation instead of one.
Someone has deliberately corrupted my core files. Anytime anyone uses a widget in their blog, the site re-directs to a pharmacy site. The solution is to temporarily dewidgetize your side and use the default sidebars.
If your site now loads normally, do nothing.
I am going to upgrade to the latest version of WPMu as soon as time permits.
THIS is what I spent most of my day off trying to figure out.
A long time ago, when I created Peoria Pundit, it was called Bill’s Content. I hosted the site with a crappy company called Affordable Host. I later changed the name of the site, started using the name Peoria Pundit, and moved the entire mess over to A Small Orange. Affordable Host was run by morons, while the good folks at ASO have been great.
Unfortunately, I left my domain name registration at Affordable Host, which was later purchased by DotCanada.com. Apparently, this is a case of one group of idiots buying out another. No matter how many times I’ve told these morons to start sending me billing information to an email address that I actually can still use, they absolutely insist on sending it to one I do not have any access to anymore since I’ve moved three times and switched ISP’s twice.
Well, today my domain name registration lapsed. Apparently, it lapsed after DotCanada’s billing department went home for the day. All of them. And no one answering phones in the tech support department has any access to any information at all except what number I should call tomorrow. And judging from their attitudes, it was a huge inconvenience to talk to me, too.
Funny, I thought the Internet was open 24/7. Silly me.
Which means PeoriaPundit.com is sick in bed with the I’m-doing-business-with-a-bunch-of-idiots flu until sometime after 8 a.m. tomorrow when the oh-so-important billing department opens.
I may record the call and play it for my readers’ amusement. But then this is a family blog.
I created the The Blog Peoria Project to encourage neighborhood-based citizen journalism. And to some extent it has succeeded. But I was kinda hoping for more. I envisioned it as a network of blogs, but it’s mostly a locally-based free blogging service, with no more interaction between members than would exist between any group of bloggers.
Soon, the fine folks at Automattic will release something called BuddyPress, which will take an existing WordPress Multi User site like BPP and make it more of an interactive social network, with blogs as just one component. Features will include personal messages between members, member albums, friends lists, a front page that aggregates to member content, and more. A feature I’m excited aboutis one that allows members to form and administrate their own groups
Buddy Press (actually, a series of plugins) is still under development, and as soon as a stable version is out, I’ll upload them all.
Cross posted to Peoria Pundit.
Some of you may have already noticed: I’ve switched out the “favicon” for many BlogPeoria sites. The favicon is the little image that appears next to the blog URL in the address bar. Since the last upgrade, the default favicon was the blue-on-white Greek “Mu” letter. This bugged me, since I once as using a hand-made yellow-on-maroon “bp” symbol. I finally got around to deleting the old “Mu” and switching it with the “bp.” Unfortunately, some sites continued to render the old symbol. I tried deleting, but it didn’t work. So, I spent a few minutes manually adding a line of code to the themes of the most popular Blog Peoria Project blogs.
From now on, the only time you will see the “Mu” icon is on administration pages.
ALSO: I removed the plugin that let users scrape content from other sites. The only other site that was using it behind my own heinleinblog was abusing it.
Askewed News is coming back. I swear. I needed to find some software to open a “zipped” database. I’ll get her posts loaded back up sometimes tonight hopefully. I thought the backup database was corrupted (which would be BAD). It turns out it was my compression software. I’ll have it uploaded as soon as I can find some time. I planned to do it today, but there was breaking political news.
UPDATE: The upload was a success and everything is working fine as far as I can see. Again, my apologies.
I’ve installed a new plugin that’s available for use by members.
It’s called “WP-Autoblog.” It’s designed to automatically add content to your blog. This is how it works: Once activated, you enter an RSS or Atom field into a form found on the “Options” panel. The plugin takes the results and posts them on your blog. The results can be an excerpt of the entry or the full entry, and the original author can be mentioned/liked or not.
Folks, this plugin has the potential to be used for scraping — blogs that contain nothing but content stolen from other blogs. But that doesn’t have to be the case, I’m using it on heinleinblog to generate links of interest to Heinlein fans. I’m using the RSS feed for a Google News search for “Robert Heinlein.” I use the results to create original entries that go beyond the sort of “scraping” that you see so often these days. This requires a bit of editing AND adding content after the entry appears on my site.
Anyone can use this if they want, But PLEASE be careful.
I have manually activated Akismet spam blocking for three member blogs during the past two days. One Blog Peoria member (who shall remain nameless) has 39,000 comments in the moderation queue. That is NOT good. You cannot even get the “moderate comments” page to load with so many.
Also, if you logged into the admin panel today, you’ve noticed some changes to the news feeds. The admin dashboard opens to a page showing the posts on the front page of The Blog Peoria Project, as well as links to member posts. Cool, huh.
Now that we’ve kicked out the riff-raff (spam blogs, spammers), the Blog Peoria Project is down to a core group of bloggers. We’ve got room for more.
Who who should be making use of this site? Here are some ideas:
- Professional people: Doctors, lawyers, Realtors, teachers, etc. ought to have their own blogs, if for no other reason than to promote themselves. But There’s also room for “pundit”-style blogs that focus on these news in these fields.
- Neighborhood activists: Peoria is a collection of neighborhoods. Every neighborhood organization needs to have it’s own Website with contact information, as well as a way to point readers to information that can use. Blogs are perfect for this.
- Students: Anyone can have a MySpace or Facebook site. Why not take the blogging experience one step further and try out some citizen journalism, the kind you can’t do in your school newspaper?
- Politicians and public servants: Other than going door-to-door, I can’t think one single thing that equalizes the relationship between the governors and the governed than when a politician blogs and lets readers respond unedited.
As always, The Blog Peoria Project is here to lend hands-on support that you won’t get from Blog*Spot.
Here’s some exciting news for Blog Peoria Project members who want to drive traffic to their sites. I have installed and activated a new plug that generates single RSS feeds for posts and comments for ALL Blog Peoria Project member blogs. Ive used these feeds create links to the 10 most recent Blog Peoria member posts and comments made to Blog Peoria blogs.
If you are looking at this site shortly after I wrote this post, you might see links to some spam blog posts. That’s because I installed the plugin before I EVERY BLog Peoria member get a little expire. The URL for the feeds can be copies my right-clicking on the orange “RSS” buttons on the top of the sidebar lists. I do encourage members to place these site-wide feeds on their blogs. A feed with a dozen or more new posts a day is going to be read more than a feed that gets one or two updates a day.
Even more good stuff is coming down the pike.
To put it in language a high-priced consultant would understand: These new feeds a tool in our belt that will allow us to leverage the synergies of a hyper-local community-based multi-blog site for maximum benefit. As more blogs join up to partake in all this synergy, critical mass will be reached.