New Open Adoption Support site in beta!
Jan 18, 2009 Adoption
The old site was so clunky, so hard to get around and so difficult to maintain that I have long wanted to move it to my beloved WordPress. Also I know WordPress would bump our google ratings so that more people who need us could find us. I was holding out for BuddyPress to come out of beta but the more I read about it, the more I knew that it would be a huge new learning curve and meanwhile the hosting account for the old OAS install was about to come due. So I had to do something.
I decided to go ahead and make the leap figuring I could do a lot with plugins that would give the community functionality and hopefully up our participation. So the new site is here: http://www.openbookblogging.com (the OAS.com domain will go live there on Valentine’s Day).
Anyone has the ability — nay, the RIGHT — to post on the blog. Logging in will take you to a truncated WordPress dashboard and you can add blog posts and events. You can’t edit anyone’s posts but your own (and no one’s comments but your own) but you can see them all there. Don’t freak out — you’re not on the true backend and you can’t break anything. Also when you login, you will automatically have access to the forum.
The forum is for members only. I thought about making it read-only for folks outside the community but decided against it to encourage greater sharing. I can create more forums if people need them but after talking to Brandy and Jenna, I decided not to break the forums up by triad members. (I think this makes things more divisive and Brandy & Jenna, who have much more adoption forum experience, affirmed this.
Things still left to do:
- I was able to bring over all the content but when I imported it, it came in with me as the author. I’m working on fixing this. It also stripped the names from comments and that I can’t fix. Anyway I need to remap the posts.
- And I need to add the links.
- And I need to write some how-to info for members.
Those of you who are members can login with your old username and password but you should edit your profile details. If you have trouble getting in, let me know. (If you have trouble with anything, let me know.)
I’m using an alpha (not ready for the wild) version of BBPress, the forum software, because it’s the only one that integrates so well with WordPress 2.7. Which means it may have some bugs and it doesn’t have some functionalities I wanted (private messaging). I hope this will change as the software improves.
Anyway! Try it out. Let me know what you think!
Tags: adoption community, adoption support, BBPress, drupal, open adoption, open adoption support, openadoptionsupport.com, openness, wordpress, wordpress 2.7
Things I want to learn to do
Jan 6, 2009 Writing, work work work
- Podcast: But not a regular Podcast thing — more like a documentary via Podcast. (I’m thinking I’m going to hit up chivespa to help me learn to do this!)
- MU Wordpress: To run BuddyPress and switch Open Adoption Support over to this much easier to understand social networking software.
- A little video editing. Not much but a little.
- Gimp. And thank goodness the Fuse Factory is going to offer a Gimp workshop!!
I think that’s it.
I want to do some adoption activism/art with other people and that’s why I want to learn to do these things. And most especially I want to make Open Adoption Support easier for people to use and to navigate. Drupal is just way too clunky and I’m frustrated with it. If I’M frustrated, I can only imagine how annoyed the people who didn’t build it must feel trying to get in there and use the features.
The problem is that MU Wordpress requires a more expensive server and it’s not in my budget right now. Well, another impetus to make more money, eh?
Tags: activism, Adoption, buddypress, drupal, networking, open adoption, open adoption support, openadoptionsupport.com, wordpress, wordpressmu, working
Twitter landing pages
Jan 5, 2009 Writing, work work work
I woke up and my email box was overflowing and overdemanding. The onslaught slowed down but I haven’t yet and feel like I’m about to run into a wall because my feet keep on running. (Momentum — what would I do without you? Oh yeah, nap.)
I made a twitter landing page over at my clips site. I thought I’d write about it some in case any of y’all are interested (I think it’s a good tool for anyone who’s marketing themselves/their work and is also on twitter).
So a landing page (if you haven’t been immersed in web 2.0 marketing and really, if you haven’t then consider yourself lucky) is the page on which you land from some other place. So, for example, on a blog lots of people don’t come in to the front page — they come in to individual entries (because someone linked to that entry or they’re clicking through their feedreader to comment or they’re coming in on a search term). Each page of your blog is potentially a landing page. (This also gets into the value of having different sidebars for different parts of your site but I digress. That might be worth talking about another time because lately I’ve been all about building individual sidebar pages for my clients — so useful!!)
Twitter lets you have one “about me” link and I was using my regular old dawnfriedman.com site. Problem is, that site gives them a decent picture of my freelance writing but a lousy picture of my marketing communications work and my social media strategizing. I used to try juggling two twitter accounts to keep my personas separate but then 1) couldn’t keep up; and 2) realized it was impossible to keep ‘em separate any old way. So I built a page in the WordPress install powering my clips site and then hid it via this pagemash plugin so it wouldn’t show up on my navigation menu (because that would look sloppy to me). Now my twitter account link helps people understand the various things I do because twitter is a great networking tool.
If you’re on twitter and you’re using it in part to get the word out about you and your work, you might find a twitter landing page is a good idea. Likewise you can build landing pages for other accounts like your email sig or what-have-you. It can be kind of useful.
(By the way, on twitter I’m thiswomanswork if you want to follow.)
Tags: freelance writing, marketing, marketing communications, networking, Open Book Strategies, smart cookie communications, twitter, wordpress, Writing
