Writing on the site

Records, publishing, shop etc.
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danny
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Writing on the site

Post by danny » Mon Feb 04, 2008 9:01 pm

I just had a wee look at what people have written under "collective" and it's the same as it was years ago. I remember the wordpress thing was painfully clumsy to use, requiring a lot of annoying fiddling to stop all the text overlapping, so like everyone else who has put an entry on the site, I gave up. Is there any way we can open up the site for people's writings a bit? Make the wordpress user friendly?

chombee
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Post by chombee » Tue Feb 05, 2008 12:09 pm

I've actually been thinking about this and talking to a few people. But my idea was to make it easier to post the site by ... using wordpress instead of what we have. Now I am confused. The site already has wordpress? Wordpress is clumsy?

I thought that posting to a wordpress blog was as easy as posting to the bb, and so I thought that maybe more people would post then.

Try going to http://wordpress.com/ and signing up for a blog. It only takes a second, just sign up under a madeup name and then make a post with some gibberish in it just to see what it's like. You just press the New Post button and then type into the box. Do we already have this on the site? If the text is running into itself is that a stylesheet issue?

My idea was actually to replace the whole site with a wordpress blog. It would be a group blog that lots of different people can get their own accounts for and post to. Hopefully the site would become a stream of information about what goes on at forest. Like, events postings from Dai, working group meeting reminders and minutes, Golden Hour posters from Ryan, Bounce posters from Danny, the theatre group, etc. etc., everyone's stuff would just get posted and go into one stream. Then you would really have a one-stop site to see what goes on at the forest. If everyone posted to it.

The point is that all people have to do is click Post, type into the box, then click Publish. And yet the blog automatically organises it all into a stream that you can scroll up and down, and even archives the old posts for us and gives us an RSS feed. So we ought to get a site that is comprehensible to navigate but that is still all eclectic because of the range of different people posting different things. Could it work?

(P.S. I just looked at your Collective page Danny, if it is indeed a wordpress blog that is running that it looks like one with a serious stylesheet issue. We could just choose a cool theme from here http://themes.wordpress.net/ and then customise it to make it forest).
I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...
Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

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ravanwin
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Post by ravanwin » Tue Feb 05, 2008 12:24 pm

i've updated my page recently:

http://www.theforest.org.uk/rvw-the-journalism/

a brilliant new piece on hotel du vin!

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beev
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Post by beev » Tue Feb 05, 2008 3:39 pm

We had a wordpress blog tacked onto the site, but it is long gone. I think wp is very smooth to use and easy to look at, tho I'm not sure if it is up to giving us a fully functional site. Wp makes it easy to publish your thoughts in a matter of seconds, but is it up to hosting all our media stuff, and presenting it in a coherent way?

danny
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Hmmnn..

Post by danny » Tue Feb 05, 2008 5:03 pm

I found that the words all overlapped each other after you clicked publish and that you had to re-edit the thing painstakingly to get a half-decent layout. Something to do with the sylesheets? It's been a long time since I did any web-design stuff and I didn't really get to grips with it, but I'll maybe give this another look and see if I can get anything happening. Err.. Sometime.. Maybe...

chombee
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Post by chombee » Tue Feb 05, 2008 8:31 pm

Danny, that definitely doesn't normally happen with wordpress. It sounds like your stylesheet was messed up. It shouldn't have been,

Beev:
Wp makes it easy to publish your thoughts in a matter of seconds, but is it up to hosting all our media stuff, and presenting it in a coherent way?
Yeah that's the question. I haven't yet poked through the forest to see what's there and try to figure out how much of it could be easily done with wordpress. What stuff were you thinking of in particular?
I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...
Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

chombee
Posts: 1327
Joined: Thu Apr 20, 2006 3:01 pm

Post by chombee » Tue Feb 05, 2008 8:33 pm

Oh, P.S., another point about the existing site. Ryan updates his page. No one knows. I don't think there is any way to know when something gets updated except to browse to that page? If Ryan had a blog category instead, then what Ryan posts would pop up on the front page in with everything else.
I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...
Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

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