June/Ju;y 2006

Volume 46, Number 6

Adding a Blog to Your Chapter Website

by Tom H. Johnson, Suncoast Chapter
Reprinted with permission from Tieline

I recently tried an experiment with our static, boring chapter Web site that no one seemed to visit: I turned it into a collaborative, interactive Weblog on which members could publish content, comment on others’ posts, and subscribe to feeds. With high hopes, I picked the perfect design, defined engaging topic categories, and added user-friendly content about publishing. The result? Not what I expected. The site did not become a hub of interaction, as I thought it might. It has,
however, provided an intriguing introduction to content management.

Evolution of Blogs

First, a brief explanation of blogs. Blogs did not start out fashionable. The idea of publishing online diaries of the mundane aspects of one’s personal life clouded the initial potential of this medium. But if you left the blogging conversation back then, you have some catching up to do.

Blogs have since become topic-oriented and highly fashionable. For example, it is not uncommon for companies to have their own blogs—take a look at googleblog.blogspot.com/ or the Stonyfield Yogurt site (www.stonyfield.com/weblog/ BovineBugle/index.html). Now some companies are using blogs as internal communication tools, with Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/blogs/) at the forefront. Each Sun employee can start a blog about whatever he or she wants, and there are now 2,000 employee blogs. Blogging has morphed into group blogging—the only real way to sustain interesting and frequently updated content.

Advantages of Chapter Blogs

The many advantages of blogs make the medium too attractive to pass up. The content is XML-based and each post is formatted in an RSS feed. RSS feeds allow your content to be automatically syndicated across hundreds of sites and newsreaders. Readers can subscribe to your site’s feed and receive the content in their newsreader (some examples of newsreaders are Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator, and
FeedDemon). This capability allows you to bring the site to your readers, rather than waiting for them to come to you.

Blogs are also interactive. They allow each member to post content and comment on others’ posts. For chapters whose participation at monthly meetings is low, an online interactive medium can supplement member mingling and involvement.

Blogs also offer ease of site management. You can get your site up and running in five minutes, change its design on the fly, publish content in seconds from any computer, and delegate ownership of pages to specific members. When you need to update a page, you navigate to it and click an Edit button, which appears only to you. In literally two clicks you can update and republish the content.

Disadvantages of Chapter Blogs

Unfortunately, many people think RSS feeds are only for tech geeks, and even fewer use newsreaders. Even worse, members rarely publish content. For example, how many voluntary submissions come in each month for your newsletter? Expect the same with your blog, which can double as a newsletter. (In fact, I think traditional newsletters are on the way out—with RSS feeds, readers can get content as soon as it is published.)

Another disadvantage is that, while the skins or themes (which determine the color, layout, and style of the site) have infinite variety, you’ll want to customize your theme to fit your chapter’s needs. This requires some tweaking of PHP code, which is not always immediately intuitive. PHP is also unforgiving: forgetting the closing tag of a bulleted list, for example, can completely disorient your site’s layout. Or, if one PHP include is out of place, the site may not appear at all.

You can get a handle on the technical issues easily enough (support forums and instruction are plentiful). What’s hard is generating interesting content on a regular basis—the key factor for any successful blog. It’s easy to run out of both time and ideas. Group bloggers can often sustain the site’s need for continual feeding, but if you’re all alone, this may be a heavy burden to bear.

What I Learned

While our Suncoast chapter blog hasn’t exactly ignited, I’ve found the content management aspects of blogging software to be a more efficient, appealing way to maintain a chapter Web site. It’s much easier to publish and update content through the blog’s admin console rather than FTP-ing individual HTML pages. When it’s time to change the look and feel of the site, the blog’s includes, style sheets, and themes make it simple to change.

After using blogging software, traditional HTML sites seem old-fashioned to me. Blogging software provides content management systems “for the masses,” as Tim Carter (see the December 2005 Intercom) and others have said. Now that I’ve converted my blog into a mini-CMS, I’m not heartbroken if no one posts. I know that I’ve saved myself a lot of time and made site maintenance novel. I feel that I’m on the edge of how Websites will be created and maintained in the future.

Implementing Your Own Blog

Most likely you’re not eager to drop your entire site and convert it to a CMS blog as I did. But if you want to experiment with a blog, you can add it as a link to your site. Here’s a three-step process for doing that:

1. Go to Wordpress.com and click Get a WordPress Blog now. Register and get your log-in information for your site. There are other blog options—TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Drupal, Pmachine—but if your Web host uses cPanel (an administrative tool), you can use the Fantastico feature to easily install WordPress’s database onto your host.)
2. Add a link to your blog on your Website’s home page.
3. Start posting content.

Of course, you’ll want to define categories, change images, customize headings, alter colors, pick themes, create static pages, and adjust other details to customize your blog. WordPress provides copious, albeit scattered, instructions. From the home page at WordPress.org, click the Docs link to see instructions on the basics of site configuration, the Extend link to peruse different designs, and the Support link to ask questions.

I’ve found the Connections theme to be the easiest to work with, and I’ve taken a few notes on how customize it (see stc-suncoast.org/customizing-connections).

Suppose you don’t want to merely link to your blog, but
actually display the posts on your Web site’s home page, which
is written in HTML? You can do this. Just create your blog, get
your feed’s URL, and then follow these steps:

1. Go to www.feeddigest.com and sign up for a free account. This site will convert your RSS feed into a format that can appear on your Web site’s HTML page.
2. In FeedDigest, generate your feed’s output in HTML and copy the JavaScript code. (The site walks you through this process.)
3. Paste the JavaScript code into Notepad to strip away any hidden formatting, and then copy and paste from Notepad into your home page. The loading time of the blog may not be very fast on your site, though.

There are certainly other tools to convert RSS to HTML (such
as feedforall.com), but this is a starting point. I must add that
I haven’t experimented much with the latter method. I used
cPanel’s Fantastico and installed the database directly on our host.

Future of RSS

RSS is not a passing phenomenon. It’s here to stay. For
example, take a look at www.nytimes.com and click the XML
button at the bottom. You can see how feeds are separated by
topic. STC also offers a general news feed to which you can
subscribe. And the new STC Forum (stcforum.org) allows you
to subscribe to specific feed categories (click the RSS Feeds
link at the top for details).

I plan to continue blogging on our chapter site. Sooner or later it will catch on. And as the Web transforms into a more collaborative, interactive space (the transformation known as “Web 2.0”), getting involved in a site’s content will be natural, even if you’re only reading it for the first time.