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Post by ryan on Sept 30, 2006 3:21:44 GMT -5
I've been working on giving the Indigenous community a new home, on our own webhosting space. So far, I've secured the space (at $9.95 a month, a price which will allow for the expandability we'll need to get the radio-station back on the air), and I've set up a forum, a community blog, and an "entrance page." The place is up, and functional, in a rudimentary sort of way -- but it isn't quite ready for us to move-in just yet. I need some feedback and discussion. First off, I thought it might be cool to have both a "forum" and a community blog. The forum will function pretty much like what we've got here, although it will look a bit different. The blog, on the other hand, will be more focused on our writings than on discussion. It will allow postings and comments from registered users, and it will allow for the posting of images. I envision it as more of a web-magazine than a blog, with the content entirely decided by its contributors. I could see Jeff posting his dissertation here, or Rick and Amanda keeping photo-journals, or any of us writing about interesting events we witness, or posting poetry or movie-reviews or commentary on current events. To get to our website, go to www.indigenousforum.com. Here, you'll find a very rudimentary "entrance page," containing links to the forum, and to the community weblog. I kind of like the idea of having an entrance page such as this, containing a logo for our site, announcements, and blurbs showing excerpts from the most recent blog and forum postings. This should be possible, using some basic PHP code to access the MySQL databases that store all the forum and blog postings. I don't know how to do it just yet, but I can figure it out. So, go explore the new forum and the weblog. Register yourself as a user for both, and try making some postings and comments. I'm sure you'll have lots of questions. I want to know what you like, and what you don't. I will change what I can, in the interest of creating something that all of us will use and enjoy. The categories in the forum, as well as those in the blog, are only temporary for now, and can be changed as we see fit. If any of you has a particular category you'd like to see in the blog or in the forum, submit it here. Also, please note that the "look" of the blog can be changed pretty easily to one of about a million different "themes." The theme it's using right now is called "Positive Feeling 1.0," and I have no idea why it contains a picture of Stonehenge. I just liked the color-scheme. If you guys like this theme, we can replace the picture of Stonehenge with a suitable logo (volunteers, anyone?). If you don't like this theme, go to themes.wordpress.net/, and browse through the hundreds available. Furthermore, I can customize the look of our blog to suit, within certain parameters. Again, this is something I don't know how to do right now, but I can dig into it and figure it out; it's all just CSS, HTML, and some PHP. Anyone who's interested in getting into the development side of this site, please let me know. I don't mind handling it myself, but my time is precious and I'm certain this project will be slow-going if I'm the only one involved. |
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Post by ryan on Sept 30, 2006 3:30:51 GMT -5
One more thing just occurred to me: If you all like the idea of the "webmagazine" blog, we could actually nix my idea of having an "entrance page," and just have www.indigenousforum.com take you straight into the blog. From there, we could have links to the forum and to the (future) radio station in the sidebar. That might seem more cohesive. I dunno. There's something I like about having an entrance-page -- but then, I kind of feel like it's a bit redundant. |
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Post by ryan on Sept 30, 2006 23:23:23 GMT -5
I noticed Tyler's logged-in and tried posting a few items in the new forum. Thanks, Ty. Be sure and let me know of any problems or questions you have.
By the way, in order to contribute to the blog, you have to register there too. You'll find the registration link over to the right, in the orange sidebar, under "Meta." For now, anyone who registers can immediately start contributing articles. I'll leave it like this unless it becomes problematic. So please, test out the blog as well as the forum. You don't have to compose anything fantastic. Just register yourself and post a test-entry or two, just to get a feel for how the back-end works. I can wipe-out all the "test blog" entries anytime we feel like we're ready to actually start using the blog.
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Post by jtmx1 on Oct 1, 2006 23:33:50 GMT -5
Wow, amazing work Ryan. I've been sort of busy this weekend, but I'll call you this week.
Jeff
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Post by jtmx1 on Oct 3, 2006 0:59:31 GMT -5
So, I will back this board up in the next day or so. Should we lock it down or leave it open? I am hoping that people will start migrating over to the new board.
Jeff
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Post by ryan on Oct 3, 2006 1:59:00 GMT -5
Jeff,
The new board is certainly functional; the few posts Tyler and I have made have demonstrated that. When I read your last post, my first reaction was to say, "Sure, go ahead and lock this board." But upon reflection, I'm not sure that's the right thing to do just yet. It's only been a few days since I posted my notice here regarding the new website, and judging by the feedback I've received, you and Tyler are the only members of our community who've taken notice.
I don't want to take anyone by surprise, or leave anyone feeling shut-out, by suddenly locking-down this forum. Rather, I think the better course of action is to decide on a "moving date," announce it here and in the banner on this forum's index, and then send an email to every member of our community announcing the date, and notifying everyone that they'll have to update their bookmarks and re-register themselves at the new forum.
Do you think a two-week notice is long enough? Could we set the moving-date to something like "Friday October 13," or would that be too soon? (Hah! I just realized that's Friday the 13th! That would be awesome! I could sooo make light of that in the email!)
Let me know. Later!
Ryan
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Post by jtmx1 on Oct 3, 2006 2:16:41 GMT -5
Friday the 13th it is. We blow this pop stand on the unluck.
Interestingly, if you count the Christian Politics board as part of this online community endeavor, the 13th of October is just right around our 2 year anniversay.
Jeff
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Post by jtmx1 on Oct 3, 2006 2:18:13 GMT -5
Oh, and again, great work Ryan!
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Post by ryan on Oct 3, 2006 2:31:14 GMT -5
Thanks, Jeff! I appreciate it.
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Post by Thanin on Oct 3, 2006 17:12:21 GMT -5
Ryan I think the blog and the intro page are a great idea.. or like you said having just the blog be the intro page is fine too. Perhaps the blod will lend itself more to day to day chat and encourage more creative imput (since at least half of us have personal blogs, people obviously like to blog). However I'm a little confused as to why we need a new message board. I think this MB has quite a history now and we all know it. Do you think it would be ok to just keep this message board?
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Post by Jeff on Oct 3, 2006 18:06:00 GMT -5
The main reason for migrating to the new board is that it will be ours. We buy and pay for the space, so we can do whatever we like. We should be able to host our own images, and eventually content of even bigger file sizes. The proboards people could, theoretically, shut us down any day of the week. We could just wake up and see all our work gone forever. They would owe us no explanation. Furthermore, the proboards forum software is proprietary, and they claim that moving the posts from one place to another is impossible. So all the work that we do over here will be hard (or impossible) for us to use at any later date. The software that Ryan is using will allow us to do all kinds of backups, which we could utilize in any number of creative and interesting ways. (Right, Ryan?) Finally, the new forum is just a first step into entirely new digs for the indigenous community. Eventually we’ll be able—fingers crossed—to host artworks, movies, and songs in dynamic ways. The new functionality will require that we have more control over our space.
David, is your concern that we will lose the content that we’ve created here? If so I am working on a solution to that. At the very least I will be able to provide a CD-Rom with a backup copy of the proboards forum. Is your concern that some members won’t migrate over to the new digs? While that is always possible, I think that when the benefits become known it will look like a pretty good idea to almost everyone.
Jeff
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Post by Thanin on Oct 3, 2006 22:02:59 GMT -5
Ok I was worried about losing the content, but if we've got that covered then thats cool.
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Post by ryan on Oct 3, 2006 22:59:01 GMT -5
In answer to David and Jeff's questions: As with any move, there are pros and cons to our situation. First, the cons: - We do have to pay a monthly fee for our new webhosting space. This is a rate of $9.95/mo, plus a yearly fee of $14 per domain name we have registered. Since we have 2 domain names (indigenousforum.com and roserockradio.com), this brings our yearly total to $147.40, a rate which I feel is pretty reasonable, considering the quality of Wassim's webhosting service and in light of how many members we have. I'm hoping that enough of us will contribute toward this yearly expense that it will become pretty insignificant for everyone who antes up. Like, if 15 of us each donated $10, we'd have it covered. Anyway, more on this later; I'll write a post on the new board explaining the financial side of things.
- Because this forum (our current home) apparently uses a proprietary system to store all our postings, we cannot migrate our data to any other system. This means that we'll be starting from scratch on the new board. This forum would therefore remain up for all of us to reference, but would be locked so none of us could contribute new posts here.
Now, the pros: - Our new forum runs on the phpBB platform. PhpBB is a widely-used and widely-supported open-source program that uses a combination of PHP scripting and MySQL databases to create robust and customizable bulliten-boards. I know that's a lot of jargon. What it breaks down to is this: All the postings on our new board are stored on our server, in a format that can be backed-up and migrated elsewhere as needed. If we ever have to move again in the future, we can take all our PhpBB postings with us.
- Because PhpBB stores all our forum postings within a MySQL database, we can actually call that data from elsewhere. This links back to my idea of doing an "entrance page." When I have the time to do it, I'll sit down and figure out how to write a bit of PHP code that will call-up the most recent forum-posting and list it in a "showcase" blurb on our entrance-page. This blurb will, of course, be updated automatically anytime anyone makes a new forum-posting.
- As Jeff mentioned, the problem with our existing forum is that it uses a proprietary format to store its data, and theoretically, ProBoards could shut us down on a moment's notice. I doubt that would happen -- but then, companies do fold, and if ProBoards did go under, I could see our board disappearing overnight. Having our forum stored in a highly compatible format on our own webhosting space ensures that we'll be able to move our data anywhere we like, anytime we like. So, let's say my friend Wassim sells his "Kmet Hosting" business, and we don't like the new owners. We can back up our databases, secure a new hosting space elsewhere, install PhpBB there, import our databases, and be up and running.
PhpBB, the program that runs our new board, is very cool. To read more about it, go to www.phpbb.com. It's totally open-source, which means that it's free to use, and open for customization. I had the option of choosing from several different bulliten-board programs, each of which would have provided similar functionality -- but in the end, I decided to go with PhpBB because it's so widely-used and well-established. The program basically installs on the server, inside our webhosting space, just as you would install a program on your home computer. Then you configure it and customize it as necessary. Right now, we're running a configured but fairly uncustomized installation. The color-scheme, the graphics, the avatars, the fonts -- just about every aspect of the forum can be customized however we might desire. And of course, if we don't want to get into editing all these things ourselves but would like to change things up a bit, we can always install a different "theme" from the phpbb.com website. Anyway, those are my thoughts on the move. I'm excited about it, and I think we'll see much greater functionality and flexibility with the new system. I wish we could import all our old posts from here, but alas, it looks like that can't be done. |
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Post by Betterout on Apr 17, 2010 10:53:10 GMT -5
So, uh, what's up with the old board being open again? Are we supposed to post here or there? At any rate, I like the new blue look for the board.
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