The Blog Peoria Network

This site is a project no longer. I’ve called this little experiment “The Blog Peoria Project” for a while. Now that there’s more stuff going on here (the host switcheroo is imminent, trust me) and I thought it time to give the joint its grown up name: “The Blog Peoria Network.”

I’ve started using the front page URL (http://blogpeoria.com) in my correspondence instead of the URL for Peoria Pundit. Hopefully, this will expose more people to the many other fine blogs hosted here.

I’ve been chatting with a couple of Peoria bloggers about moving their Blog*Spot sites here. That can happen as soon as the hosting migration and WordPress upgrade is complete.

I’ve been braining storming with my advisers, and a solution should be coming soon on what do do about the frequent outages. The change will probably be somewhat less drastic than I earlier thought. I need to wait to hear from some local folks, then I’ll make an announcement.

It’s essential that a change be made, because the current situation isn’t working for my host, it’s not working for me and not for readers and fellow bloggers. I want to grow this site, and it can’t happen when I can’t even open admin pages every time I try.

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve added some content to the sidebars of most member blogs. These additions include:

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Solution: The Blog Peoria Project.

Sign up for a free site (donations accepted) and you will find a free already installed utility that lets you automatically import your posts from Blog*Spot to Blog Peoria. If you’ve been using Blogger’s own commenting system, you will even get to keep your comments.

That’s what I did with my old, hardly used heinleinblog site. I went from heinleinblog.blogspot.com to heinleinblog.blogpeoria.com.

Blog Peoria offers close to 200 pre-installed themes. Some of the blogs include a “sidebar editor” that lets you add buttons and counters, even BlogAds and Google AdSense.

Just follow the simple instructions. I’ll even help if you need it, but I do charge a fee for creating a template JUST for your use, with all the bells and whistles. But the vast majority of recreational bloggers can do very well with what I have already installed.

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word press, blogger import, robert a heinlein