WordPress comes with a very good set of moderation tools for you to use.  One of the first things you need to think about when it comes to moderating your site, is what do you or your audience deem as acceptable language?  Acceptable language is subjective and will depend on the target audience and theme of your site.

 
There are words that are generally unacceptable in day to day conversation and therefore, unless your site has a very adult theme, should be blocked.  I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t allow but show you how to block what are generally unacceptable words, once you have done this you can then tweek your settings to suit your site.

To start any form of site moderation you need to go to the dashboard of your WordPress site and from the menu on the left hand side, select Settings and then discussion from the sub menu.  Once you are in the discussion sub menu you will see a whole host of options available to you, for now we are going to concentrate on Comment Moderation which is the fifth heading in the list.

 
The first option within this section is Hold the comment in the queue if it contains [2] or more links 
In here you can tell WP to hold a comment if it contains more than a set number of hyperlinks, the default value is 2 and I tend to leave this alone and deal with comments which have more than 2 hyperlinks in them on a case by case basis rather than picking the spam comments out of the site later. If you do want to change this then just click in the box next to the number 2, delete and replace it with your new value. Make sure you click SAVE CHANGES at the bottom of the page to apply your changes.

Your next option is the list of words which you personally would like to block. By default WP will look at all your comments and check them against a very effective set of spam filters for you but you now get the opportunity to ‘fine tune’ what does not make it to the site.  As you will see on the screen grab the actuall wording for this section is: 
When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be held in the moderation queue. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.
What this is telling you is you can block a comment because it has one of your ‘trigger’ words in it, whether that word is in the actual comment, the commentors name, E-mail address or webpage. But what it is also doing in a round about sort of way is giving you a bit of a warning It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”  most generally unacceptable words don’t cause any problems unless you live in Scunthorpe and run a discussion site for people who like the swankiest wristwatches, but it is something to bear in mind when you are adding words to the list.

 
So what do you add in here?  Well personally I add the words in the attached text file. 

hotwords-THIS-FILE-CONTAINS-SWEARING.txt

I make no apologies for the list, better to see them here once than be chasing them around your site later When you add words to this section make sure you add each one on a new line so that WP can identify them when it is running the checks.

As well as unacceptable words you can also add web addresses in here, for example if you wanted to stop people from posting links to You Tube videos in the comments you could add http://www.youtube.com/ on a new line, this would then hold every comment which had a link to you tube in it, so you could check the link before you published the comment.

You can also block any comments from anyone who uses a certain E-mail address by adding the address to a new line. This does have its uses but they are limited.  You can stop anyone posting from a particular IP address by adding that in to the filters, this can be dangerous and can backfire, for example if you have 2 people posting from the same PC and you block that IP address neither of them will be able to post! If you have a lot of visitors and commentors from within an organisation then you could end up stopping all of them from commenting!  So unless you know what you are doing and have good reason to I advise that you don’t block IP addresses.

Of course anything you do in this section can be undone by simply deleting the word, URL, E-mail address from the list.

A Talk About Local guide written by Nicky Getgood and Pete Ashton of http://ash10.com

Creating a Ning account

• Ning is a service that lets you run your own social network, similar to Facebook. Before signing up for Ning you should think about whether you need it. Do you have an audience ready and waiting to use it? Can you make do with a simple blog or forum? Would it be easier to simply use a Facebook group if your audience is already there? A good example of a Ning being used by a local community is http://www.harringayonline.com/ a site in East London with over 1,000 members.

If you’ve decided to go with Ning, here’s how to set up a social network there.

To set up a Ning social network you first need to create a Ning account.

• Go to http://ning.com

• Click on Join Now in the top right hand corner of the screen.

• Complete your details to sign up for a new Ning account and then press the Sign Up button at the bottom of the form.

You will be sent a confirmation email with a link. Click on this and fill out a few details about yourself. If you want to skip this step you can, but make sure you fill out your profile properly before launching your site.

Now you have created a new Ning account, you will now be able to create your own social network.

Creating your own Ning social network

You should now see a page with a big Create a Social Network link:

Click on this and give your network a name. You will also need to decide on the address for the network. Chose carefully as this cannot be changed – pick one that is short and memorable (your preferred name may be taken so keep trying). Once you’ve got this move on to filling out more information about your network.

Add a description and in ‘keywords’ add the search words you think people might use to try and fine you or your subject matter such as your place name or your area of interest.

Now you have created your new social network we can customize it by adding some features.

Adding Features

You now have a social network. It’s time to decide what sort of features you want your social network to have.

You’ll be greeted with a somewhat overwhelming selection of features. Don’t panic. Just think about what you want people to do with your site and chose appropriately.

Remember, people can only use the features you include. You can add and remove features at a later date but if, say you don’t want people adding video, simply don’t include the Video feature.

Here’s what they do:

• Activity: This displays the most recently activity on the network and is a useful
  one-stop way for members to keep up to date.
• Badges: Your members can use these to promote the network on other sites, for example on the site of their blogs.
• Birthdays: Shows when it’s a member’s birthday. Not that useful.
• Blog: Members can run a blog within the network. This can get a little confusing as it’s very similar to starting a forum thread. However, if you want to have a separate area for longer, more in-depth articles this can be useful so is worth considering adding in future.
• Chat: Participate in a live network-wide chatroom or private one-on-one chat with other members on your social network. This is Instant Messaging within the network and can be useful for members to have a conversation without giving out private details.
• Description: This takes the description you wrote in the settings and puts it on the sidebar.
• Events: If your group is running a number of events this can be a useful way of storing the information in one places. (Other events services do exist…).  For a community site, this can serve as a local events calendar that anyone in the network can add to.
• Forum: Probaby the most useful feature on the Ning. This is where the members discuss whatever is on their minds. It’s also the feature most people will be familiar with.
• Groups: If you have a very large Ning community then letting people form groups within that can be useful. This is good for clubs and societies within a community that may want a space of their own within the site.
• Members: A list of all the members in your network.
• Music: Members can upload songs and audio files up to 20mb in size. While the file size is small this could be a good way to share recordings of meetings and events, or for people who are more comfortable talking to share their thoughts. It is geared more towards music though.
• Notes: This duplicates the blog and forum a bit so best not used as it confuses things.
• Pages: Add new pages of content. If you have a lot of static content which needs to be referred to often, such as community guidelines or local links, this is a good place to put it.
• Photos: Members can upload photos to the network, either directly through the site or via email. Other members can comment and mark photos as favourites. You can also import photos from Flickr and share photos on other sites outside the network. If you’re not already using Flickr this is a useful feature to have.
• RSS: If you have content on another site, such as a WordPress blog, you can automatically have the most recent entries linked here by adding the RSS feed.
• Text Boxes: These are boxes on the sidebar that contain anything you like. The most common use is “adverts” for events and services in your area or a widget from another service like Twitter.
• Videos: Allow members to upload their own videos and share videos from video services like YouTube. Like the Photos feature this is useful one to include.

Remember the most important rule: keep it simple. Start with a small number of features and listen to your members. If they want to do something they’ll let you know.

Here’s how I’ve decided to start my network:

In the left sidebar is the Description of the network followed by recent Activity, the list of Members and Events. This tells visitors what the site is about and what’s going on.

On the right is an area reserved by Ning for administrative purposes and adverts (Ning is free so you do have to suffer ads unless you opt to progress to a paid). Under that I’ve put the Badges for people to promote the network on their own sites.

In the middle is the main activity. For now I want to encourage the sharing of Photos followed by discussion in the Forum. Under that is the option for Chat.

Now I’ve added the features I want and decided upon the layout, I can choose a suitable appearance for the site.

Appearance

Ning has a very flexible system for chosing the appearance of your site. You can spend a long time selecting colours and so on but remember you can always go back and do this later. For now chose a basic theme. I’ve chosen “Social Blue” and my new network looks like this:

Which is nice, but rather empty. It needs people, but people need a reason to come so let’s start adding some content.

Adding photos

Go to the Photos page by clicking on the Photos tab at the top.

Click on the Add Photos button in the top right hand corner.

Click on the large camera button the next screen.  This will bring up a browser for you to search for your image file on your computer.  Double click on the relevant file.

Your file will be added to the box.  Once it is listed click on the Upload button in the bottom right hand corner.

Once your photo has been uploaded, it will appear in an Edit Uploaded Photos page, where you can add a Title, Description and mark it with Tags so it appears in people’s searches for relevant keywords.

You will also have the option to add the photo to an album if you wish (which is always a good idea if the photo is part of an event or group activity).  You can either add it to existing abum using the drop-down menu or create a new album by giving it a Title, Description and Tags.

Once you have added all the necessary information to your uploaded photo click the Save button in the bottom right-hand corner.

Your Photo is now added to the Photos page of your Ning site.

Starting forum discussions

Go to the Forum page by clicking the Forum tab along the top.

Click on the Add A Discussion button in the top right-hand corner.

Give your discussion a Title – this will appear as the title on the Forum page so make this relevant.

In the Post box write about your issue or query.  You can use the toolbar along the top to customize your text.  You can make highlighted text bold, italic, underlined or strikethrough.

You can also hyperlink highlighted text to a relevant website by clicking on the chain link icon, inserting the website address (URL) in the box that appears and clicking OK.

This will insert the HTML code into your post to hyperlink that section of text.  It does look a little strange but is not something you need to worry about.

If you want to add an image to your post, place the cursor where you would like the image to appear in the post.  Click on the camera icon on the toolbar and use the browser box that appears to search for and select the image in your computer.  Then click the Add button.

Again, this will add the HTML code for the image into your post.

Once you have finished writing the body of your Discussion post, add relevant tags into the Tags section so it appears in other people’s searches for those keywords.

Press the Add Discussion button in the bottom right-hand corner.

Your discussion will now appear on the Forum page of your Ning site for others to respond to.

Inviting members

Now you’ve got a little content on you site for visitors to respond to, it’s time to start inviting people to become member of your social network.

The best way is to email your contacts inviting them to join.  To do this go to the Invite tab along the top.

Click on the Enter Email Addresses option, and insert the email addresses of the people you’d like to invite with a brief message.

Click the Send Invitations button and the contacts will be emailed an invite.

Alternatively, you can just direct people to your website address, they can sign-up themselves.

New users can then invite new members themselves.  This is good as it means you will get new members to your site more quickly.  However, you may understandably want to approve new members.

To do this click the manage tab along the top.

Click on Network Privacy in Your Members section.

In the Network Privacy page, select the Approve New Members before They Can Join box. Now every time someone requests to join the network, you will receive an email containing the person’s name, email address and a link to thir Ning profile page, from where you can accept or decline their membership request.

Banning Members

Should you feel a Member’s behaviour on the site is becoming unreasonable to the point that you no longer want them to be within the Network, it is possible to ban members.

Banning Members should always be a last resort – try to settle the matter by sending them a private message explaining why their behavior is unacceptable first. However, if they persist with unreasonable comments you may need to ban them.

Go to the Manage tab along the top.

Click on the Members option in the Your members section.

You will see a list of Member. Select the Member you wish to ban by ticking the box next to their icon and selecting the Ban From Network option in the drop-down Actions menu.

A confirmation window will appear.  To proceed, click the Ban button.

The next time the Member tries to sign in, they will be taken to a page explaining they’ve been banned from the network and given the opportunity to contact you, so you may receive an email asking ‘Why was I banned?’

If you want to remove the ban on a Member, go to the Banned tab above the list of Members in the Members page.

Select the Member by ticking the box next to their icon, and press the Remove Ban button above the list.  The Member will now be restored to the Members page.

Well done!  You have learnt how to create a Ning account, created a new social network, customised its appearance for your needs, uploaded a photo, written a forum discussion and set suitable settings in order to moderate network membership.

Of course, there are a few more things to learn if you want to keep going with your network and develop it into something more, but none of it is much more difficult than the basic essentials you’ve learnt here to get yourself started.

On Saturday me and Mike were lucky enough to enjoy a day in the sunshine in the name of work, giving something of a mini social media surgery under a tent in a field.  We spent the day introducing people enjoying Fulham Fest to the new community website for the London W14 & SW6 neighbourhoods, a ning site which manager Annette Albert has built up into a fantastic local resource that covers local events, news, groups and information.

We got a fair few signed up to the site and many got cracking with adding to it straight away by poll voting, posting events, starting discussions and joining groups.  What was most rewarding was inducting people who initially had reservations, either because of a fear of the technology or because they could not see how it might be used.  It was just a few simple steps to show people how easy the site is to navigate and discuss issues important to them that the site could help with.

Getting people there who were at first quite reticent enthusiastic about the site really highlighted the benefits of holding a social media surgery as part of a larger, community event.  Many of the people I met on Saturday wouldn’t have come to something solely about social media or using a community website, but by being part of a fun and informal family day we were able to teach in a relaxed, ‘non-training’ atmosphere and get past preconceptions they may have had.

So now I’m all for a social media tent becoming a staple part of local fetes and fairs.  Next time you’re organising a community festival or gathering, think about making space for a couple of laptops next to the face-painters.  It’s a great way of raising awareness of a new hyperlocal site and you’d be helping people discover something new, get involved with local activity and carry on communicating long after the party’s over.

On Saturday me and Mike were lucky enough to enjoy a day in the sunshine in the name of work, giving something of a mini social media surgery under a tent in a field. We spent the day introducing people enjoying Fulham Fest to the new community website for the London W14 & SW6 neighbourhoods, a ning site which manager Annette Albert has built up into a fantastic local resource that covers local events, news, groups and information.

We got a fair few signed up to the site and many got cracking with adding to it straight away by poll voting, posting events, starting discussions and joining groups. What was most rewarding was inducting people who initially had reservations, either because of a fear of the technology or because they could not see how it might be used. It was just a few simple steps to show people how easy the site is to navigate and discuss issues important to them that the site could help with.

Getting people there who were at first quite reticent enthusiastic about the site really highlighted the benefits of holding a social media surgery as part of a larger, community event. Many of the people I met on Saturday wouldn’t have come to something solely about social media or using a community website, but by being part of a fun and informal family day we were able to teach in a relaxed, ‘non-training’ atmosphere and get past preconceptions they may have had.

So now I’m all for a social media tent becoming a staple part of local fetes and fairs. Next time you’re organising a community festival or gathering, think about making space for a couple of laptops next to the face-painters. It’s a great way of raising awareness of a new hyperlocal site and you’d be helping people discover something new, get involved with local activity and carry on communicating long after the party’s over.

On Saturday 15th July ‘Pindec’, of BirminghamB29.com, led a walk around the B29 postcode perimeter. But this was no summer stroll, this was a Tortoise Walk:

Apparently, in 1840s Paris, it was very trendy to wander around with a tortoise on a lead to make sure you were gong at the right speed to truly experience the city – so can anyone lend us a tortoise?

Unfortunately, no-one had a tortoise to spare that day but a sufficiently slow pace was set, ‘recording our feelings as we go, in the spirit of the flâneur (“a person who walks a city to experience it”).’

Exploring their surroundings in this unusual way meant the walkers started to notice things that had escaped their attention before, and wonder online what that plant is, or why someone saw fit to place a pylon right next to someone’s house. They concentrated on derelict buildings and building sites, reflecting on what was there before and what’s to come. They explored local historical sites, discovering the Weoley Castle ruins ‘completely by accident’ and taking the time to wander around. And they discovered ‘random things’ that just happened to catch their eye whilst they had the time to stop and investigate further.

And the best bit about it was the whole B29 perimeter walk odyssey was recorded on the site by Pindec, who incorporated everyone’s comments, photographs and audioboos into her blog post about the day. This meant readers were able to share the walkers’ journey – read about their findings, see what made them stop and think and listen to what they had to say out loud.

Taking a different style of journey that makes you look at your area in a new light like this is a great way of generating interesting and unusual content for a hyperlocal site. You could try a Tortoise Walk like the B29ers, or try something a bit different if a snail’s pace isn’t your style. If you’re stuck for ideas The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel is a good starting point, and the website has an Index of Experiments for you to dip into and play with. Fancy ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’ or ‘Blind Man’s Buff Travel’? Or how’s about a messy hybrid of the two? Mis-guide.com is also worth delving into, leafing through their book A Mis-guide to Anywhere has given me an idea or two.

Have a think and go exploring your area in weird and wonderful ways, either as a group or on your own if you’d prefer. Just be sure to record each new discovery and how you came about it, so your readers can share in your adventure.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover an old friend from my home town of Cardiff, photographer Dan Green, has started a brilliant local photography blog Big Little City – ‘a window into the lives of those people who help give cities their unique character’. The site was born out of his first major exhibition, Cardiff Characters, which he has developed in his online space with pictures of people who epitomise Cardiff and reflect its ‘unique vibrancy and soul’.

The focus will be on highlighting communities and the people who make them tick be they a rugby star, a bus driver, a lollipop man or lady, an artist, waitress, café owner, musician, dancer, or eccentric.

It got me thinking about how people really make a place, and most communities have a few characters that you couldn’t imagine being without – be it because they’re local heroes, a bit eccentric, or just that they and what they do is such a long-standing local institution.

I can think of few from my neck of the woods, Digbeth, off the top of my head. John Tighe, landlord of my local The Spotted Dog, who won Birmingham it’s Not Shit’s Brummie of the Year 2007 for his fight against a Noise Abatement Order. His finest hour on Digbeth is Good is a film of him getting his head shaved for charity. Adam Crossley, author of Keep Digbeth Vibrant and Chair of the Digbeth & Highgate Residents’ Association, is always organising great local events with John and starting up quirky local websites.

And then there’s Mr Ralph. Mr Ralph is something of a Digbeth institution, invariably found in one of the many Digbeth pubs, peddling customised goods from his battered old suitcases. Rumour has it he holds the last existing Birmingham pedlars license. I found Mr Ralph quite fascinating so I wrote a blog post about him after he kindly agreed to it, including photos of him and his Mr Ralph branded goods.

Do you have any key local characters like this? People who really make your neighbourhood what it is? Talk to them, see if there’s a way you could present them and the great stuff they do online somehow – be it with photography, film or just writing about them with passion. Perhaps they’d like to contribute themselves, either on a regular basis or as a one-off with a story they want to tell. Try getting them and their voice onto your site, either by letting them speak for themselves or, if they’re a little shy, by telling as much of their story as they’re comfortable with. That way your site starts talking about ‘who’, as well as about ‘where’ and ‘what’.

Busker by Dan Green

I was pleasantly surprised to discover an old friend from my home town of Cardiff, photographer Dan Green, has started a brilliant local photography blog Big Little City – ‘a window into the lives of those people who help give cities their unique character’.  The site was born out of his first major exhibition, Cardiff Characters, which he has developed in his online space with pictures of people who epitomise Cardiff and reflect its ‘unique vibrancy and soul’.

The focus will be on highlighting communities and the people who make them tick be they a rugby star, a bus driver, a lollipop man or lady, an artist, waitress, café owner, musician, dancer, or eccentric.

It got me thinking about how people really make a place, and most communities have a few characters that you couldn’t imagine being without – be it because they’re local heroes, a bit eccentric, or just that they and what they do is such a long-standing local institution.

I can think of few from my neck of the woods, Digbeth, off the top of my head.  John Tighe, landlord of my local The Spotted Dog, who won Birmingham it’s Not Shit’s Brummie of the Year 2007 for his fight against a Noise Abatement Order.  His finest hour on Digbeth is Good is a film of him getting his head shaved for charity. Adam Crossley, author of Keep Digbeth Vibrant and Chair of the Digbeth & Highgate Residents’ Association, is always organising great local events with John and starting up quirky local websites.

And then there’s Mr Ralph.  Mr Ralph is something of a Digbeth institution, invariably found in one of the many Digbeth pubs, peddling customised goods from his battered old suitcases.  Rumour has it he holds the last existing Birmingham pedlars license.  I found Mr Ralph quite fascinating so I wrote a blog post about him after he kindly agreed to it, including photos of him and his Mr Ralph branded goods.

Do you have any key local characters like this?  People who really make your neighbourhood what it is?  Talk to them, see if there’s a way you could present them and the great stuff they do online somehow – be it with photography, film or just writing about them with passion.  Perhaps they’d like to contribute themselves, either on a regular basis or as a one-off with a story they want to tell. Try getting them and their voice onto your site, either by letting them speak for themselves or, if they’re a little shy, by telling as much of their story as they’re comfortable with.  That way your site starts talking about ‘who’, as well as about ‘where’ and ‘what’.

By far the most inspirational talk I heard at Open Tech 2009 conference was from Robin, a member of Space Hijackers, who spoke about ‘Community and Democracy in Hijacked Space’. I’d recommend you listening again if you have the time.

It was a great to hear about play being used as a surprisingly effective and disruptive method of protest. Space Hijackers, who attempt to ‘corrupt the culture of architecture, and destroy the hierarchies that exist’ by staging hilariously anarchic happenings, got me thinking about putting the fun back into local campaigning, which many hyperlocal sites find themselves involved with.

Obviously, justifiable anger and reasoned argument about issues causing serious damage to the community is a great and worthwhile thing, I’m not denying that. It’s just that sometimes you’re met with problems so ridiculous the best option may be to fight like with like.

For instance, Birmingham pub The Rainbow has recently faced closure after Birmingham City Council served a Noise Abatement Order in response to complaints from one lone tenant, who lives in an apartment block built long after the pub was. The council seeing fit to threaten this renowned live music venue because of one complainant, but aspiring to develop the area’s cultural character in their Big City Plan, seemed kafkaesque enough to warrant a game. After hearing Robin speak, I was pondering on some noisy, twisted version of musical statues, or a loud complaints choir outside the council house.

The fun doesn’t necessarily have be physical, you can have it in your online space too. Keep Digbeth Vibrant do a great job of tempering their obvious frustration with Birmingham City Council Environmental Health, with quirky creations like the spoof Stella advert above and The Digbeth Whisperer newspaper. On my site Digbeth is Good, when Birmingham City Council Leader Mike Whitby commandeered a Big City Plan public consultation bus from my neighbourhood for a photoshoot on the other side of town, I initially responded with righteous indignation. My emails and calls to the press office were met with a wall of silence until the fantastic local satire site Lolitics helped to bring it to a wider audience. Soon after a lolled image of Mike Whitby appeared, closely followed by several of a walrus bemoaning the loss of his bus, I received an apologetic statement from Director of Planning and Regeneration Clive Dutton. The increasing amount of attention from other sources the incident was getting seemed to make them realise ignoring me was not making me go away.

So next time you’re met with local plans, politics or problems that would be funny if they weren’t so angering, perhaps just try highlighting the funny. Point out the silly and match it. The results this approach gets from The Man may be limited, as he’s not known for his sense of humour, but it will make engaging with the issue much more fun for your readers, and give you a bit of light relief from feeling just plain mad.

DiGpuss is the online shop attached to Digbeth is Good, my hyperlocal site about Digbeth’s ‘culture, pubs and a whole lot more’.

Now, DiGpuss is rather an unusual shop in that it doesn’t sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost and I have found. And brought home to DiGpuss. My cat DiGpuss…

If any of this sounds familiar it’s because these are the opening lines to the classic children’s TV series Bagpuss, which DiGpuss was inspired by. It was born from the fact that, because Digbeth is rather a messy place with seemingly no street cleaning to speak of, I’m continually finding things. Most of it is general rubbish, admittedly, but after a while of walking the Digbeth streets I became aware of certain trends emerging.

The first thing I noticed was a plateful of discarded food at around the same time Gordon Brown was encouraging us all to be frugal and eat our leftovers to beat the credit crunch. I took a photo, and put it in a post stating ‘Digbeth says no to food saving’. I would have left it there but I kept discovering more and more food congealing in the surrounding streets – scotch eggs without the eggs, a drain blocked with corned beef hash, a whole loaf of bread tossed into the canal and ignored by the ducks. It just went on and on, and I kept on posting the photos until they warranted their own category ‘Digbeth Food Wastage’.

After a while, I began to realise that it wasn’t just food I was finding, but human and household objects too. There seemed to be an awful lot of people shedding clothes in Digbeth such as hats, coats, gloves and Cinderella-style lone shoes. Some of my finds were incredibly strange, such as a brand new pair of Moss Bros trousers still in the bag and a photo of a biker girl on holiday.

It was whilst discussing my discoveries with some friends in the pub that a DiGpuss shop was suggested by Birmingham artist Shona McQuillan. It immediately struck a chord with us all and we hatched grand plans for interactive shop windows and Digbeth-themed mice songs. Michael Grimes offered to make the technical magic happen and build it, as I really didn’t know where to start. But perhaps that’s the point – we had the idea and looked at how to make it a reality afterwards because where there’s a will, there’s almost always a way.

Discussing it in the cold light of day, Michael and I decided that singing mice might have been a bit time-consuming and ambitious, so it was scaled down to something simpler that still captured and communicated the essence of the thing – I’m going to hand over to Michael at this point, who has kindly written up the science bit:

Digpuss is intentionally minimal: a sort of grittier, no-nonsense version of Bagpuss. I drew a sketchy parody of the Bagpuss logotype and underneath it plonked the picture of Nicky’s cat Floss. Nicky also supplied the picture of some grotty Digbeth window; a far cry from the quaint set in Emily’s shop, but much more in keeping with the sort of tat that Nicky finds to put in them.

Building Digpuss was a bit of a challenge, because I wanted it to be standards-compliant and not rely on any scripting (such as Javascript); I wanted to write it entirely in html and css. The items in the windows are pulled in from Nicky’s tagged images on Flickr (this did require a little bit of scripting, but it’s done server-side in PHP and so relieves the browser of any compatibility issues) and displayed as items in an unordered list. When they’re clicked on the user is taken to their page on Flickr.

I used two versions of the shop windows image: one untouched and one with the windows cut out. I then sandwiched the list items between the two. As a finishing touch I added opacity to the list items so that the image behind shows through, giving them the appearance of being behind the windows: when moused over they display more clearly, apparently further into the foreground.

However, because I chose to build Digpuss this way it only works as described above in Firefox and Safari; and, I was excited to find, it works beautifully in Safari on the iPhone (the 3GS at any rate). It didn’t work at all well in Opera , but surprisingly didn’t fare too badly in Internet Explorer. The main issue is opacity, as this is a css property that’s not supported in many browsers (yet). There are also issues to do with positioning which may well be to do with my html and not browser problems at all, but I’ve yet to look into it.

Have you noticed something slightly odd about your area that you might like to present in a more quirky way? You may want to present a trend collectively, rather than in a trickle of disjointed posts that wouldn’t communicate a bizarre build-up. You could try playing with maps if they span an area (like I did with my Faunography map of Digbeth animal life), or some kind of slideshow of images, or a mashed-up YouTube movie of film clips. Or you could try building something like a shop from scratch, if that’s what you really want to do. The most important thing is to have a think and a talk and a few laughs over some thoughts, let them take shape and then worry about how you’re going to achieve it. Never stop a good idea in its tracks because it’s beyond you technically.

For instance, William posed a creative quandary to me the other day – my DiGpuss finds are a collection, but Digbeth Food Wastage still remains a category of lone blog posts with no explanation that may seriously perplex newcomers to the site. How might I present them as a whole, rather than in their little pieces? So I thought, and pondered, and today a little light-bulb came on. All the photos as a film slideshow of images with the soundtrack Food Glorious Food. I don’t know how to do this, so I stuck my hand up and asked. Twitter is a great place for doing that. And if you get no joy there, try asking the Talk About Local team by emailing helpisathand@talkaboutlocal.org. If we don’t know, rest assured that we’ll find someone who does!

Some of the issues you will have when running a site are: