The other day I was talking with a UK online centre trainer about how the people she had engaged on the talk about local project were finding the WordPress interface quite difficult – the group haven’t been using the internet for long and are just getting used to using email and the like, so were finding WordPress a bit of a leap.

So I started thinking about platforms other than WordPress that are a bit easier to use.  By far the easiest I can think of is Posterous, which publishes emails you send to the site’s email address as blog posts.  A quick run-down of what it does can be found in the Posterous FAQ section.  Posterous also support autoposting to other platforms such as WordPress.

Some good examples of interesting Posterous sites are creativeopenworkshops.com and the community website for Central Birmingham grounds.posterous.com, which takes advantage of one of the best Posterous features – with the correct settings it can allow for contributions from anyone who has the website’s email to post address, whilst the site administrator keeps full control over what does and doesn’t get published. They will receive an email every time someone submits a post, and can check it before releasing it to go live on the website.

The interface on Blogger is a little simpler than WordPress and there are some good community sites that use this, such as welovelarkhall.com and alexandraandainsworth.blogspot.com. A demo video on how to set up a Blogger website is above. However Blogger does have a limited number of themes, so it may be hard to get your website looking exactly how you want it to.

Both Posterous and Blogger have a good import/export feature, so you can import the content from blogs created on other platforms to them, and export to them to again to another platform later if you want to.  For instance Wrote Under Publishing, a Birmingham creative writing and spoken word collective, originally started a website in Blogger, but exported the content from Blogger to a WordPress blog once they felt they had reached the limitations of the Blogger platform.

Another platform is Tumblr.  I’ve not had a terribly long play with this as yet, but from my use of it, it seems to have a very easy-to-use interface.  However, it has a kind of ‘scrapbook’ feel to it, and seems to be purely a place to post content to – you can’t really add a great deal of extra features.  An example of a community website created with Tumblr is kingsheathen.co.uk.

Jonathan Davies has written quite an in-depth article that discusses the pros and cons of using Tumblr – The Blog Herald: Should Your Blog Be On Tumblr? is well worth a read before you start using it.

Other useful posts that go through the pros and cons of different blog platforms are:

• Dave Briggs’ Way To Blog – ‘There are a number of great options available now to start your own blog, for free, with just a few clicks of a mouse button. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and here I run through five of the best ones.’
• Podnosh’s Where to blog: WordPress vs Typepad vs Blogger? – ‘Blogging packages are like cars. They all get you from A to B but some get you there quicker, some are easier to drive, and they all come in lots of different colours.’

From time to time, you may want to change the look and feel of your site. With WordPress we know this is really easy, you just apply a new theme. 9 times out of 10 you apply the theme and it works, but occasionally you find the theme you ‘really’ like, you apply it but when you go to look at your site, it looks like a car crash. All your sidebars are a mess and stuff is missing.

When you go in to the widgets section of appearance, you are non the wiser as to how to sort it out because your sidebars have been renamed.

The first thing is DON’T PANIC!

There is a quick and easy way to sort out your sidebars and actually understand what ‘sidebar wide’ or ‘primary right’ actually are in your theme and get everything back nice and ship-shape.

The second thing to do, is go back to your original theme, take a note of what is where, so you can put it in to a similar order in your new theme.

Next go back to appearance > widgets and do some house keeping. Open each widget and make sure it has a nice friendly name, not George, Sally or Dave (which are all nice friendly names) but something that tells you what the widget is. Some are already named for you some aren’t. What you need to do is make sure you know which each widget it.

Now the backward step, bear with me……

Drag your widgets off the sidebars and in to Inactive Widgets, this is the section at the bottom of the widgets page. When you drag a widget in to here, it will keep all its settings. If you just drop it in to the available widgets, it is like deleting it, it will reset the widget back to its default settings. So always drag them in to Inactive Widgets first.

Anyways, we are going backwards by removing your widgets. Why?  Because if you have a widget in sidebarX in your current theme and sidebarX doesn’t exist in your new theme the widget disappears, until you apply your original theme back. This can be a real OMG! moment, when you apply your new theme and find all your beautifully hand crafted widgets have gone AWOL..

So back to sorting your theme out.

So far we have:

• not panicked
• done some house keeping
• moved all our widgets in to Inactive Widgets

So now we can go back and apply your new theme and go in to appearance widgets to look at the side bars.

Not a clue what these are or where they are in relation to anything on my site. So how do we sort this out?

In the available widgets, look for one called Text. Drag this in to your sidebar, and name it the same as the sidebar, like this:

Now do this for each side bar. When you have added a widget to each sidebar, go back to your site and have a look at it again.

So you know where 2 of your sidebars are, but what about the third? Have a quick look at the content on your site, go to a post or a page just to see if anything changes.

Now you can see where the other sidebar is, it changes from Primary Post to Primary Index, when you look at a post on the site.

So now you know where all your sidebars are and how they work with your site, you can start adding your widgets back in from the Inactive Widgets section. Then go and shout about how cool your site looks now it has had a make over..

Oh yeah, and you might want to delete your little text widgets out once you have done

As your wordpress site gets more popular you may want to use your own domain on your site, so rather than going to yourdomain.wordpress.com you could have people going to yourdomain.com which would then show the your wordpress site.

There are a couple of options available to you when it comes to domains. You could map the domain to your WordPress blog or you could forward it.

Mapping
If you map your domain, through WordPress, you are paying wordpress to make changes to your domain so that visitors to the site will only see yourdomain.com in the address bar instead of yourdoamin.wordpress.com. The mapping is done by changing the name servers for your domain.

You can use a domain you already own and just make changes to the Name Servers to point them to WordPress

WordPress have very good instructions on how to do this here.

If you don’t yet own a domain you could either buy your own from anyone of  a number of  companies such as:

1 & 1

123Reg

or buy it through WordPress by following these instructions.

Forwarding
The less high tec option is to just use domain forwarding, this will allow you to tell people to use yourdomain.com and they will be forwarded to yourdomain.wordpress.com. Domain forwarding is usually very low cost £2 -£3 per year or in some cases free.

Forwarding your domain is usually a very simple operation using a screen in the control panel from your hosting company like the one shown below.

If you forward your domain to yourdomain.wordpress.com what you are doing is giving people a short cut to get there by using your domain name, which will probably be easier to remember for most people instead of yourdomain.wordpress.com.
The difference between mapping & forwarding is that with forwarding when they get to your wordpress.com site they will see the yourdomain.wordpress.com URL instead of your domain.
Forwarding is likely to be a cheaper option and you don’t need to involve WordPress.

There are times when you may want to have groups on your blog.  Maybe you want to use the platform more as a ‘proper’ website rather than a blog.

We are all familiar with categories & tags for grouping information, but what about if you have a couple of groups within your organisation who each want their own space on the site?

Most people will shout ‘Ning’ at this point, or at least they will have done until last week. Ning is very good but could be too big for what you actually need or want. With a few simple changes you can set WordPress up to do the job for you.

Creating interest groups on your site for different clubs or groups is possible and not as difficult as you may think.

I am assuming that you are starting with a new WordPress blog in these instructions, they will work for an existing blog, but you may have to do some tidying up of categories & tags to make it work properly.

OK some basic changes you need to make to get started.

1 Create an about page (or edit the one that is default in the WP install). This is going to be your new front page so write some nice stuff about your organisation, add some pictures and stuff.

2 Create a page for each of your groups

(I turn comment off on pages generally as I want them to just provide information not discussion, that is what posts are for and also pages look nicer without comments.)

Now you have done this bit, go to your WP dashboard, then select settings on the left hand menu then reading from the sub menu. On the page that opens up right at the top you will see ‘Front Page Displays’ then to the right of that 2 options ‘Your Latest Pots’ or ‘A Static Page’ put the dot in the static page option and then in the drop down below select the name of the about page you created, if you used the WP default it is called ‘About’. Now press save. then go and visit your blog. You should now arrive at the page you wrote about your organisation.

So now we have the basics set up, you have a home page that all your visitors will land on when they visit your site and you have some other pages for the different groups you have.  Now we need to do some work on making sure that he groups content is nicely ordered on the site so it can be pulled on to the correct pages.

Setting up categories

On your dashboard, click on posts on the left hand menu then select categories now if it is a new install you will have only one category in the list, this will be uncategorised Edit this by hovering the mouse over the category name in the list on the right of the screen then selecting Edit from the little menu that appears below it. Rename this to the name of one of your groups. leave everything else as default and press update to save.

Now on the left of the screen you will see a section Add Category with an empty white box with Category Name over it, enter the name of another group in here and press the Add Category button below.

Repeat this step until you have created a category for each of your groups.

Writing posts

Now you have your categories set up, you need to let whoever can publish on your site how to use them. Simply if they write about knitting they must use the knitting category to ensure that their post turns up in the right place. Categories are selected from the right hand menu of the create or edit post screen, (it is the bottom box in the right hand sidebar).

Finally

You will need to go back to each of your group pages and add a link to the categories.

So all you do is go back to the group page for knitting and select edit, either from the edit button on the page (theme dependent) or via the dash board. Now in the appropriate place you need to add some text like ‘Click here to read our latest knitting posts’ or whatever and adding a link to it.

Handy tip here to create the link, open windows notepad and copy & past your website url in to it, so for example for this site it would be http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk now in notepad add this directly to the end of the url /tag/knitting/

so your notepad should have the following line in it http://yourdomain.wordpress.com/tag/knitting/

Copy this and then back in the wordpress editor highlight the text you want to add the link to and click on the icon on the tool bar that looks like a chain, in the popup window paste the newly extended url in and press save, then press update page to save the changes.

And this is it, job done, all you need to do now is repeat this last bit on each group page you have created, just remember to change the last bit of the link from /knitting/ to /welding/ or whatever on each page so it pulls the correct posts back.

I have created an example site for you here http://mygroupsblog.wordpress.com

If you’re going on holiday and the person feeding the cat looks askance when you ask them to keep the website ticking along as well, you might find it useful to know you can schedule blog posts to automatically publish in the future. It’s a very simple setting in the publishing dashboard, but easy to miss if you don’t know it’s possible.

The full how-to is here and video below.

The following videos have been developed for use in Talk About Local training sessions. Although there are loads of brilliant how-to videos out there which we often use, we thought there was still a need for very simple videos that people could refer to as they got started on their hyperlocal sites. They take you through the development of my model site, Mythical City. Hopefully they are easy to follow with a bit of hands-on help if people get stuck.

It would be great to get your feedback on any ways these videos can be improved as you use them and any requests for further tutorials.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a great site for finding social groups in your area called GroupsNearYou.com. Just type in your location or postcode and it shows you what’s close by.

Now you can provide that very same ease of use to your own local blog. I’ve just finished the first phase of a new GroupsNearYou plugin for WordPress. It provides blog owners with a new widget which, once configured, will show the groups in your area.

Below is a video showing how to set the widget up and there are also written instructions. The plugin itself can be downloaded from my website where you can also subscribe to updates. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions on how to manually install a plugin. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Go to Plugins
2. Activate the GroupsNearYou plugin
3. Go to Appearance > Widgets
4. Drag the GroupsNearYou widget to your sidebar
5. Configure the settings according to your own location and your preferred display
6. Check your blog and you should see the new widget added to your sidebar

If you run a local blog there’s a good chance you might be on Twitter, as my some of your neighbours. This creates a ‘back-channel’ that can often go unseen. So in the interests of enhancing local blogs with this back-channel, below is a video which shows you how to add both your own tweets and the results of a Twitter search to your WordPress blog.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please leave them in the comments section below.

Instructions – adding someone’s tweets

1. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
2. Drag the Twitter widget onto the sidebar
3. Add the twitter account name you want to show
4. Configure the remaining options to change the display
5. Click Save
6. Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget on your sidebar

Instructions – adding a Twitter search

1. Go to search.twitter.com and perform a search.
2. On the right hand side, right click on the link that reads “Feed for this query” and select Copy link location
3. Go to your WordPress dashboard
4. Go to Appearance > Widgets
5. Drag the RSS widget to your sidebar
6. In the first box, paste the link you just copied from Twitter
7. Configure the other options according to your preferences
8. Click Save
9. Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget on your sidebar

If you’ve not heard of WriteToThem.com before, it’s a great site by mySociety which makes contact politicians really easy, whether that’s your local councillors or your MP, regional assembly member or MEP.

To make it even easier for readers of your own blog, I’ve just finished the first phase of a new plugin for WordPress. It provides you with a new widget based on WriteToThem.com which will provide an easy way for your readers to get in touch with their politicians.

Below is a video showing how to set the widget up and there are also written instructions. The plugin itself can be downloaded from my website where you can also subscribe to updates. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions on how to manually install a plugin. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Go to Plugins
2. Activate the WriteToThem plugin
3. Go to Appearance > Widgets
4. Drag the WriteToThem widget to your sidebar
5. Configure the settings according to your preferred display
6. Check your blog and you should see the new widget added to your sidebar

TheyWorkForYou.com is a great site built by e-democracy charity, mySociety. It provides an easy way for citizens to keep an eye on their MP. You can sign up for e-mail updates whenever your MP speaks in the House of Commons, for example.

So wouldn’t it be cool if you could also put this stuff on your local blog for all your readers to see and keep up to date with? Well, know you can!

I’ve just finished the first phase of a new plugin for WordPress. This first version provides you with a new widget. Once configured, the widget will show the latest activity from your MP and is available both as an addition to your blog for the benefit of your readers but also as a dashboard widget so that you can see the latest updates everytime you log in.

Below is a video and written instructions on how to set the widget up. The plugin itself can be downloaded from my website where you can also subscribe to updates. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions on how to manually install a plugin. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Go to Plugins
2. Activate the TheyWorkForYou plugin
3. Go to Settings > TheyWorkForYou
4. Configure the settings according to your own MP and your preferred display
5. Click Save options
6. Go to Appearance > Widgets
7. Drag the TheyWorkForYou widget to your sidebar
8. Check your blog and you should see the new widget added to your sidebar