What could be fixed about the blog?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

What could be fixed about the blog?

i am trying out different ways to make it easy to find good posts but keep the site simple and not confusing. In your opinion which of the options in the sidebar are the easiest and most helpfull?

  • the cloud tag,

  • the popular posts

  • the categories?

is there any other ways that you think we could make the blog better?

Thanks!

2

i would categorize. Check out Hardocp.com maybe something like that?

3

Hey Ean, I use wordpress myself. I can say there are some pretty amazing widgets and plugins out there.

I have tried [u]the tag clouds widget myself[/u], but somehow I am not that pleased with it. ([u]Here’s a google translator version of the page… Really bad english![/u])

I am thinking of going back to a combination of categories and most popular posts.

Tag clouds are nice, but given time, they will take over your entire screen, taking away the focus from your articles.
And you wouldn’t want that to have right? :wink:

I can imagine, you would like to have a smarter way of merging/implementing your forum with your blog. There are some awesome plugs available for that.
And it would also be a cool thing to view the newest or latest 10 forum posts at your fingertips while reading up on the frontpage.
I am sometimes guilty of only checking the forum and totally forgetting about the blog.

4

Is there any way you could have human moderators able to flag an individual post in a thread as a “classic”, and have it added to a library of The Good Stuff - that way the really informative or important posts can be found, archived and referenced easily.

Essentially I don’t want to have to write that “USB vs. Firewire vs. PCI” soundcard argument again. :slight_smile:

5

+1

Instead of commenting on the blog itself, comments should be made in the forum.

6

^^hardocp.com dose exactly that for example

7

Oh you will.. no amount of organization is gonna stop those posts!

I like the popular posts section. I also think there should be an archives link somewhere that would link to a new page with all the old articles.. or with categories of links for all the old archives.

I like having comments under the blog. ’ More organized than jumping to the forums to make and look for responses.

8

that sounds like a very valid request. let me look into it- it should be possible, right?

9

Here ya go Ean, this looks like a nice plugin:

They call it “Rate Your Comments (Comment Karma)” and it looks like it can fit the bill nicely.

10

Good ideas :slight_smile: i like the idea about trying to bring the comments and the forums closer together. Maybe if the forum post appeared instead of the comments under the blog posts that would help increase some of the forum traffic and help to blur the line between the forum and blog.

11

^ Agreed,

make any blog/news post automatically duplicated as a forum post with a relevant tag (like [FEATURE] or [NEWS] etc)
Then have a “Discuss this in our forums” link to that post replacing the current blog comments.

You could make a specific Blog Articles forum, or just have the posts sent to the most appropriate of the current sub forums.