Solved Poll: The Webwide Blog

[adam]

I have been making some progress with the general fleshing out of the Webwide blog. I love to hear your thoughts on how the content should be aggregated...

Option 1: A Medium style multi-author blog where members can share posts that are all contained within the centralised blog with the ability to canonicalise to a personal blog if it is a repost.

Option 2: No on-site posts, but simply a feed of the best articles from our members own personal blogs/websites.

Option 3: A mixture of both 1 & 2, users can have the option of publishing to the site or simply adding a personal site post to a feed.

Poll above! Would love to hear any other ideas and answer any questions if you have any.

 

[Gummibeer]

I've voted for option 3.
This would allow newbies to write their first posts in irregular interval but still reaching a community.
And advanced users can use their own blog and link it via RSS/Atom feed and autopublish on both. Or even only publish a plot paragraph and link to the original post - not sure what I would like more. 🤔

 

[Gummibeer]

I think my major problem with posting full articles via feed is formatting.
Blog owners would have to create a dedicated feed for webwide and put in HTML but without classes, IDs and so on. And you would have to make it look pretty. I think a structure less/unstyled plot/description like normal in a RSS feed would be better.

 

[tom]

At work we are currently thinking about something like in option 3. Our solution would be to have the blog articles on 2 sites. The employees website and also on the company website. The articles themself will be written in Markdown so parsing it is easier and everyone can format it on their own like they want to.
Also there'll be a canonical tag on the company website that attributes the article on the employees website as the original one.

 

[adam]

Thanks guys! What about just direct links to our sites rather than trying to pull in and format RSS for posts where they’re already published?

Just thinking it would be nice to show off our own creations and promote our community members individually while having a bit more creative freedom as web folk.

 

[Gummibeer]

Thanks guys! What about just direct links to our sites rather than trying to pull in and format RSS for posts where they’re already published?

Just thinking it would be nice to show off our own creations and promote our community members individually while having a bit more creative freedom as web folk.

This would be possible with option 3.
The RSS would still be required to have a list of all posts, show a short excerpt on index view plus headline and possible image - like all the RSS readers. Parsing RSS isn't hard - there's a ton of packages and it's a very limited XML standard, so even parsing it by our own would be easy.
Properly indexed this would also allow to search through all linked blogs with webwide blog search.