Harrisonburg Blogs
Harrisonburg Blogs represents my first attempt at running a Wordpress MU site. The intention is to create a portal where anyone living in or around my home city of Harrisonburg can enter into the blogging scene and easily connect with other bloggers who are already active. To that end, it will serve both as a blogging platform as well as a blog feed aggregator. The idea isn’t really original, and I freely admit that it’s mostly inspired (”stolen” being such an ugly word) by my experience with a website called chattablogs, which a friend of mine from college put together.
The fun thing about this is that I can get lots of ideas for new development tasks in order to take Wordpress way beyond it’s typical capabilities. So far I’ve added in local news feeds, links to the most recent posts and comments sitewide, an ajax-based online poll, and I’ve developed a few new plugins to work both on the home page as well as the various hosted blogs. I’ve also been researching plugins written by others that I can tie in as well. So far my favorite is one called “Weather Icon,” which I use to show the current weather conditions in Harrisonburg.
What I most need now, in order to continue developing it further, are a few alpha testers who can help me find any bugs, suggest and test themes and plugins, and help turn my lone-wolf project into a true community effort. Chattablogs has become a treasure to the now-vibrant blogging scene in Chattanooga, and I’d just love to see the same thing happen here in my new hometown.
By the way, if you live in Harrisonburg, have some familiarity with Wordpress, and would like to be an alpha tester, visit this page.
April 01 2008 | Schmategories | No Comments »
