Much of this post perhaps falls into the category of “too much information” for most EMUTalk.org readers, but I have finished (for now) a series of updates and changes to the site, and I thought I’d take a moment to report on that to the curious and/or hardcore EMUTalk.org fan.
This continues to be an interesting experiment, and I am rather confident that I don’t have it all completely “right.” I’m sure I’ll have to change something again. But for the time-being, here’s a run-down of some of the things I’ve done lately to the site:
- I updated to the most current version of WordPress, 2.6.1, which was easy enough to do. I’d recommend the upgrade to anyone else running a WP site.
- I updated the rules slightly and added some description on how to contribute a post to EMUTalk.org in order to reflect those changes. Long story short: while I am very willing to post things here that folks send me, I am not willing to once again open up the site to allow anyone to get an account and to post whatever they want. I think that was an experiment that turned out poorly. My goal in doing this is to get a wider variety of contributors; we’ll see how that works out.
- For folks who aren’t happy with this “contribute a post” policy, I’ve set up some instructions on how to set up a blog with blogger. It is literally something that almost anyone who is capable of reading a blog can do in about ten minutes.
- I went ahead and changed my contact email to emutalk at gmail dot com, though sitedad at emutalk dot org will continue to work.
- I added more links to local bloggers, things about higher ed, etc. Those are on the right. Also, because these are feeds from my Google reader, you can click where it says “Read more…” to read all of the updates in the sites for the items in that category.
- I’ve added a couple of nice features for making comments. First, once again you have 20 minutes to edit your comments after you initially post it. Second, I’ve added a new feature that allows you to be notified via email if there are more comments on a post that you have commented on. And third, I turned off complete moderation of comments. I still filter for spam, but as long as you have posted a comment to EMUTalk.org before with an approved email address, your comment will appear.
- And finally, I’ve added Google ads. I’m not interested in “getting rich” here, and that’s a good thing because EMUTalk.org doesn’t get enough traffic for that. But it does get enough reads that a few ads (depending on what people click on and stuff like that) will be enough to cover the basic expenses of this hobby. In the unlikely event that I make over $100 a year for this, I will either temporarily discontinue the ads or I will figure out some kind of EMUTalk.org-friendly cause or charity to support.
I think that’s it for now. Keep reading, keep commenting, keep sending post contributions!
