It’s not a matter of reconstructing the software, bringing it back to its blogging roots. I’ve made my modifications as additions, and the ability to do blogs has never gone away. It’s simply a matter of using a blog-style template instead of a forum layout.

There will be benefits to having a blog integrated into the Zone, though. The personalized member pages we’re envisioning would be able to display everything you’ve posted elsewhere on the Zone, plus the blog posts made specifically to your blog. And there will be various widgets to let you link to other blogs and resources to create “mashups” here. The idea is to make the Zone a hub rather than a satellite. Longer term, all the sites running my “Proscenium” version of WordPress will be interconnected into a vast discussion network, in which you’d stroll casually from the Zone to…I can’t say yet, and deleted my attempt to namedrop without naming names. Suffice it to say, for now, that these changes at the Zone are part of a larger tapestry.

This “university” of which I speak is the client who’s retained my services to do many wonderful geeky things, including adapting WordPress to an academic collaborative environment. The particular individual I work with turned out to be an online discussion afficionado, and even wrote his PhD thesis on threaded discussion forums. He’s well aware of the HabitableZone, and sees the benefits of having the Zone running the same software and testing it with a bunch of people with lots of experience in online discussion forums. You could say that at this point the HabitableZone is partly subsidized by this private nonprofit university, but taking account the future plans, it’s more like we’re joiniing a network of academic institutions and think tanks, whose sites will be interconnected using this software.

The separate forum group (taxonomy) is probably a cleaner way to do it on an interim basis. It wouldn’t represent cleanly the way the forum list to the left does; it would have many more nodes (blogs). Keeping it all in a separate taxonomy will make it easier for me to eventually transition everything to the final personalized user page.

An alternative that’s nearly as clean would be to set up a new forum called “Members”, and everybody’s blogs can be children of that forum. The drawback to me is that the parent Members forum serves no purpose, but that’s not important for a temporary setup.

Thanks for your offer of help. Now that you know that this is work-related, you can be less concerned about my taking time out from my workday; this is part of my workday. The initial phase of installing the next version of the software is something only I can do, as is setting up the new taxonomy. But after that it’s wide open. You know my philosophy is to give Zoners the keys and cross my fingers, so perhaps it’s better to ask you what you want to do with the new blogs? How do you see yourself helping?

Even though the Zone now has a work aspect to it, it’s still my longtime hobby, and doing things for the Zone while people “sit by” is in fact rather rewarding. I don’t think you’re being idle, I think of it as indulging me in my hobby, and I’m grateful y’all play along.

Question 2: Just to be sure, you want a SEPARATE forum group with various sub-forums that we use for our blogs?

Question 3: How do I help? I don’t want to make demands, then sit by as you take more time out of your workday that could cut into the time I spend surfing the web or trolling people.

Blogs for everybody who wants one have always been part of my plan, it’s just a matter of when I get it set up. There’s a certain irony here: WordPress is blogging software, and I’ve devoted a lot of effort bending it into a forum shape. But the ability to do blogs is alive and well inside. (Technically, I consider blogs and forums to be the same thing, just laid out differently. It’s all a matter of topology.)

Right now, everybody’s name is linked, and if you click it, you go to a compendium of the person’s posts generated automatically by WordPress. Everything you post in a forum goes there automatically, but that’s not enough to make it a blog.

The university has commissioned a makeover of the automatically generated author listings, to give it features that will make it personalizable and bloglike, but that’s not scheduled until the fall. What can we do in the meantime?

What about this as an interim solution: That list of forums on the left is a “taxonomy”, in this case the “topics” taxonomy. This is reflected in the URL, e.g. “topics/community/” is You Are Here. What if we add another taxonomy called “Zoners”? (Or whatever we all agree on.) Each “node” in Zoners would represent a person, just like nodes represent forums in the “Topics” taxonomy. You’d post messages to your Zoner node the same way you post messages to a forum; essentially it is a forum (remember that topology stuff), every person’s personal forum.

The forum style is not appropriate for a blog, but the software can produce other styles by changing the template. The style you see on the author pages is a “newspaper pyramid” that I personally like, but in generally, we can set up the pages in any layout you like.

That is to say, all pages will have the same layout we all agree on. That’s interim too; the long-term design will let you redesign your own personal space.

The Zone’s overdue for a software upgrade; it’s now half a dozen releases behind the university’s systems. I need the new software to set it up so that only the blog’s owner can start topics in his/her blog. And clean up this nasty formatting bug in Community. I feel pretty guilty about the way you guys suffer in silence so much.

I’ve been giving this some thought before this, VB. You’re one of several Zoners who blog, and a blog would better present your weekly news digest; a forum post is too cramped and you need to spread your wings with it. My ideal would be to bring everybody together under one roof, to have the benefits of both blogging and discussion in one place. The artificial division of the two leads people to talk about having to blog one place and advertise their blog here, and that’s just plain silly. I won’t have it, I tell you!

We’ll get you a blog here, I promise.

over there, BTW