Hey all,
World Kayak is very excited to announce that we are flicking the switch on a second phase of development for the blogspot as of this morning. This first site was a pretty quick and dirty beta launch, little marketing (1 day) and just a bit of maintenance. We have hired Luke Poland (aka Lunabyte), one of this systems principal developers! Lunabyte will be streamlining everything from our categorization, our performance, our login process and our spam fight. We will be presenting an entirely new look to the main blogging screen with regional categories working better, cool tags and keyword post tracking as well as many more plugins and widgets. We will also be developing a series of video/screen capture tutorials to show you how to use some of these cool tools.
Coming soon:
New to this blogspot will be a bunch of key categorizing changes. The regional post and blogger management system will be upgraded to a more robust and automated system. The end result will be a more accurate way for us to categorize the bloggers to specific regions as well as posts. We will also be able to start ‘tagging’ subject matter, linking posts of similar topic like trip reports, event coverage, tips and tricks and much more. These tags and categories will allow us to bring your posts through to the www.worldkayak.com portal to specific regions so visitors there can get a teaser of the social interaction going on in each region, alongside the news and events. The mainscreen will then be transformed into sectors of discussion … alongside the traditional list of recent posts you will see lists of recent posts regarding certain subjects. You will have feature blogs and much more.
Widgets and plugins will be added for some cooool stuff. We will be allowing you to cross post to places like Facebook and Myspace. We’ll be allowing you to add a growing number of cool toys to your pages, games, neat info, friend lists etc.
Custom layouts!
At the end of November, you will have access to a growing number of web site layout options. Just like blogger and myspace, you will be able to choose from a variety of colors, layout themes, font styles etc. This will give you the power to manage your own identity and content to unlimited capacity.
Some cool stuff you already can do:
In the meantime, we have many things to work with now. Our list of plug ins is getting longer and they are all available to you to use on your own blogspots:
Plugins - go to the plug ins link in your administrator and you will see plug ins that we have made available to you. Activate those you want to use. Typically the new plugin will create a new admin function. Here are some cool ones available now:
Akismet and Bad Behavior - Anti-SPAMare both plug ins that help control spam, both emails you get as well as comment posts to your blog. Akismet involves a bit of a registration with the folks at Word Press, but it will help battle the spam… strongly recommended!
WP-Autoblog - This allows you to bring blog posts from another blogspot to this one… to eliminate double posting. Activate it, go to Options and the WP-autoblog tab. On the left you will see a field. Paste in your RSS feed address. To get the RSS feed address, go to your other blog, click on the Subscribe to link or the little RSS/XML link and you’ll get the page you want. Copy the web address and paste it in your wp-autoblog screen.
Widgets - presentation layout!
Widgets are items that you can place on your blogspot layout. Could be something as simple as a Text widget that simply creates a box of text on your screen, or a complex Widgetbox application. Go to the Presentation tab then click on the Sidebar Widget submenu. You will see a screen showing your 1 or 2 columns (you choose how many columns you want under Blog Presentation). Drag any of the widgets you see below onto either of your columns. If the widget has an icon on the right, click that and enter the detail or select the options you want. We have the following cool widgets as examples:
About me: creates a simple text box where you can throw up a description and photo of yourself.
Calendar - shows a calendar that will highlight the days on which you’ve posted.
Text widget - select how many text boxes you want on your layout below. If you choose 3, you will then see 3 text box widgets appear on your widget list at the bottom. Drag each text box onto your layout, click on the icon to the right and enter your title and text.
Widgetbox - This is a community widget development platform. IE. there are thousands of cool widgets that you can choose from. Best thing to do is drag it onto the layout, double-click on the icon to the right and watch the training video. Go to the site via the link they provide and you’ll see a ton of cool gimmicky things for your blog. All you’re really doing is copying a widget ID code into the widget and voila. This is a bit complex, but the video tells all!!!
More widgets and fun to come! Keep an eye on the site and tell your buddies!
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