Staggering Blog and more

[Adam J Purcell]

http://blog.staggeringstories.net

All regular contributors to Staggering Stories or the forum are welcome to add their own blog entries (and all are, of course, welcome to add comments), just ask me for a login. Right now only I'm contributing but I hope that will change over time (yep, I know some of us already have blogs elsewhere - I'll happily add links to any more of those). It may even be fun to let some of our characters have blog entries, imagine Cre'at's take on current affairs or his latest observation on humanity?

Ultimately I hope to add a list of the most recent blog and forum entries to the front page of Staggering Stories, alongside the regular scheduled updates. I'm not looking for the blog to replace this forum or the musings (not that we've had a regular musing since December 2005, 8 months ago ) but I think it might help bring people back to the site. It used to be we did updates every two weeks and we often had half a dozen items. Now we're down to doing it once a month (yep, like an old marriage, heh? ) and this year have been lucky to scrape together more than one item (caption competitions barely count). That's not to say what we have done hasn't been excellent (and I really think it has been, particular kudos to Karen and Andy this year but everyone's done a great job) but if we can make the front page a hub to the latest goings on in the forum, blog and the site proper then maybe we'll get more eyeballs!

So, yes, the implied site redesign is on the cards again and this front page rework gives it a bit more impetus. The only problem - I'm not graphic designer. This should be very obvious from the current site look. I can probably build the CSS (and certainly do the manual changes on all 330 html pages the site consists of...) but the actual look is giving me trouble. I'm thinking of the old 50s SF pulp magazines (as inspired by Andy's great front covers) but beyond that... Anyone any good at graphic design? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? No?

[Hobbit]

Cool....send me the log in details - I have the blog bug and will happily waffle on about anything and everything.

[tallorder]

Go on then - I can't resist putting forward my two-penneth on occasion!

[Adam J Purcell]

Okay, to make things simpler I've opened up the registration so anyone can register themselves (though I will have to up that to author status as we don't want spammers taking advantage of us!) I should get an email through when someone registers, so it shouldn't take too long before you are able to post!

[Adam J Purcell]

An additional Bloggly note, I've created new categories now so you can specify the content of a blog entry. Why? This way people can easily get a list of entries with similar themes (see the category links on the right) and, my main reason, it means I can syndicate out a feed to interested planets of just the subjects they represent. A planet, do I hear you ask? That's just a special website that aggregates feeds from blogs into one list (an example being http://planet.lugradio.org that supposedly concentrates on Linux and associated fun tech stuff).

I've gone back and categorised all my past blog posts (I didn't realise there were so many!). If the other authors would like to do the same that would be great. If not, don't worry I'll have a go myself at some point. You just need to edit the post, click the '+' button next to categories section in the side panel and select the ones you want. If you'd like to add another category feel free to do so.