If someone comes up and suggests a new idea for a blog – we will be happy to create a blog and make them the owner of it. He should then build the blog and most important of all, build a community around it. Any reader who wishes to contribute to a blog, can register and ask for becoming an author in it. This is all about trying to get more people to post in a single blog and to build the blog more social.

This blog network isn’t about making huge money or to compete with the big players. We are just simple minded people who want to blog about things passionate to us. Of course we would think about monetising and would also love to get donations(paypal:srinivasanr@gmail.com) so that we can sustain running this network.

I have this network running on a WordPress-mu installation which is very easy to get a blog network up and running in minutes. I have it hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech and tried to bring fslog.com also into that. I know that wpmu supports multiple domain names and I tried using this Multi-Site Manager plugin – but couldn’t get fslog.com work in NFShost. Also for creating a blog in blogial, I should manually create an alias in NFS. This needs to be changed asap and we are looking at moving onto a better host (maybe a VPS). If someone can give us some good offer for a VPS, we are listening to you. Till we can fix this, FSLog is going to be on a seperate WordPress installation.

I am in the process of setting up the blog, installing plugins and creating blogs. Right now we have 3 blogs under blogial.

• FSLog – This one
• Codelog – about programming owned by Sudarsan (previously ProgrammersLog)
• OZ – about living in Australia owned by Anish

I am open to any other blogs that you may want to be here.

I am also looking at creating some good themes for the blog and also a logo for blogial. If someone can help us in it, we would be very happy.

Since we now have more people to post in this blog, you can be sure to get good, quality content here on the network.

People can suggest new topics which they would like to be covered or they can vote on topics already added by other members in the community. It is non-intrusive and takes just a simple sign-on (they have openid too) and adding a widget to your blog. A very simple idea.

So, if you want me to write about any particular topic, just use the widget in the side bar and suggest new topics.

After you have setup an account with NFS and setup a site, you will be given the site details – like FTP, SSH, etc. I prefer using SSH if available, as it is faster to download and install directly than to get it on my machine and uploading it again.

Just ssh to the site and download the latest wordpress tarball and untar it


$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

If you want to setup the blog at a subdirectory, just rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to something like ‘blog’. If you want it to be at the root of the site, just move all the contents of the wordpress folder to the parent directory.

Then visit your site http://your-site.nfshost.com or the domain if you have registered one.

It will guide you through the install process which is very easy. You just have to give the MySQL database details. You may need to temporarily give write permissions to the public folder, so that the installer can write a config file.

After this, login to your admin page and remember to change the password from Users menu.

Plugins

After you have your blog setup, its time to get some basic plugins installed. You can get more functionality by installing these plugins.

All you have to do is just download the zip files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip them. The plugins I have installed are:

WP-SuperCache

This caches your blog’s contents as plain old HTML, so that your server doesn’t have to process and fetch all the data from the database. Previously the install process was a bit difficult, but now it has become very easy. Just unzip and activate.

reCAPTCHA

Prevent comment spam by using CAPTCHA for your comments form, also help in converting books to electronic format.

WordPress.com Stats

Track your popular posts and other statistics by using the wordpress.com’s stats.

Google Analyticator

Google Analytics is an excellent user metrics analysis tool with bright colorful charts and best of all, it is free. This plugin asks just for your Google Analytics’ UID.

Feedburner Feedsmith

Feedburner is a great service for your RSS feeds and I have been using that for this blog for a long time. This plugin is now the official plugin and it automatically redirectly your feeds to the FeedBurner link.

These are my list of plugins. So, what are the plugins that your have?

(load-file "/path/to/twit.el")

After doing it and restart your emacs, just press M-x and twit-post and type in whatever you want to and press enter. It will then ask your twitter id and password – which gets saved for the entire emacs session. It is a very basic authentication and is not secure.

By the way, FSLog too has a twitter feed. You can follow this feed to get updates when I post here. Thanks to Srid for this tip.

1. I am going to use Don’t break the chain for keeping track of the posts on this blog. I will mark each day that I post and would try to not break the chain.
2. I am going to post about anything interesting to me. Mostly it would be related to Free and Open source software, technology, internet, etc.

If someone can provide reliable hosting for this blog, I will be very happy. If not, I have to switch to a better paid host after I join my job. Anyway I will soon come up with a post with all the things that happened during the downtime.

By the way, I have also changed the theme to a better looking (atleast thats what i think) one than the default Kubrick theme. Though I am not a huge fan of such kind of design (i prefer 2 column) I will see how good this one works out.

Update: I have changed to a better looking theme. I dont like that old theme. Anyway I will stick with this for now. Maybe change it later.