blogs

[sjors]

There seems to be a wish for personal blogs, like the ones that got deleted on UK-website.
I'm considering to create a similar website.
If it would be a standalone website would anybody be interested?
If yes, which functionality would be necessary and which would be nice to have.
I have never seen the deleted version, but what I can imagine would be great if the workout to be registered has some easy to enter workouts-schemes , even better would be if a workout could be imported from the log.concept2.com site. No idea if that's possible?
Please don't hesitate to bring on some fancy wishes.

[gooseflight]

As you no doubt realise it's no small undertaking, having to be across security, upgrades, account management, moderation etc.

Given that there is so much free blog space out there, I wonder if a better approach wouldn't be to maintain a portal page linking to self-managed ergers' blogs.

[sjors]

As you no doubt realise it's no small undertaking, having to be across security, upgrades, account management, moderation etc.

Given that there is so much free blog space out there, I wonder if a better approach wouldn't be to maintain a portal page linking to self-managed ergers' blogs.

All true, but what if we were able to create something that fulfills our needs. I have the utilities to generate a site according tot our wishes. Would be a nice adventure. Maybe concept2 would even like to participate in such a initiative. No open source security vulnerabilities.

[lindsayh]

for me a blog thread here would be much more attractive option - captive audience and a common link to all the other useful stuff and the existing community.
It is not clear to me why C2 are so resistant.

[edinborogh]

i agree with lindsayh.
but if impossible to have such section here, i would follow a dedicated web site and support it.
great initiative Sjors.

[calalli]

It seems to me that a simple idea would be to create a sub forum for members such that each person could create their own topic as their'blog' and post whatever they feel is appropriate. Perhaps phpBB allows for moderators to be assigned at the topic level, then Citroen or whoever is in charge could set the topic creator as the moderator for his specific 'blog'.

I know there are more elegant solutions, but the hurdles are higher.

Another idea I have seen on other forums is for a sub forum dedicated to so called arguing and other bullsh*t. Not exactly a free for all, but relaxed moderation and more tolerance of the hostilities that occasionally arise in any public forum.

One concern I do have is that personal blogs might reduce the activity in the more general topics like Pete Plan, What training have you done and personal Bests for example. Are users going to want to add updates to more than one topic?

[edinborogh]

One concern I do have is that personal blogs might reduce the activity in the more general topics like Pete Plan, What training have you done and personal Bests for example. Are users going to want to add updates to more than one topic?

in my opinion - absolutely. "personal blog" is your journey, YOUR journey. it contains not just strokes, DF, splits... it contains lots more. your journey can be shared on your personal space/blog/what have you.

training posts are just what they are - what have you done today, what result, and maybe whats next.
so to answer your question, in my humble opinion, people will post on all relevant places.

[lindsayh]

in my opinion - absolutely. "personal blog" is your journey, YOUR journey. it contains not just strokes, DF, splits... it contains lots more. your journey can be shared on your personal space/blog/what have you. training posts are just what they are - what have you done today, what result, and maybe whats next.
so to answer your question, in my humble opinion, people will post on all relevant places.

That is how it happened on the old UK forum - the other threads continued as well and the personal blogs documented the details of individual sessions and the like.

[Citroen]

Each one of you who wants this needs to write an email to rowing@concept2.com.

[valgozi]

Because of how Old C2-UK / Indoor Sports Services dealt with the old training blogs I am of the thinking that no one will start writing on a 'New Rowing Blog' site unless they have full control of the content they are producing. The ability to export all their content in a Wordpress format would be a must, then if it all goes south again they can grab their content and upload to their own wordpress website.

What would make the most sense is some sort of 'plugin' that would let someone write the content in Wordpress but publish that content to a page on this forum. If it is also linked to workouts on the C2 logbook that would be perfect. Do Wordpress offer a solution like this that could then be easily installed on to here?

A lot of old C2-UK bloggers simply started their own wordpress/blogger blogs. I follow quite a few and I am kept informed of new posts via email. Obviously you need to know about the blog first. So maybe a very visible post on here that keeps an updated 'approved' list of rowing bloggers could be a great start. I did have a play with setting up a twitter account that read the RSS feeds of rowing blogs sites and then tweeted when a new post was made, couldn't quite get the auto tweet working on it which was annoying as even a copy and paste would have been daily work. Happy to hand it over for someone to finish. It was @RowingBlogs (https://twitter.com/RowingBlogs). I have a google sheet that pulls all posts from any sites I had identified and automatically updates to a google sheet that should have automatically tweeted new posts. I think the issue was the sheet tweets were produced from were auto generated where as the twitter bot had to have non auto generated content. PM me if you are interested in having a play anyway.

I have said it before on here, Indoor Sports Services, really underestimated how much a captive audience was possibly worth, they encouraged the forum/blog to die and so lost contact with a lot of potential customers. Probably not completely to blame as the site went through a load of changes during the change from C2 UK, which one would think was forced. However they did end up losing a huge user base they could have used to market to.

[gregsmith01748]

Hi, A few of us that had blogs on the C2 UK site have migrated to blogs on on wordpress. It's free, it takes care of security and comment moderation, and the editing tools are very strong.

They also have tools to help you find other rowers. Here are a few of the blogs that I follow, and the one I keep.

https://quantifiedrowing.wordpress.com/
http://blog.rowsandall.com/
https://ergsdontfloat.wordpress.com/

My experience has been fantastic doing it this way.

[hjs]

Ofcourse you can blog somewhere, but thats in my view not comparable to a blog on this site. The few people blogging, have left this site more or less.

[sjors]

Probably best is that concept2 would create blog functionality inside there log-site. Would not be to hard to create but possible to much work to maintain.

[jackarabit]

I have no blog in the fight but love giving advice, so:

Start an advert thread pointing to your blog hosted @ Wordpress or wherever. Entitle it " On my blog today" or "Whass happnin' blogwards?" Bloggers would post a brief subject header, ex.: "Random thoughts on spirituality, Hummingbird nectar, campervan maintenance, and my in-laws distract me from erging" or (much better!) "My erg training, day X", or (better yet) "Training for [your IR or OTW event here] competition" and link their host site. Shawn Baker does this occasionally. You can have this bloggers' signpost thread up today. If it doesn't produce the result you want, go back to reinventing the wheel.

[valgozi]

I have no blog in the fight but love giving advice, so:

Start an advert thread pointing to your blog hosted @ Wordpress or wherever. Entitle it " On my blog today" or "Whass happnin' blogwards?" Bloggers would post a brief subject header, ex.: "Random thoughts on spirituality, Hummingbird nectar, campervan maintenance, and my in-laws distract me from erging" or (much better!) "My erg training, day X", or (better yet) "Training for [your IR or OTW event here] competition" and link their host site. Shawn Baker does this occasionally. You can have this bloggers' signpost thread up today. If it doesn't produce the result you want, go back to reinventing the wheel.

Anyway this could be done automatically by a wordpress plugin / widget?
So a wordpress site posts to say the training thread in the way you suggest everytime someone writes a new post on their blog. The widget/plugin has the C2 forum login and then knows where to post.
This must surely be possible? Would C2 be happy with that happening?