user blogs

[prophetik music]

i'm curious when the user blog thing is going to get started here. i know i'm really looking forward to them.

also, is there going to be RSS functionality built into them? way easier to track updates, if it'll work like that. google reader's got a way of pulling updates out of pages that don't have a feed set up, but it doesn't play well with most websites.

thanks for the info.

[DarkeSword]

Blogs will come once we do a forum software upgrade, which is kind of a big undertaking on our end. I believe djpretzel is waiting for an absolutely stable release of vB4 before making the upgrade.

As for RSS, vB's blog system does feature RSS for feed readers and the like, so don't worry about that.

[prophetik music]

fantastic. thanks for the update, man.

i don't care that it'll take a while - i was just curious if there was still a timeline.

[djpretzel]

fantastic. thanks for the update, man.

i don't care that it'll take a while - i was just curious if there was still a timeline.

vB4 is interesting to watch - they're resolving bugs but the change in ownership/developers is making it a bit of a bumpy road. I don't want to endanger our forums by upgrading prematurely, although digitalpoint.com, shoryuken (beta), m-audio.com and others have already taken the plunge.

Once DKC2 is released, this will come back onto my radar as an immediate goal.

In the meantime, if you're curious, check out http://vbulletin.com and the forums (and blogs) there for an idea of what to expect. There's definitely RSS and some pretty nice tagging, draft/preview functionality, the blogs aren't an afterthought at this point, they're fairly well-implemented.

One thing is, blogs can have both global and local categories. Local would be user-defined, global would be across all blogs. One thing we'll need almost immediately is a list of global categories. I'm not entirely sure how we wanna break that down - super generic like "Games" "Anime" "Music", which might not be too helpful, or more specific like even specific categories for the current gen systems...

You wanna hijack this thread and start looking at vbulletin.com and coming up with suggestions for global blog categories we can discuss & refine, that'd bring us one step closer - just an idea!

[prophetik music]

i'll do that.

some specifics for generic categories could include

-"current gen consoles", encompassing PS3, 360, Wii, PSP/go, and DS/i

-"older gen consoles", encompassing everything from atari to ps2

-"PC gaming", encompassing everything involving PC gaming including emulation, current pc games

-"music hardware/software", encompassing all audio production gear and software, from winamp to logic to interfaces to headphones, including reviews, previews, and rants against/for certain items

-"game design/theory", encompassing posts about the nature of the industry and relevance to current trends across all consoles

-"music", encompassing all topics about music that aren't related to games (like, album reviews of mainstream bands, have-you-heard-this threads, etc)

-"off-topic", encompassing best-sandwich threads and wacky's posts about being a creepy boyfriend in australia.

you might want to split up consoles and handhelds, at least for current stuff, since the crossover isn't necessarily there. you'd likely NOT want a 'discussion' tag of any kind, as that'd make the forums obsolete (or at least overlap functionality).

going too generic kills functionality of it, particularly when the three you suggested will almost always overlap with at least one other topic all the time (games with music, games with anime, etc). getting as specific as possible without cutting into sub-genres will allow for more freedom, i think.