Collaboration

Slowly but surely I am updating the editorial and style guidelines. This section on style is still in progress, but please take a look at it.

When you write a comment, start a forum topic or submit an article at culturekitchen, you are not just contributing your writing. You are also taking part in the publishing process.

In this book you will find the dos and donts of prettifying your work.

Come out, come out wherever you are...

I'm not asking you to come out of the closet :lol: I'm asking you to come and play on the site --especially if you are one of the thousands of people reading us through our feeds.

In the past few weeks I have been working on the technology and design of culturekitchen. Check out our growing list of features. I actually have a longer post to make about what I am rolling out this weekend; but right now I need your help with two things :

I had to shut off a few features on the site, especially after we got slammed with traffic during the Brangelina saga. Now that things have calmed down and I have figured out what was crashing the server, I can turn features on and do some promotions.

So that means that all the people who joined culturekitchen as far back as April and had not been granted member privileges, now you've got them.

I have promoted some members to contributor status. And I have set in place a community promotion system or "mojometer" that allows all members to vote to move posts by non-editors and/or contributors to the front page. Yes, it's not just me who can move stuff to the front. In one way or other the whole community can do this now.

I will be writing about it later today, just giving you the heads up.

If you have not been granted anything other than unmoderated commenting rights, then please, holler here in the comments. And also let me know of any technical difficulties you might be having. I know Lorraine was having trouble posting this morning but I can't find what was happening.

Anyhow, hollaback y'all!

The life of a site is on its statistical pages; but to this day there is not one web metrics or statistic package decent enough to truly be able to measure the influence and reach of a blog.

For one, most metrics programs out there are interested measuring only the number of unique visitors and page views. Visitors and traffic may describe how many people on average visit your site, but it really does not tell the complete picture. How people get to you through the web is as important as the amount of pages being read by a visitor.

I am using some statistical tools created just for Drupal-powered sites. These are still rather unpolished but with them I can see who is linking to us, through which categories or terms people are stumbling upon our site, and even who are the most active members in the site.

Traffic hitting specific users this past week :

1. liza (5030)
2. JJ Ross (2749)
3. sea (329)
4. Wulingren (277)
5. Nance Confer (253)
6. mole333 (253)
7. Tara Parks (240)
8. Lorraine (232)
9. drmmrgirl77 (125)
10. Jeffrey Langstraat (82)
11. LynnS (64)

This is insane. People are googling y'all and hitting your pages here.

Find out how to make your life easier when blogging about content you find on the web.

[via Blogging made easier with a bit of code | culturekitchen]:

What is a blogging bookmarklet? It is a piece of code you put on the bookmarks or favorites toolbar of your browser. When you want to grab a quote fromm an article on the net, all you have to do is :

There are many ways to contribute to culturekitchen than just blogging. Here's a run down of some of what's available on the site :

1. Quotes
   When I don't have time to blog about a bit of news, I use the Quotes form to take good excerpts out of articles and have them rotating in the QUOTES block that appears towards the bottom of the left side column on every page. Some have images, some don't.

   It just occurred to me to use it to also excerpt good posts from other bloggers outside of our site. So use it, please, especially if you don't have time to blog about a good post you've read from blogs we don't have in our blogroll.

2. Image Galleries
   After the last fix our image galleries got all screwed up, but when they are working, they work marvelously.

   If you'd rather open a photo-essay gallery instead of a blog, just make your case and we will do that for you. We have here a wonderful source that gets massively hit through the search engines ready for the community.

3. Recipes
   Yes! After a test run, the recipe module is working again (that's a shout-out to Jeffrey). A girl doesn't just live of ideas. She needs a good, hearthy portion of Chocolate Mousse Pie to feed her soul too.

Have you ever wondered how you can help get the word out there about your contributions to our blog? Well, look no further. This list is meant to break down some of the features we have on the site that should help people spread the word about how y'all are contributing to any or all our culturekitchen blogs.

[via What happens to the Barely Legal XXXtian Girls in the next chapter at Pandagon]

Am asking.

Seriously.

I'm inundated with cards of people who want to keep up with the site. A weekly update is in order. I mean, look at what we've done this week while I was away :

On Monday I published, There are no mommy wars when the real war is at home. Although I have not caught up to JJ's comment, I've actually had a number of women and men emailing privately or stopping me in my neighborhood to tell me aside what JJ said in the comments : They're going through their own versions of the same. You read that right, men and women. So that one gender assumption of mine, is ... well ... ahhh ... hmmmm .... the point is totally taken.

I'll have more to say about that soon.

Tuesday I was again out in Washington DC at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association 2006 Forum. My ego was stroked verily and in more ways than one when I was called a "hero" by a couple of the attendees. This, even after I warned the roomfull of attendees that in the battle waged between the cables vs. telcos for control of the internet, to most bloggers they both were technically the enemy. Even after that, they thanked me profusely for the presentation. The topic? We the media. My slides (yes people, I powerpointed!) will be forthcoming.

Members cannot edit your blogpost after it has been promoted to the front page. Since you are not a Contributor or Contributing Editor, once you save it, the post will revert back to the "Counter Talk" batch.

If you want to correct grammar or anything else once the post has been promoted, please forward any changes to the editor who promoted the post.