Membership

Another way to promote yourself and your blog is to write a short blurb at the end of each comment you post.

Spammers know this and that's why this blog has been under attack from them for years. What they don't know is that we have instituted a site-wide NOFOLLOW rule for all of our comments. What does it mean?

We get about 2000 comment spams a day. On a slow day. Many unethical SEO companies try to embed links in our blogs so they can poach and use for their splogs our reputation and high-ranking in search engines like Google.

So, I have taken the drastic measure to block all search engine traffic from our comments section. ALL OF IT. This means you will not get any search engine benefits from links in our comments, but you will get whatever traffic is generated when someone clicks on a link to your organization or blog.

With that clarified, let's get into the nitty gritty of creating a comments footer. We have added an entry form in your account settings to simplify the process.

How to update your Comments Settings

1. On the left-side of the blog you will see a box with your name. That's your navigation block.

Click on "My Account" to go to your profile page.

Membership at culturekitchen has its privileges. One of them is being a member of a blog that, as someone told me recently, "scares people because it's so brainy".

Yah.

We are the thinking woman's (and man's) blog. Welcome to the thinkidrome.

Heh.

I owe the blogs hard thinkitude to my sluttish attraction to good writing. I have always made it a point to drag into this here blog the bloggers I love to read elsewhere.

Call it blogmiscuity, but it works.

A good way to promote yourself and your blog is by writing a short bio at the end of each article or post you write. We have added an entry form in your account settings to simplify the process. Once you fill it out, it will automatically update all your posts (even previously published ones) with your new mini-bio and information.

How to update your Author Box

1. On the left-side of the blog you will see a box with your name. That's your navigation block.

Click on "My Account" to go to your profile page.

2. Once on your profile page, click on the "Edit" tab to change your profile settings.

3. Scroll down the page until you find a closed tab that reads "Additional user info". Click on the little triangle or the words to open it.

4. Once opened, write in a one-line bio --please keep HTML to a bare minimum. If you don't, we reserve the right to edit and/or remove this feature from your membership privileges.

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!

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.

Unfortunately we do not have a team of moderators to handle anonymous or unverified commenters.

Why should you register with our site? The answer is here.

Absolutely!

When you publish your blog, book reviews, recipes, event calendar, and other content with us, you are doing so under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike license.

You are free:

* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:

by
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

nc
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

sa
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

What does this mean? In the event you or I get a contract to re-publish your content in any form, we need to get each other's permission.

Other than that, you are free to republish your content in any blog you decide to start. Just make sure we know about it so we can link back to you.

Let's keep this a secret OK.

Don't tell anybody we are open for blogging.

Heh.

As far as the developers of CivicSpace are concerned, the site is ready to take in new bloggers w/o it breaking. So please, take this baby for a good (political) spin.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. Why do you have to register? Now you will know, Sour Duck.
2. You need to wait one-hour for your registration to be processed.
3. Please open one membership only. If you have multiple email accounts that you want to associate with your membership, you can add them to your membership settings.
4. You will start out as an authorized user and will not have blogging privileges for three days. Do you want to start blogging ASAP? Ask and shall receive.
5. We have one of those editorial and privacy doo-hickeys, so please start at Welcome! after you have registered at the site.

I was asked why do people have to register to participate in the site. At culturekitchen, you have always had to register in order to leave comments. With the old blogging software though, there was no commitment established between anything other than a name, a sometimes fake email and my light moderating of comments.

In communities, even anonymous members have an identity that sets them apart from other anonymous users. We do not demand full disclosure of your personal information, but we need at least a basic level of commitment for your participation in the site and that involves registering.

At culturekitchen, you may stay anonymous to the community but, as part of our editorial policy, to become a contributor, you have to publish pseudonymously. In other words, the publisher and editors need to know, under full confidentiality, who you are.

Still, we care deeply about your privacy and freedom of speech.

Use the comments section to add any questions you think we should FAQ you.