Grinnell Bloggers

LIVES DETOURED OVER I-80 EXIT 182

Greetings!

March 13, 2008 at 7:42 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Hello to my fellow Grinnell bloggers and all those searching for Grinnell bloggers. You’ve come to the right place!

I will be working over the next month to add as many blogs as possible, as well as to try and sort blogs into useful categories for easy browsing. Help me out by submitting blogs and sites I’ve overlooked.

I want to post all your Etsy and CafePress stores too — pretty much if you’re out there doing your thing, we want to see it here on this page. Send your links and a short description of what you’re writing/doing/selling to the email address on the contact page.

10 Comments »

  Rachel wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 2:58 am

Do we want people’s names to be posted by their blog? It might help in deciding whose to read.

  Julia wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 3:06 am

What a fantastic idea. Thanks for putting this site together.

  poetloverrebelspy wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 9:31 am

Rachel, quite a few people blog anonymously. What might be useful, but which wouldn’t infringe on their privacy too much, would be to add categories for class year as well. Only problem is I can’t identify everyone’s class year without them telling me.

What other categories might we all find useful?

  Amy wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 3:48 pm

I’d love a location category, if that’s possible in the future. :)

  Sarah wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 3:56 pm

This is a great idea and obviously took a lot of work. Thanks so much! Looks great!

  poetloverrebelspy wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 4:09 pm

I’ve thought about that, Amy — but how specific or general does one need to be? Chicago or Midwest? Atlanta or South? etc.

  Mike Shapiro wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 6:51 pm

There must be some sort of tagging system that would allow blogs to exist in dozens of categories: Madison – Midwest – Academic – Grad school – Anonymous – Class of 2001.

I guess the problem is that the blogroll to the right is already a mile and a half long, and adding more categories will only exacerbate that problem.

Might it work (although it would be time-consuming) to introduce each blog via a post here, and then to tag those posts according to what is publicly knowable about that blog? That way there could be a list of tags in the third column that would let readers filter by whatever category interested them…

  poetloverrebelspy wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 9:17 pm

Thanks for your comment, Mike.

My first task is to try and get as many blogs in the blogroll as possible and divided into a few major categories so that I have a better sense of the scope of what we’re even dealing with here. The list to the right was cobbled together from blogs I knew about and had on my personal blog and from a cursory search of the term “blog” in Plans. Fewer than 10 have come from emails at this point. I assume there are a lot of alums out there not on Plans who are also blogging that will trickle in over time.

I chose this layout because I thought having more columns would better show off the categories. Problem is you can’t divide the blogroll, and the program stupidly doesn’t allow me to divide the categories from the blogroll either. You can see I was planning on putting them one column over. So that is something I’ll work on once we’ve got the list more finalized.

I don’t know about a post on every single blog (I think it would kill me, as adding them to the Blogroll is labor intensive enough), but I was definitely hoping that we would highlight the regularly updating blogs somehow . . . Over at Frugal Hacks, they have a constantly updating sidebar showing which blogs have recently posted. Maybe we could syndicate the various feeds? Someone more talented than I in this area will have to suggest how we go about that.

The categories question is a tricky one, because as I noted, you can’t tell immediately from every blog when the person graduated, where they’re located, etc. Each person would have to write me individually and tell me which categories they fit in — and would have to update me every time they moved, etc.

If we use tags in posts on each blog, then they will get mixed up with the tags from each post if we syndicate, no?

I suppose one of the important questions is how people expect to use this blog. I guess at this point I was hoping it would act simply as a clearinghouse for us to find each other and all our pages. Am naturally interested in how other folks would like to see this develop and what they are willing to contribute.

Keep the comments coming!

  Rachel wrote @ March 14, 2008 at 9:32 pm

I feel like it’ s just a list of random blogs (granted, by people who happened to once attend Grinnell) unless we have more information. That’s still neat in the sense that Grinnellians are interesting people, but it does make it more difficult to decide which ones to read.

Another possibility could be categories like photo blog versus personal blog versus political, etc. Of course, many blogs cross category.

Great start!

  Rikhei wrote @ March 22, 2008 at 12:55 am

I am wondering if a wiki might not be a better platform for this – it seems like it would be easier to create new categories. Another advantage would be that you would not have to do all the work.

I have not used too many wiki platforms, but one that I’ve enjoyed using is PBWiki.


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