Blogging with Darkness.com isn’t as difficult as you might imagine.  The trick is just knowing where to start.  Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, it’s pretty simple.  Most of our new members with no prior experience have already figured it out after spending just a short time with it.  Even Raver!

WordPress is the platform we’re using, with a main plugin called BuddyPress that provides us with the social networking features in the back-end.  If you wanted to do your own browsing around to see what you can do with WordPress, a good place to start is the Codex.

New Users should probably start here:  First Steps with WordPress
http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress

What would I blog about?
The Codex will be useful for a lot of things, but another important thing to consider is why will you be blogging in the first place?  As a Darkness.com member, the ideal candidate for using the Darkness Blogs will be anyone that posts their own poetry or fiction or member pics and artwork.  The blog system is much better than the forum for all of these.  It’s fairly convenient.  It’s easy.  Most importantly, you have all the control over your content as well as anyone that comments on your posts (topics).  If someone is being rude or making you uncomfortable with a comment, you can just delete it.  If you have a change of heart and one of your entries should be removed, you can do that yourself.  Need to edit something or fix it, several weeks later?  Again, you’re the Admin.  You make the calls.  The only disadvantage during the early beta stage is getting visitors.  That should work itself out later once the Blogs are actually linked from the forum, chat, etc…

Reminder:  During the beta stages it’s important not to get too attached to the blogs as-is, but especially to a specific plug or theme.  It’s a time consuming process to test, and audit each of these for anything that may cause problems later.  Backup your own posts or save them somewhere outside the blogs.

Since no one else seems to have tried it after I posted the Notice, I thought I’d grab a dozen photos from our Member Gallery section and try it out.  I hope Saz doesn’t mind.  I’ll remove this post after a few days probably.  Just long enough for others to see the results.

There was a button on the right, so I’m going to click it.  When I mouseover, it says Add NextGEN Gallery.  Ok, that didn’t seem to help as it expects me to already have a Gallery ready to insert.  Next, I’ll try the first button after “Add media:”  That seemed to work.  I selected about 12 to 14 images and it started uploading them one at a time.  I did get an HTTP ERROR at some point during the process.  I don’t know why.  That’s all it said.  I guess if I noticed some images missing, I’d just re-add them probably.

I clicked the “Save All Changes” button, even though I didn’t really do anything else.  After that, it gave me an option about some ordering of the images, how many per row or column or something.  Then I just clicked Insert Gallery button.

I’m back in the Editor again now after taking a look.  That does look pretty good!  Doesn’t it?

I noticed a “Gallery” button in my menu near the bottom.  I’m going to click that next and see what other options it may have.

Update:  Ah, that was for the NextGEN gallery plugin that I apparently didn’t end up using at all.  I found out what my HTTP ERROR was from.  I ran out of my alloted disk space of 10MB with the images I uploaded.  That makes sense.  It might be better to add images hosted remotely so you don’t run out of space.  You can do that on the same menu but use “From URL” instead of “From Computer” when adding the pics.  Not as awesomely easy but keeps you from running out of space.  I added a jQuery lightbox plugin so that my gallery uses a cool effect when viewing an image.

Welcome to Darkness Blogs

This used to say “Hello World!” and was a default post.  I’m kicking it’s ass with a post or rant of my own.  Like I posted on the forums, for those of you who actually read it, I need a lab rat or two.

First come, first served. If you’re ready to help me test this so I can learn the ropes along with you, please post in this thread AND create an account at http://blogs.darkness.com/

I need someone who is active on the forums and/or in chat. I need someone who is accessible to work -with- me. I’m usually around late nights through early mornings. Preferably, you have also actually used the current Blog component or have no hesitation when it comes to testing the system by actually -blogging- which is the whole purpose for this.

This new setup is being evaluated to replace our current one after the upgrade. It’s actually pretty nice, you might enjoy it.

I’ll pick and choose one or two that follow these directions and create the blogs for you to get started with.

So, I look forward to working closely with you until we’ve both got the hang of this.