Wow, what an amazing start we got off to yesterday! You guys totally blew away my expectations in our discussion of yesterday’s post 31DBBB Day 1: The Elevator Pitch
There are also a number of lessons learned and observations I’d like to pass along to you. So, because today’s assignment is to write a list post, I thought I’d share those things in the form of a list post.
1) This is an amazing group. I have done several previous group blog projects, all of them very good, but this group will probably blog all the rest away. Not only did you introduce yourselves and your blog’s elevator pitch, but many of you went the extra mile of replying and giving feedback on other blogger’s elevator pitches. This has the makings of a real community where it’s not just each person out to make their own blog better, but everyone helping each other.
2) We shattered the record for most comments on a post. As I write this there are 171 comments on the Day. The previous record was 91 on the post Why Willow Creek and Saddleback are Losing Influence While North Point and LifeChurch.tv are Gaining Influence
3) Threaded comments are… awesome! It was only about 6 months ago that I installed the IntenseDebate commenting plugin, which gives us the ability to comment on comments (rather than one big long list of comments) WordPress itself now supports threaded commenting, but wow Day 1’s conversation would have been completely impossible without this.
4) IntenseDebate screws up links. I noticed a lot of broken links in yesterday’s comments. This was not the fault of those posting the links, but the fault of the commenting system. It doesn’t like any characters before or after links. When you post in the future, don’t put parentheses around links or periods after them. Make sure there’s at least one space on either side of a link. Or better yet, put a link on its own line.
5) Read all of our blogs in one place. William Dicks has taken (and will keep adding) all available blogs with RSS/atom feeds and added them all into one feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/31dbbb so that all you have to do is use this feed to see what the other bloggers on 31DBBB are blogging about. There is also a web page available to read the posts of our 31DBBB bloggers at http://bit.ly/31dbbb-cwt if you do not want to make use of a feed reader.
There is a quirky thing where when a new blog is added to the feed all the posts from that blog appear at the top, but over time this will settle out all new posts will be displaced chronologically. Way to go, William!!!
6) Conversations happen where they happen. The plan was that any questions about blogging you might have that were unrelated to the days specific lesson and assignment would be posted in the forums. I noticed there were quite a few questions unrelated to elevator pitches posted in that post’s comments. Those tangents didn’t seem to create any problems and most people’s questions got answered. So, as long as it’s working, there’s no reason to change it.
What did you learn from Day 1?
P.S. This is not the Day 2 post. You can find that here.
29 Comments
I am excited and grateful to be a (new) part of this community and look forward to seeing how God moves through it. Ironically, I had posted an entry containing a list to my blog before I read the post for today. Not sure if it meets all the criteria or not. It is an article I composed for our congregation's newsletter, in fact, most of my recent posts have been my newsletter articles. I am planning on that changing as a result of this project and pray God will help me to be more prolific in my posting!
I am excited and grateful to be a (new) part of this community and look forward to seeing how God moves through it. Ironically, I had posted an entry containing a list to my blog before I read the post for today. Not sure if it meets all the criteria or not. It is an article I composed for our congregation's newsletter, in fact, most of my recent posts have been my newsletter articles. I am planning on that changing as a result of this project and pray God will help me to be more prolific in my posting!