Progress Report

BGSchool has 5 members, all with Admin status, and one pending member.

Brevard Genealogical Society has 2 members, both with Admin status -- no pending members.
(This one will have to wait until after our Board Meeting AND hurricane season.)

BGS Boardom has 3 members, 2 with admin status and 8 pending.

Travelers In Time has 3 members, 3 with Admin status, and one pending invitation.

Barb and I are starting to work on Travelers In Time. She is adding Issues 1 and 2, and I will format them. I would appreciate anyone who had an article in either issue to proof it. If you need an invite for TT, let me know and I will send it asap.

There are some decisions that need to be made about the blogs.

• Shall we list them (except BGS Boardom) with blogger? The main thing that does is allow them to be searched by Google. I tentatively have all three listed, but can change any or all.
• Shall we include Email Post links on our articles? They let our visitors easily email posts from our blog to their friends. I tentatively have this set up for all blogs.
• Weblogs.com is a blog update notification service that many individuals and services use to track blog changes. I think we should change the settings to allow this AFTER the formatting is complete. There are too many changes right now -- it would drive people crazy.
• Do we want to allow anyone to post comments on Brevard Genealogical Society (BGS), and Travelers In Time (TT), or shall we restrict it to registered blogger users OR only members of the blog? Same question for BGSchool? I think we ought to stick with Registered Users at a mimimum. The School is debatable, either registered only or blog members only. The Board is obviously members only.
• Next, do we want to publish a site feed for the blogs (excluding the Board). This works somewhat like the Associated Press. We would be syndicated. Anyone who locates our site and finds it helpful, can add it to their blog or online magazine. I know copyright retention is an issue, so there is an option to limit the number of words that can be "fed" to the other site. The average is the first paragraph or about 255 words then a link back to our site to finish the article.
• The final item to consider is if we want to advertise on any or all of our sites. Google just came out with Bloggerized AdSense. Basically, it looks like it will be the now familiar unobtrusive Google ads that are content driven. You can find more info here: http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/08/theres-adsense-in-my-blog.pyra

Those who signed up for one or more of the blogs have had varying experiences. For some it was easy, others difficult and for some it was both -- first an easy one then a royal pain. I don't think we can ask those members who can't even cut, copy or paste to sign themselves up without help. So... I am working on an instruction sheet WITH PICTURES.

I will also offer to help sign ups after the meeting at the library. One of the nicest features of a blog is that you can use it from any computer and with any word processing program.

I have also been thinking about the best possible use of the BGS blog. One idea is to utilize it for our members family histories with an emphasis on the where and when. The whos will follow, naturally. Hopefully that will result in even more connections among our members.

Rel@ively...