Follow along as metaprinter.com founder and senior writer Robert Ivan builds a community news blog for Aberdeen Township New Jersey at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship.
I figure this could be a huge help for many of my readers who are either interested in starting their own community site (some call this BeatBlogging). To my main stream media readers who come here to stay on top of news media trends, this entire exercise could be a real lesson in the new realities of online publishing.
The site is called NJcircles (because I already had the domain from a previous project) and is located at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship and built using Movable Type. I selected MT because the metaprinter site is built on Wordpress and I've got those skills down pretty good, so I want to learn Movable Type CMS and share that experience as well. It doesn't hurt that MT is used by power bloggers like Jason Kottke, media companies like National Geographic, and community news sites like Baristanet.
Here are the first steps. I'm going to assume you know how to do certain things so please let me know if you need help and we'll work through this together.
To follow this series just select NJcircles from the "categories" menu at the top of the metaprinter blog. In the next installment I will modify the site to give it a more personal look as well as add some links & pages related to my beat.
Leave a comment