Projo Subterranean Homepage News

We're finally finished converting the active projo blogs to Movable Type 4.12, a labor that began months ago and finally bore fruit this morning when the flagship Projo 7 to 7 News Blog started publishing in the new templates.

The most interesting new feature, to me, is the MultiBlog: Whenever a new post, photo or comment publishes to any projo blog, it will simultaneously publish in realtime to Multiblog. You get an eagle's-eye view of all today's news there in one chronological stream.

This was inspired by Dave Winer's River of News aggregator, which still plays out in a quiet corner of the New York Times site, publishing headlines as each newspaper section ships.

Movable Type, our blogging software, is built as a series of things -- entries, photos, comments, tags, bits of formatted text -- you can connect in many ways. They are interchangeable, which allows me to use essentially the same page to create a "tag cloud" as to create a photo gallery.

It's a lot like Tinker Toys.

I'm not a programmer, I'm a journalist who taught herself the templating language to hack this software in order to give us new tools, new ways to organize, publish and display all the news, photos and comments coming through these blogs each day.

The priority was to convert the existing blogs and create the MultiBlog. There are more features to Movable Type 4 that I haven't explored yet. Development will be ongoing, based in part on what interests you. I'll blog about Movable Type occasionally, since the docs are sketchy and what I've learned may be useful to other bloggers.Much more on that later. For now, I'm troubleshooting, helping bloggers who've forgotten their passwords and getting ready to launch a new group of blogs, many by first-time bloggers.

The intro:

How do you want to view this blog? Our new format offers several new options:

· Headlines: In a hurry? Scan the latest headlines, each linked to a complete blog post and its comments.

· 25 words: Want the gist? See headline links and the first 25 words of each post, links to the rest.

· Full version: Browse the latest blog posts as you have all along.

· A "tag cloud" is a visual index of topics "tagged" -- described on the fly -- by bloggers: Buddy, budget, Celona, Pawtucket, beaches, Firefox, Trinity. Larger type means more blog posts on that topic -- click the tag to see them all.

· Photos: A page of thumbnails of the most recently published photos, each popping up at a click to a larger image.

· Comments: The most recent writings by readers on all posts.

Want to know everything?
The MultiBlog merges all the news from all projo blogs into one chronological stream.

Latest headlines from all blogs display in realtime on one blog dedicated only to that task.

So will all posts by your favorite author, thumbnail photos, comments, a "tag cloud," and "author cloud" each on separate pages.

Changes

· Comments will no longer need approval before publishing; instead, each comment will display a "Report Abuse" link. Use it to tell projo staff about inappropriate language or content. Please don't abuse it.

· Tags: We're migrating from filing posts in formal categories to assigning descriptive tags on the fly.

· Photos: More, larger, the news in pictures. Galleries of thumbnails of every uploaded photo.

What's ahead?
We're starting from scratch with some of these features. When we tag enough posts and add enough photos to the new database, our tag clouds and thumbnail galleries will fill out.

There's more to come -- the tool is flexible, and we're seeing how far we can extend it. If there's a feature that you, the reader, or our journalist-bloggers want to see, we'll try to build it. Watch us work.

Some next steps are basic, such as captions. Scrollbars and ads on enlarged photo pages. An RSS feed for MultiBlog. (Under way now: Getting kinks in its "author cloud" and "tag cloud" links worked out.)

The tag cloud gives weight to topics as they rise and fall. We can group the most popular tags, the most recent, those with the most posts, the orphaned single. Choose the top ten, a swarm of 50, more. Today only, just Scott MacKay's tags, and, eventually, last year's top tags.

Readers as writers: Open comments let blog posts become instant publishing tools for news-gathering and microlocal reporting: "What happened in your neighborhood today?" could be a nightly "open thread."

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