Blog Management

[Mick Bonwick]

I have started a blog but would like to change the way that past entries have been organised. I can't find a way of doing this, so I suspect that it's not possible. At the moment the blog is one long account of activities, but this makes it difficult or, at best, awkward to find a specific topic. Is it possible to break an existing blog into sections, each one of which is a blog in its own right?

[ess1uk]

I’m sure there used to be.

not sure now

[Mikkel]

If you want to change the sequence of the posts, the only workaround I know is to edit the dates, as the default view is chronological.

 

In the old RMweb format you could also use the tags, e.g. have several blog entries tagged "Diesels" and then set up a link in the sidebar which brought up all the entries on "Diesels". So far it dos not seem that the new format provides for this.

 

Incidentally, what the new format does allow is to highlight one of the tags (yellow box called "item prefix" under the tags) so that it appears as a little red banner over that particular entry on the blog's frontpage (as illustrated here). This could also be used to help the viewer to differentiate entries when going through your front page.

 

 

PS: To answer your question about breaking one blog into several blogs, no I can't see how one would do that - except of course copying and pasting the desired entries over into a new second blog - which may be your best bet? At the moment everyone is experimenting so I don't think anyone would mind seeing your old posts being posted again.

Edited February 3, 2019 by Mikkel

[Mikkel]

A little tip for anyone who would like to keep track of activities on their blog: You can set up a special Activity Stream" for this:

 

1. Under "Activities", select "My Activity Streams", then "Content I started".

2. In the white menu bar that now appears, select: "Show me": "Items, comments and reviews"

3. Also in the white menu bar, select: "Content Type": "Blog Entries". Next to this selection, click the wheel to select the blog in question:

 

 

4. Lastly, click "Save as New Stream" on the right hand side of the white menu, and give  the stream a name (e.g. "My blog").

 

The name will now appear in your list of Activity Streams, and when clicked will show you interactions on the blog.

 

 

 

 

Edited February 4, 2019 by Mikkel

[47137]

This sort of worked example is really helpful and when you have set up your first custom stream or whatever it becomes much easier to see the possibilities to set up some of your own. Maybe the site administrators will be able to provide some tutorials like this in the weeks to come.

 

For the OP: I asked Andy Y about splitting a blog many months ago, at the time I was pondering trying to separate my train topics from my layout topics. The answer was no, you would have to recreate the topic in the new blog and delete the original. I suppose the important thing is to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve when you begin the blog, which of course is much easier to write here than actually do because projects evolve as they develop.

 

- Richard.

[Mikkel]

Andy just pointed out that streams can be shared. Here's a stream for watching all blog posts and comments:

 

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/discover/585/

[Ravenser]

We appear to have lost a number of features from the blogs :

 

- The sidebar list of previous postings. 

- Any form of indexing or list-of-tags 

- The classification of postings by type 

- The list of recent visitors

[ess1uk]

49 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

We appear to have lost a number of features from the blogs :

 

- The sidebar list of previous postings. 

- Any form of indexing or list-of-tags 

- The classification of postings by type 

- The list of recent visitors

You can do some of those things slightly differently but I did prefer the older way.

ive gone through my blogs and started the long process of bringing it back to almost how it was previously.

 

[Mikkel]

The sidebar feature can be switched on in Manage Blog >> Edit Blog. But if you haven't saved the old index, you'll have to rebuild it.

 

[Ravenser]

On ‎20‎/‎05‎/‎2019 at 16:32, Mikkel said:

The sidebar feature can be switched on in Manage Blog >> Edit Blog. But if you haven't saved the old index, you'll have to rebuild it.

 

 

There used to be a side bar index of past posts effectively by default - switch on sidebar and you got it automatically. You now have to build an index manually , setting up a link to each post. Not only is it laborious , there is nothing - except this topic - to tell you what to do.

 

The other 3 points I raised remain unsolved. There seems little point applying tags when there is no longer a tag-cloud for the visitor to find by tag.

 

This isn't meant as a whinge about functionality and new ways of doing things. There's a severely practical issue here. Since the new software changed everything, blog views have slumped. I reckon views for my new posts during the last 6 months are down by 45-50% , and I don't think it's that I've suddenly become boring. When I sort by view, recent posts fill 4 of the 5 bottom slots on my Workbench blog. I'm really not convinced my 2019 New Year's Survey and Resolutions was only 20% as interesting as the 2018 post. I'm struggling to get posts much over 100 views unless the low arts of social media are applied

 

This phenomenon isn't confined to me. I've taken a quick look at a few other long-term blogs and the pattern is more or less the same.  Dave John's Kelvinbank blog shows exactly the same thing. - all this year's posting are jammed at the bottom of the view count. The Fatadder's workbench shows it as well. He's now getting 100-150 views per post not 400-600. His modelling certainly hasn't gone off the boil.  Fen End Pits blog shows a similar pattern

 

This isn't just because these are recent posts. In my experience , over a decade , at least 2/3rds of a post's total views come in the first 7-14 days. (No surprise there - people view new content). With no automatic past post list in the side bar any more the chances of a casual visitor looking back through the blog for interesting past content drop dramatically, so postings are even less likely to attract new views after the first few days.

 

I'm not convinced the change to listing blogs in the front page box based on Most Recent Comment as opposed to Most Recent Post helps us. Posts drop off the front page much faster. I admit to "gaming the system" on my latest post and adding a minor update as a comment to return it to the front page. In 24 hrs that raised the post views by 50% , indicating that visibility on the front page in the general forum list is a key driver of traffic to the blogs.

 

But adding comments is not a panacea. Barry O's most recent posting has 13 comments, keeping it on the "leaderboard" . It has only attracted 216 views, and is almost his least viewed post ever , despite being a thoroughly interesting piece of modelling.

 

We need some adjustments to restore visibility to the blogs and encourage people to resume looking at them. The removal of readily accessible post view-counts may be a move against "social media addiction" but  I think it has served to disguise a real slump in viewing. If you can't see who's viewing , you don't notice that nobody is any more

 

I'm not quite sure what adjustments to suggest , but something needs to be done to high-light blog material to the forum at large

[Mikkel]

Yes, my total blog view count is also down, I'd say by 75-80% since the change.

 

A lot of it could be down to a counting error though: A while back I noted that when I posted a new blog post, the views for the post itself grew much quicker than the total blog views. I initially thought that maybe the post counted hits while the accumulated count showed viewers - but testing doesn't seem to support that.

 

What could be happening is that the "total" blog view counter only counts hits to the front page of the blog, and doesn't actually include views of the individual blog posts. Since most viewers now probably access the blogs via the Activity Streams and thereby go directly to the individual blog posts (rather than the front page of the blog), that's bound to give a complete misrepresentation of actual views.

 

It's a shame if it means that people abandon their blogs because they don't think they are getting views. Andy is aware of the issue though, I believe it's on his list.

 

Edited to clarify.

Edited May 24, 2019 by Mikkel

[ess1uk]

8 hours ago, Ravenser said:

 

There used to be a side bar index of past posts effectively by default - switch on sidebar and you got it automatically. You now have to build an index manually , setting up a link to each post. Not only is it laborious , there is nothing - except this topic - to tell you what to do.

 

 

I found this useful 

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/47303-blog-quality/

 

[Ravenser]

26 minutes ago, ess1uk said:

I found this useful 

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/47303-blog-quality/

 

 

Quality is one thing, but blogs of undoubted modelling quality like Mikkel's or the Fatadder's have seen massive drops in views. 

 

I think a further contributor to this is that the following/subscriber lists have been wiped by the new software. So - we've lost indexes, we've had all "following" lists wiped, "favourite blog" is a distant memory, we can't see who looks at our blogs any more , its become very difficult to find how many are viewing (you have to open each post individually to see) , we've lost tags in a usable form . I think we've lost the RSS feed as well

 

This  guide old system is now irrelevant because Content Blocks have been deleted.....

[47137]

9 hours ago, Ravenser said:

...

 

We need some adjustments to restore visibility to the blogs and encourage people to resume looking at them. The removal of readily accessible post view-counts may be a move against "social media addiction" but  I think it has served to disguise a real slump in viewing. If you can't see who's viewing , you don't notice that nobody is any more

 

I'm not quite sure what adjustments to suggest , but something needs to be done to high-light blog material to the forum at large

 

With the old software, I could see a list of my blog entries with their view counts and see, at a glance, which subjects were more popular. I miss this feature a lot - I now have to look at one topic after another to see if anyone is looking at it.

 

Of course, the counters may be unrepresentative! I am pretty confident, there is no way sixty-eight thousand people have looked at my blog. I have always had a feeling, the counter for the front page includes hits from bots.

 

The biggest improvement to me would be for the forum to have simple lists of recent blog entries, without thumbnails and without short lists of recent entries. Then we could have maybe 50 posts on a page and it would be easy to scan the list. The lists to show the title of the post, the user name of the member, the parent blog and the view count.

 

To my mind, blog posts  have a longer life span than ordinary topics. If the view count is reliable than apart from anything else it gives you an idea of whether it is worth reading. Or, indeed, worth writing :-)

 

- Richard.

[Ravenser]

1 minute ago, 47137 said:

 

With the old software, I could see a list of my blog entries with their view counts and see, at a glance, which subjects were more popular. I miss this feature a lot - I now have to look at one topic after another to see if anyone is looking at it.

 

Of course, the counters may be unrepresentative! I am pretty confident, there is no way sixty-eight thousand people have looked at my blog. I have always had a feeling, the counter for the front page includes hits from bots.

 

The biggest improvement to me would be for the forum to have simple lists of recent blog entries, without thumbnails and without short lists of recent entries. Then we could have maybe 50 posts on a page and it would be easy to scan the list. The lists to show the title of the post, the user name of the member, the parent blog and the view count.

 

To my mind, blog posts  have a longer life span than ordinary topics. If the view count is reliable than apart from anything else it gives you an idea of whether it is worth reading. Or, indeed, worth writing :-)

 

- Richard.

 

It's possible to sort the list of postings by number of views, rather than date of posting  [Sort By, in small type just below the big yellow Add Blog Entry button]. This means that you can get an idea of where a posting sits in ranking terms, and opening one or two posts gives some idea of the absolute numbers of views at different points 

 

I also notice that posts which have been linked in a topic have substantially higher view counts. There's a reason why one of my posts , on upgrading a Lima CCT , has almost 1500 views - I provided a link in a discussion thread. The issue is therefore how the existence of blog content is signalled within the main forum, rather than allowing blogs to decay into a kind of twilight zone that some members pride themselves on never visiting

[47137]

If I sort my own blog by views, I too draw the sad conclusion that views have dropped a lot with the new software.

 

The home page for blogs is oriented around blogs, not individual posts. So if you try sorting this by views, you simply get the blogs with the most views first, not the posts with the most views. Someone beginning a new blog now may never reach the first page.

 

We can set up bookmarks in our browsers for the blogs we enjoy, but if many of us do this then the blog writers don't get new readers. Anyone starting a new blog has a real struggle to reach viewers as soon as their posts have dropped off the list of new blog entries. I will confess now, the only way I can find my own blog is through a browser bookmark.

 

I think I'd be happy with a list of blog posts, sorted by views, and with the ability to put some cut-off dates. Essentially, I suppose a tool to find blogs of future interest.

 

- Richard.

[Mikkel]

9 hours ago, 47137 said:

I have always had a feeling, the counter for the front page includes hits from bots.

 

Yes, my feeling too. And probably thousands of visits by people who were looking for something else . In fact such random hits may account for the majority of visits. But really I have no clue (as my wife frequently reminds me).

[Ravenser]

54 minutes ago, 47137 said:

 I will confess now, the only way I can find my own blog is through a browser bookmark. 

 

I think I'd be happy with a list of blog posts, sorted by views, and with the ability to put some cut-off dates. Essentially, I suppose a tool to find blogs of future interest.

 

- Richard.

 

Two ways to find your own blogs:

 

1. There's a dropdown to the left of the yellow Add New Entry button and the icon for the two types of blog frontpage

 

This reads (in faint type!)  My Blogs - and the drop down shows your blog(s).

 

(I've only just realised this)

 

 

 

 

2. The other option is as a tab within your profile, which is what I've mainly been using:

 

 

 

 

By the way the Create section in the top bar doesn't work for Blog entries . I've not bothered to try it for anything else:

 

 

Edited May 24, 2019 by Ravenser

[ess1uk]

On 24/05/2019 at 09:44, Ravenser said:

 

Quality is one thing, but blogs of undoubted modelling quality like Mikkel's or the Fatadder's have seen massive drops in views. 

 

I think a further contributor to this is that the following/subscriber lists have been wiped by the new software. So - we've lost indexes, we've had all "following" lists wiped, "favourite blog" is a distant memory, we can't see who looks at our blogs any more , its become very difficult to find how many are viewing (you have to open each post individually to see) , we've lost tags in a usable form . I think we've lost the RSS feed as well

 

This  guide old system is now irrelevant because Content Blocks have been deleted.....

I wasn’t really meaning the blog quality but more that thread was useful for laying out blogs under the old system, some of which is still relevant.

it was previously useful to be able to group entries such as “loco” “van” etc.

Edited May 26, 2019 by ess1uk

[Mick Bonwick]

I have just added another topic to the sidebar in my blog, but the spacing between the links has doubled compared with those that were done a while ago. I have tried all sorts of things to change the new entries back to single spacing ,but failed dismally. Does anybody have an idea about how this change can be made? I don't think I've done anything different this time, but it's entirely possible that I have!

[47137]

1 hour ago, Mick Bonwick said:

I have just added another topic to the sidebar in my blog, but the spacing between the links has doubled compared with those that were done a while ago. I have tried all sorts of things to change the new entries back to single spacing ,but failed dismally. Does anybody have an idea about how this change can be made? I don't think I've done anything different this time, but it's entirely possible that I have!

 

I my own blog, I use SHIFT+ENTER to create new lines in the sidebar, and then a simple ENTER when I want to begin a new block of text. In the editor both sorts of new line look the same:

 

But the web site renders them like this, with extra space before "Main Baseboard":

 

I have done quite a lot of faffing around to get this sidebar looking presentable, but now it is done I can add slot in new topics when I write them. Hope this helps.

 

- Richard.

[Mick Bonwick]

Thanks, Richard. I'll try that.

[Mick Bonwick]

Fixed! Thank you.