Saturday, August 14, 2010

New Ancient Egypt Blog Portal

Via News from the Valley of the Kings by Kate Phizackerley on 09/08/10


Kate has posted about a new Ancient Egypt blog portal which she and Vincent have put together in WordPress. It is affiliated with the new magazine that Kate and I have been working on. Please see Kate's list of requests below for feedback. It would be great if you could get back to her on the link above, or post comments to me here and I will forward them on to Kate so that we can aggregate all ideas.

If you follow the link to Egyptological (our work-in-progress magazine) you will find something that is very much in the development stages! We decided to revisit the design from scratch, including the entire nagivation.

You can tell I'm in WordPress development mode this week ... Here is another new development, this time Andie and I have teamed up with Vincent Brown of Talking Pyramids.

I used to have a page like this at PageFlakes but it died so we have created a new Ancient Egypt blog portal in WordPress. It's an alternative for those who don't use a newsreader - it gathers the extracts from the most recent posts on your blogs and displays them on a single page. Simple. The top row is Andie's Egyptology News. Our themed blogs are on the second row.

If there is interest I need to update the site to the latest version of WordPress and tweak a few things, so the purpose of this article is to gather feedback on the level of interest. We would also like to know how the site should be developed. For instance:
  1. Which other blogs should be show? We can't guarantee to show every blog you would like as we need the permission from the blog owner. That's one reason why we only show a short snippet. The idea is that people can find interesting articles to read on the originating site.
  2. Since there are overlaps between blogs, we think we should only show one blog for each area of interest. For instance Vincent has the world's best pyramids blog with a pretty comprehensive coverage so there is no reason to include any other pyramid blog. Andie has the best general Egyptology news blog. (EEF is great but not a blog.) Do you agree?
  3. We have opted for a single page. We could have other pages - for instance a page of other general blogs about Ancient Egypt, or a hieroglyphs page. Is there a wish for this?
  4. Do you have other thoughts or ideas?
Of course, nobody might find this useful at all in which case we will quietly abandon it!


(As an aside, you'll notice this links back to Egyptological - Andie and my new magazine site which I have mentioned before and which is still under development. However, just as Andie and I are working with Vincent on the Portal, we would be happy to work with other people on other ideas for affiliated sites. If it is a good idea we can offer hosting on Egyptological and help with the development.)

3 comments:

Jane Akshar said...

Couldn't you get more on the screen I had to page down 4 times to see all content, smaller font?

You need a space between headline and text

Where is my blog :(

Andie said...

I replied to Jane by email, but the precis of the answer is basically that whilst the portal is being worked on the decision was made to restrict the blogs shown to those owned by Kate, Vincent and I. This is, after all, a work in progress.

We also want to make sure we have permission from people before we start displaying their content on the portal, so invitations will be sent out to ensure that we don't upset anyone by adding their content to the portal without their consent.

Finally, the more comments about the current page the better. We want to get it right, so if you have any comments about layout, design etc let us have them!

Cheers
Andie

Sam Oakley said...

I like the portal and will probably use it for a quick scan of current items. However I follow your blog via RSS on Google Reader (and some of the others there too) and find that's the easiest way to keep up to date. Would be good if the new portal could have a combined RSS feed for all the blogs tho!