citizen journalism
Create your own personal Urban Vancouver hyper-local citizen journalism site
Introduction
"Hyper-local media" and "citizen journalism" are buzzwords that are getting lots of attention these days. Why? Of course, I don't know the whole answer but part of it is that under 35s don't read newspapers and this is seen as an effective way of getting their attention and engaging them by letting them blog their own news and contextualizing news to where they live instead of the big media hubs like London, New York, Washington, Ottawa, Toronto, etc.
Urban Vancouver (henceforth called UV) is one example of a hyper-local/citizen journalism site. It's news for Vancouverites (that's BC, Canada not Washington, USA) by Vancouverites. There's no barrier to entry (or more accurately, the barriers to entry are much lower). Anybody with a Vancouver connection can join for free and blog for free (including photos and soon, audio and video) and their blog posts show up automatically on the front page.
Before Bryght, creating your own Urban Vancouver (which is a Bryght site) was imposssible for non technical people. With Bryght, you can create your own UV in a matter or hours or days whether you are technical or not.
What you will have
Your own "UV-like" site (to pretentiously name drop European places that I have lived, how about Friedrichshafen Heute, Belsize Park Today, Hadley Common Today or for a Vancouver example how about Cedar Cottage Today?) with blogs automagically published to the front page.
You won't have a cool "Bright Creative Dave Shea" look like Urban Vancouver, but that can be arranged. Contact us and we can put you in touch with a reseller (or do it yourself if you know modern, table-less CSS/HTML design) who can get you a fantastic look and feel.
Note that this is only one possible configuration for a Bryght site. Bryght sites are flexible and can be set up in other many ways e.g. brochure sites. See Types of Sites for other common configurations.
Prerequisites
- You need your Bryght site to have been created. Your reseller can do this for or you can do this yourself at Bryght.com.
- You need a userid and password for an account with admin privileges. We recommend using an account that is NOT the admin account but has full privileges.
Use the easy 10 step site checklist, Luke!
This is a UV specific version of Boris' most excellent new site checklist.
Step 1 - Configure your admin settings
- Click Administer » Site settings » Site information
- Fill in your Name, and email. The rest of the settings can be left at their defaults if you wish.
- Click "Save configuration"
More info on configuring admin settings
Step 2 - Ensure aggregator, blog, and image gallery are enabled
- Click Administer » Site building » Modules
- Make sure Aggregator, Blog, Blogapi, Comment, TinyMCE (if you want WYSIWYG HTML editing), and image are checked under the "Enabled" column
- Leave the other modules at their default settings
- Click on "Save configuration"
Step 3 - Set workflow so that blog posts are published to the front page and comments are enabled
- Click Administer » Content management » Configure Types
- Click "edit" for the "Blog entry" content type.
- Make sure "Promote to front page" is checked so that blog posts are published to the front page.
- Make sure "Published" is checked
- Click "Save configuration"
More info on default workflow for various content (also called node) types
Step 4 - Configure users to allow users to sign up without approval, user pictures (avatars) and to enable blogs and image galleries for registered users and comments for anonymous users
Allow people to create accounts without approval, and add user pictures:
- Click Administer » User management » User settings tab
- Check "Visitors can create accounts and no administrator approval is required."
- Click on "Enabled" under "Picture support:"
- Click "Save configuration"
Enable blogs, comments and image galleries for registered users and comments for non-registered users:
- Click on Administer » User management » Access control
- Under "anonymous user", make sure the following are checked: "access comments", "access content", "access news feeds", "post comments" "post comments without approval", "search content", "vote on polls"
- Under "authenticated user", make sure the following are checked: "access comments", "access content", "access news feeds", "post comments" "post comments without approval", "search content", "vote on polls", "edit own blog", "edit own pages", "edit own stories", "administer images", "create images"
More info on user roles and permissions
Step 5 - Create geographic and newspaper style categories for blogs and images
For your own personal UV, you wouldn't use the Vancouver geographic categories (Chinatown, Commercial Drive, Downtown, Eastside, Gastown, Kitsilano, Main Street, etc.). Instead, you would use the ones applicable to your community. For this example let's pretend our community is called 'Bedrock' :-) and the neighbourhoods are called 'China Rock', "Commercial Rock', 'Down Rock', 'East Stone', and 'Gas Rock':
- Create the neighbourhood vocabulary:
- Click Administer » Content management» Categories » Add vocabulary tab.
- Type in Neighbourhood (or Neighborhood if you prefer) under "Vocabulary name:"
- Under "Types:", check "personal blog entry" and "image"
- Under "Hierarchy:", check "Single"
- Leave "Multiple select" unchecked to allow content to be classified as belonging to only one neighbourhood at a time. You could check this if you are going to allow content to be classified under multiple neighbourhoods at a time.
- Check "Required" to force people to people to fill in the neighbourhood.
- Click on "Submit"
- Create the neighbourhood categories:
- Add the Bedrock category:
- Click Administer » Content management » Categories
- Next to "Neighbourhood", click "add term"
- Under "Term name" enter "Bedrock" - This will be the "catchall" category for things that are applicable to all of Bedrock in the same way that the Vancouver category on UV is for anything applicable to all of Vancouver.
- Under "Parent:", select "<root>"
- Click on "Submit"
- Add the 'China Rock', "Commercial Rock', 'Down Rock', 'East Stone', and 'Gas Rock' categories as subcategories of Bedrock:
- Click Administer » Content management » Categories
- Next to "Neighbourhood", click "add term"
- Under "Term name" enter "China Rock".
- Under "Parent:", select "<Bedrock>"
- Click on "Submit"
- Repeat for 'Commercial Rock', 'Down Rock', 'East Stone' and 'Gas Rock'
- Add the Bedrock category:
For the newspaper style categories, we looked at the local papers and came up with our own set of categories (General, Arts & Entertainment, Business, Environment, Fashion, Food & Dining, Health & Fitness, Media, Music, Politics, Real Estate, Recreation, Society, Sports, Technology, Travel) for UV. Feel free to use your own of course! For this example we will use the same ones as UV.
- Create the newspaper style categories, which for UV which we call 'Topics':
- Click Administer » Content management » Add vocabulary tab.
- Type in Topics under "Vocabulary name:"
- Under "Types:", check "personal blog entry" and "image"
- Under "Hierarchy:", check "Single"
- Check "Multiple select" to allow content to be classified as belonging to multiple topics.
- Check "Required" to force people to people to fill in the topic.
- Click on "Submit"
- Create the categories under Topics. Add the General category:
- Click Administer » Content management » Categories
- Next to "Topics", click "add term"
- Under "Term name" enter "General"
- Under "Parent:", select "<root>"
- Click on "Submit"
- Repeat for 'Arts & Entertainment', 'Business', etc.
Step 6 - Set module specific Settings
Click Administer » Site configuration. Underneath you will see a list of modules whose settings you can change.
A few modules (like image) require you to access their settings in order to set them up:
- Click Administer » Site configuration » Image
- The very first time you do this, it will initialize itself and create some directories for images so you need to do this at least once before you start adding images. More info
Other modules have settings that you may want to change.
Step 7 - Set up input formats to remove dangerous tags and enable tags you need
By default, Bryght allows only a very small set of HTML tags to be entered by users using the "Filtered HTML filter". Like UV, you may want to let the user enter tags for bold, italic, paragraph and block quotes, here's how:
- Click Administer » Site configuration » Input formats
- Next to "Filtered HTML" and under "Operations" click on "configure"
- Click on the "configure filters" tab
- Under "Allowed HTML tags", add <b>, <i>, <p> and <blockquote> to the list of tags
- Click on "Save configuration"
More info on Input Formats and Filters
Step 8 - Configure the RSS Aggregator to subscribe to all related feeds
UV's RSS aggregator is configured to subscribe to every single RSS feed related to Vancouver that we know about which is several hundred. These feeds are grouped into one or more categories that make sense for Vancouver. The categories are Vancouver blogs, food, business, technology, etc. For example, a food blog would be categorized into the Vancouver blogs and food categories and about a technology business would be categorized into Vancouver blogs, business and technology.
This provides a portal for Vancouver blogs as well as helps improve UV's search engine rank for Vancouver related keywords.
For this example, we will use the categories Bedrock blogs, food, business, and technology but of course you can use whatever categories you wish.
- Configure the aggregator:
- Click Administer » Content management » Aggregator » configure tab.
- Select "5 items" for "Items shown in sources and categories pages:". Of course you can pick another number here but five is about right for most sites.
- Check "multiple selector" to have a multiple select box rather than checkboxes.
- Click on "Save configuration"
- Create the aggregator categories:
- Click Administer » Content management » Aggregator » Add category tab.
- Enter Latest Bedrock Blogs under "Title"
- Select 5 items under "Latest items block:"
- Click on "Submit"
- Repeat for food, business, technology, etc.
- Subscribe to all relevant feeds in the aggregator:
- Find the RSS feed (for more info, see how to find RSS feeds from blogs and websites and how to create RSS feeds from keywords using RSS search engines like PubSub and Feedster) that you want to subscribe to and copy it to your clipboard.
- Click on Administer » Content management » Aggregator » Add feed tab.
- Fill in the title e.g. Bedrock News under "Title:"
- Paste in the URL of the feed under "URL:" e.g. http://www.bedrocknews.com/index.xml - not that this is a not a real URL for an RSS feed, just a made up example!
- Select 3 hours under "Update interval:"
- Select 5 items under "Latest items block:"
- Check the category or categories to which this RSS feed belongs, in this cast "latest Bedrock Blogs"
- Click on "Submit"
- Repeat for all the other Bedrock related RSS feeds.
Step 9 - Set sidebar blocks so that popular content is on the left and blogs from the RSS aggregator and Upcoming Events are on the right
Make the left sidebar contain popular content
- Click Administer » Site building » Blocks
- Check "Enabled" and "left" next to "Popular content"
- Click "Save blocks"
Make the right sidebar contain the latest update blog posts from the RSS aggregator with Upcoming Events below:
- Click Administer » Site building » Blocks
- Check "Enabled" and "right" and select "0" next to "Latest Bedrock Blogs"
- Check "Enabled" and "right" and select "-1" next to "List of upcoming events". Since 1 is greater than 0, this means Latest Bedrock Blogs will float above "List of upcoming events".
- Click "Save blocks"
More info on enabling and setting the order of sidebar blocks and for those who wish to make money via ads, check out How to add a Javascript (e.g. Google Adsense, SiteMeter, Blogrolling.com, etc.) Block to the Sidebar
Step 10 - Point your domain to servers so you can use your own URL, not Bryght's
Two options:
- Use Bryght's name servers:
- Point your name server to ns1.bryght.com and ns2.bryght.com
- Use your existing name server and just update DNS to point to Bryght's server:
- [PREFERRED] create a CNAME that points your site to horse.bryght.com e.g. if your site is community.bedrock.com, create a CNAME that points community.bedrock.com to dudley.bryght.com OR
- Create an A record that points to 209.31.179.218 e.g. an A record that points community.bedrock.com to 209.31.179.218. This solution is NOT preferred because if we change the IP address of the server, you will have to update your A record.
More info about pointing your domain to Bryght's servers.
All Done! Eat some chocolate or Mohnkuchen! What's next? Gardening and Promotion
Actually, that was the easy part and you don't have everything that UV has (e.g. discussion forums. It depends on your particular community as to whether you need forums or not. Each blog post has threaded comments which are very similar to forum topics. The only difference is that you have to be a member to create a blog post whereas you can set up forums so that non members can create forum topics.). That said, you definitely deserve a pat on the back and chocolate or mohnkuchen! Technology is easy. Creating and growing a living community where people actually create content (by blogging, posting pictures,sand comments) is not technology. It's sociology!
Speaking of sociology, people who are not bloggers don't usually like a very long scrolling "River of News"/"Conveyor Belt Sushi" front page such as the front page on Urban Vancouver. You may want to have a front page with minimal scrolling like the most excellent Bluffton Today.
Of course, you will need a customized look and feel at some point. As we said at the start, contact us and we can put you in touch with a reseller (or do it yourself if you know modern, table-less CSS/HTML design) who can get you a fantastic look and feel.
Again, the hardest part of any online community is enabling people to create compelling content constantly. Based on our experience, you really need a "conversation coordinator"/"site dad/site mom" who administers the site on a daily basis (watching for spam and other objectionable content) and fosters and nurtures the community and helps out beginners. This person doesn't have to be technical; he or she just has to know how to build community and how to use Bryght. Again, contact us if you need to find somebody like this but really it would be best if this person was a member of the community you are covering and not an outsider.
