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Identity

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Harriet Lane's post makes me think about one of the many problems with this blog, which is the lack of author bios. There has never been a decent solution for this. Back in the day, there was a roughly slapped-together bio page which had to be manually updated. People would e-mail their updates to me, and I would paste them into the HTML. It was a tedious process for me, and the levels of involvement prevented most PDD members from participating. Few people visited the page because the information was sparse and static.

I want a solution that will be easy for the user and functional for the reader. The best solution I can come up with at this point is to make an additional blog for bios; each PDD member would make one post, which would be their bio. To make updates, all they'd have to do is update that one post. Everything could be done from the same page you make your PDD posts from.

We do have the ability to create a list of all the PDD members and how many posts they've made, which is available here. I could easily use this to create links to bios, but it's updating the bios themselves that's difficult.

Any thoughts or ideas anyone has will be greatly appreciated.

Comments

I am not sure exactly how it is done, but on metafilter each user has their own Profile page which they can edit at will. The tag username at the bottom of each post is a hotlink to that users profile. I don't know much about Movable Type, but with Wordpress there are tonnes of free add on modules written by 3rd parties, is there something simular for MT that might mimic the MeFi system?


Not that I can tell. Team blogging is not very popular, and when it is, it's usually just a handful of friends as opposed to the open-enrollment system we have at PDD.

I can make the author's name link to anything in the world; that's easy. But the problem lies in having a bio page that is easily updatable by the author.

There are lots of PDDers who can't figure out how to post pictures or make an active hyperlink, so it would have to be really easy to use.


A cheap-ass duct tape solution would be another page that would have everyone's "bio" post. That way the authors could go in and edit the data to keep it current.


I could donate some webspace to the site that you could just link over to an html formate that is easily made.(I think) I would just create a subdomain of even point directly to it. I have 10gigs of space and 400gigs of bandwidth a month. Shoot me a line if you might want to....


I posted a question about it here, perhaps it'll turn something up by a more experienced user.


last post by me on this subject... my link above has a few suggestions that may work


Thanks, Edgewood for the advice and the footwork. I installed the Custom Fields plugin, and it works great. However, here's another problem I run into all the time:

Sure, it's easy to edit author profiles now. But you must have administrative access to do it. This means that in order to have the ability to edit your own profile, you must also have the ability to edit everyone else's. And to do just about anything behind the scenes on this site, for that matter.

The thought makes me squeamish.

Of course now that trolling is illegal, everything should be OK.


i guess i have to post to be an "active" member huh?

i didn't get snubbed off the list because i don't live in duluth anymore right?

hey did i mention i'm paranoid?


Christopher, the list is only of current members -- people who've rejoined since we transferred to Movable Type. So, like, why haven't you rejoined? Huh? HUH?!


I've seen a few Madison references here (which is where I'm deployed). Sure be nice to find some car poolers for weekend runs.


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