Blogs

Fellowship Blogs

The Fellowship blogging platform is available at http://blogs.fsfe.org.

This page has some basic instructions to use your blog, please read it carefully.

If you want, you can also have your blog added to the Fellowship Planet available in several languages (see below).

Getting Started

To start your blog, just login with your Fellow username and password at http://blogs.fsfe.org/wp-login.php, and the http://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME blog will be automatically created.

The Fellowship blogging platform is implemented with Wordpress, configured in multisite mode; this means that some blog features are limited, compared to a classic stand-alone Wordpress installation (for example, plugins and themes must be installed in a centralised way, see below).

If you are new to Wordpress and want to learn more, some useful starting points are:

If you are new to blogging, here's a good introductive article:

If you had a blog on the old Fellowship portal, please read the instructions for migration.

If you already know Wordpress (or even hacked on it!) and you have any suggestions about possible improvements to the platform, please have a look at the FellowshipHacks/Projects/Blog project.

Blogs usage

Here you'll find some tips for using your Fellowship blog.

Tags, Categories and Languages

Organizing the content of your blog is important if you want people to find easily what they’re interested in. Tags also give your audience a clear idea of what you’re talking about precisely. However, you might be confused between tags and categories. Well, you’re not the only one in that case.

Moreover, we aren’t all English speakers, and most of us want to blog both in English and in our mother tongue.

So we came up with a quite simple solution. Tags are used to carry content, subjects, whereas Categories are used for languages (and if you want you can also use categories for classification).

Themes

Currently the following Wordpress themes are available:

Plugins

Wordpress plugins must be installed centrally by the system administrator, then each blogger can decide to enable them on his blog. So if you want to use a particular plugin, write to <fellowship AT fsfeurope DOT org> (please note that not all Wordpress plugins are compatible with the multiuser feature).

You can enable/disable plugins in the Plugins section of your blog administration dashboard.

Create your hackergotchi

A Hackergotchi is a picture of your head. If you don't have one, here is an howto with the GIMP. And if you need some inspiration take a look at Gnome’s hackergotchi heads, planet kde, planet debian, or other planets.

Get your blog into the FSFE Planet

The Fellowship Planet is an aggregation tool that publishes blog posts from our fellows. There is a planet for different languages: English, German, French, Spanish, etc.

If you want to get into this planet, please send an email to <fellowship-hackers AT fsfeurope DOT org> with the following information,

  • RSS feed for the language category, http://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME/?feed=rss2&cat=CATEGORY-ID. Note that you can play with the options to have a little more explicit RSS URL. If you are already using an external blogging platform, we can certainly add that RSS feed instead of your fellowship blog.

  • The name under which you would like your blog to be published.
  • Your Hackergotchi, in 80×80 px and PNG format

Fight spam

To fight spam in your blog comments, we provide some wordpress antispam plugins: you can test them and use the one(s) you prefer.

If you have other antispam suggestions please let us know!

CategoryFellowshipServices