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FSFE Blogs

The FSFE has a blogging platform for volunteers/teams available at https://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME.

If you want, you can also have your blog added to the FSFE Planet available in several languages (see below) and visible at https://blogs.fsfe.org.

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

Getting Started

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

Then you can administrate it at https://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME/wp-admin/

The 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:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/New_To_WordPress_-_Where_to_Start

• http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons

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

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging

Blogs usage

Here you'll find some tips for using your 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:

• The "Pome" wordpress theme

• The "Classic Green" wordpress theme

• The "Atahualpa" wordpress theme

Use the official colours of FSFE

• You can find the official FSFE colours and other designer guidelines on the designer section of the website.

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 <blog-hackers AT lists DOT fsfe 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 Planet is an aggregation tool that publishes blog posts from our supporters. 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 <contact AT fsfe 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 blog.

• Optionally: Your Hackergotchi, in 80×80 px and PNG format

Some notes about categories

There are no common or "agreed" categories for languages across the planet or in the blogging platform. Instead, you assign a category of your choosing to represent each of your blogging languages, and then you include the numeric identifier of that category in the URL sent to the mail address above. To find out what the identifier is in Wordpress, just look for the category in the list of categories displayed alongside your posts and see what the hyperlink contains. Indeed, just copying that link, which will look like this...

http://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME/?cat=CATEGORY-ID

...and adding &feed=rss2 to the end of it will give you a usable URL for the planet.

If you are already blogging to one of the planets and didn't use a language category to start with, but you then find yourself wanting to blog in another language, you can create a language category and then assign it to many of your existing posts at once in the Wordpress authoring interface. To do the latter update, choose the "Posts" section of the interface, select as many as you need to change, choose "Edit" from the "Bulk Actions" menu and click "Apply", and then select your new language category. Finally, click "Update" to add the category to the selected posts. (This is described in the documentation for the "Posts" screen.)

After updating the categorisation of your posts, you will need to tell the Planet maintainers the updated URL for your language-specific posts using the mail address given above.

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.

• blogspam

  • A free collaborative antispam service

  • See instructions here: http://blogspam.net/plugins/

• wpspam-free

  • This plugin only allows comments from users who have javascript and cookies enabled

  • See instructions here: http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/library/wordpress-plugins/wpspam-free/#wpsf_installation_instructions

• Akismet

  • Another collaborative antispam service; you'll need to request an API key (this is free for personal non-commercial use!)

• spam karma 2

  • This plugin is not actively maintained anymore (so you could get some warning messages), but it still does quite a good job.

If you have other antispam suggestions please let us know!

Category/FellowshipServices