News from myminnesotawoods.org

This month we’re excited to announce a new way of aggregating and displaying news on MyMinnesotaWoods.org. Our “In the news…” box is now set up with an RSS feed. The new list will automatically display any news items tagged in the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.

We’re excited about this approach because it offers the community a new way to contribute content to the site. This is one of several ways that we’re trying to do this.

If you’re not familiar with del.icio.us, it’s a free and simple way to store your bookmarks remotely. This means your bookmarks are accessible from any internet-connected computer. You can easily share your bookmarks, or just as easily keep them private. Learn more about del.icio.us.

If you have a del.icio.us account and want to add news items to our feed, contact Eli or Philip to find out how.

Philip created a new template for the web version of the monthly email updates.  The November 2007 update is built on the new template.  This is a vast improvement over previous web versions, created by copying, pasting, and then trying to fix the HTML from a preview message.

Constant Contact, which we use for our email updates, has some nice features.  But one feature that makes us mad month after month is how hard it is to build a web version of your email.  They want to charge extra for that.  The HTML is a complete mess, and this process is never as easy as it should be.

Now that we have the new template, we just have to manually copy and paste each story from CC into our page.  Still a waste of time doing something CC could very easily provide for free, but at least it allows us to avoid fighting with CC’s coding.  And this way it actually renders properly.

The site was down for a full week early in August.  The explanation?  A “catastrophic hardware failure” on the Extension server.  We apologize for the outage, and hope it didn’t cause too great an inconvenience to site users.  To our knowledge, everything was back up and running by about August 8.

I’ve had a few inquiries from other Extension website managers about our discussion board. Here’s what I’ve been sending out in response:

We use Website Toolbox for the discussion board platform. It’s relatively cheap and seems to work well. (According to my records a one-year subscription cost us $42.) By far its most important strength is spam control: Knock on wood, we’ve had no spam problems at all in the 4 months or so that it’s been up. That may change (?), but it’s good for now.

Website toolbox is easy to set up and use, but has some limitations. A more expensive product might have more functionality. Some settings that should be modifiable seem hardwired, which at times is annoying. This is a relatively minor thing though, and overall I’m pretty happy with the software.

Discussion board usage has been good. In the first three months after launch, there are 34 threads, averaging about 100 views each. There are a total of about 100 posts, so each thread includes about two replies. There is significant variation by topic.

There’s room for growth, but overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised with this. The discussion board is not meant to be an ask-the-expert thing, it’s supposed to be a forum for discussion. But, in most cases I write the first reply, and I try to do that within 24 hours of the original post. With that in mind, although more questions would be nice, a lot more questions would strain my capacity to address them.

The discussion board is not moderated, so we do not review posts before they appear. They go up as soon as the writer hits “submit.” We do, however, receive email notifications of new posts, and we tend to check them rather frequently.