Rush, Yet Again

[Surfcrest]

Rush, Yet Again

Oh, what luck! Our timing has been incredible. Rush is indeed looking to us to now be more involved with the plug-in and to be hosted.

This opens doors for both of us. Check out his post and the PM I forwarded to you Bob.

This must be a SGT Birthday present for both of you through us (~~)

[elephantspike]

Yup, and I thought he was on blogspot.com but he's on wordpress.com so it is the EXACT same software as we are using so I know EXACTLY how to make an EXACT copy of his existing site on our network. He can register his own domain like "bangkokbois.com"that we can have all his blog pages appear on or he can just have a subdomain like "bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork.com".

WHat we are going to be running here is basically the exact same thing as those yourblog.wordpress.com blogs with the exact same software but since it is our domain we can allow/disallow whatever we want.

Now we need to get a few more popular bloggers aboard.

[elephantspike]

I think the main page navigation pages should be written by you or ghost written for you if you prefer. THat slideshow at the top of the main page has excerpts and an image from whatever pages you set to be in it so we should make some introduction pages and have each one appear in a slide in that slideshow.....so like one could be "Guest Bloggers" and one "Thailand Nightlife" and one "Start Your Own Blog" and one "The Same Ol' Sawatdee Forum- Still Going Strong" and one "Living In Thailand" and one "Gay Scene in Thailand" and one "Other Countries",,,,,,(or something like that)

Also- we really need to get a paid membership here:


https://premium.wpmudev.org/join/

It has all the plugins and themes we need to make a real pro multisite network that can rival or surpass sites like wordpress.com or blogspot.com in fuctionality and user options (including that paid directory plugin)

[Surfcrest]

Let me work on bringing them in. Having Rush onboard may help the cause...whether he's liked by the others or not.
Having them share the same page with him is going to create some cross exposure they never had before...and that's all good stuff for the gay traveler to Thailand.
I know Pochai (llz) has read my message, but hasn't responded to my post.
What about Christian? There's someone that definitely needs a blog, especially for all the photo content.
We could set him up and then have him submit content.

[elephantspike]

This is what Rush is going to need to get once we rebuild a copy of his site on our network:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/site-redirect/

It makes all the links in google and everywhere on the web for every page on bangkokbois.wordpress.com redirect to the same page on it's new domain with us. It costs $12 per year.

[elephantspike]

Wordpress out-of-the-box comes with a sidebar widget that displays a block like our portal blocks that you can show or hide on any page that has links to link partner sites. There is also an RSS widget that if the site we want to link to has an RSS feed, our RSS widget can be set to show links to each of (however many we set it to show) the latest posts on their site so if they post a new article a link to that article automatically appears in our RSS widget.

[elephantspike]

zip-up everything you have for photos and upload the file as an attachment here on this thread so I can download it and have a look. Also should get a shutterstock membership:

http://www.shutterstock.com/subscribe.mhtml

super high-quality pro photos we can license to use and millions to choose from.

Also that wpmudev site has all the plugins we need to make different membership levels with different levels of access and hundreds of professional themes and anything else you can think of that a professional website would possibly need. There's one that allows you to show your own Google Adsense on free blogs on the network but when the blogger pays us for a premium membership it makes our ads go away and allows them to have their own ads. etc etc etc...

[elephantspike]

Well I have Rush started out here:

http://bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork.com

All we need is to grab an XML export from his old site and that will copy all of his contents to this one- then just get the same sidebar widgets he uses for related posts, featured posts, random posts and those other sidebar things he had.

[elephantspike]

I have enabled the "Top Referrals" portal block. As people click through links on other sites to this site, a link to the site they came from will automatically appear in that block. I have it set to show the top 20. the more traffic they send the higher on the list their link climbs. We'll have to use the ACP>Portal>Http Referrals to filter-out spam sites and multiple search-engine mirror sites from appearing.

[elephantspike]

Importing all the images now. Should be done soon...

http://bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork.com/the-xxx-games/

[elephantspike]

Importing in chronological order. Oldest first so front page will be done last but here's the Feb. 2011 archive:

http://bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork.com/2011/02/

[Surfcrest]

zip-up everything you have for photos and upload the file as an attachment here on this thread so I can download it and have a look. Also should get a shutterstock membership:

http://www.shutterstock.com/subscribe.mhtml

super high-quality pro photos we can license to use and millions to choose from.

Also that wpmudev site has all the plugins we need to make different membership levels with different levels of access and hundreds of professional themes and anything else you can think of that a professional website would possibly need. There's one that allows you to show your own Google Adsense on free blogs on the network but when the blogger pays us for a premium membership it makes our ads go away and allows them to have their own ads. etc etc etc...
I like the shutterstock images, plenty of Thailand stuff for us to download / upload for the new site.
That's a hefty price tag for what it is and so I imagine the strategy is to go is, get as many a s we can grab and get out in a month at $250 / month.
We could go back in from time to time to update, provided they updated to or there was another choice out there.
Will this assist with the design work?
What file sizes would you pick up? There are 60MG images that you could cut into banners.
I've been working on the article this morning.
I might even have another for the global forum based on my month in Peru.

[elephantspike]

I think there's plans where you just get x # of credits to download whenever and boigger photos count as more credits (I think the "medium" size is what I'll use), but yes, I think there are also plans that allow you to download x # of photos each day for a month which is the better deal. Don't do shutterstock yet though because there is another site like that I found that has more Thailand specific pics. I'll get back to you on that.

Hey, if it's readable, we can just post it on the blog page for the main site and we'll just put it in a "peru" category or something. RIght now I have a static page as the main page but We can and should have a "blog" page as well, with random articles presented latest first and put into categories so when people click on the category link they see a list of all the articles in that category. (I'll show you what I mean- it is basic "blogging 101" but I'm not good at explaining things like that so I have to show you)

I'm getting a bunch of blog starter templates done. login on the network and click the "sart a blog" link and you'll see all the thumbnail images of templates to choose from. Also the strater content I put in for new blogs is video tutorials on how to blog using the WP software.

[elephantspike]

Do you have a link to Christian's current blog? It's not in his profile.

Nicky's blog is a WordPress, so It can be imported exactly as-is just as I did with Bangkokbois. Or he can just continue posting as he has been except he can make new posts as blog posts and there's a box he can select to cross-post it to his Nicky's Forum which will put the post in that forum with a link to the blog post page and it would show as the top (latest) post on our blog page (we have a static page as the front page now so It wouldn't go there, but I can add a link to a regular "blog" page in the header that would show all blog articles in reverse chronological order...OR...We could just make the front page the "blog" page and make your welcome message a sticky post so it stays at the top - and we can still have that magazine layout with the excerpt boxes on the blog page)

ALso we can use the same RSS AutoBlog feature I'm using to put those excerpts from bangkokbois on our front page for Nicky's blog too. This can be done whether or not Nicky's is on the network. That can be done with any site that has an RSS feed and if it's a Wordpress it will display perfectly without the need for any tweaking.

[elephantspike]

He will have stats (a few different stats plugins to choose from), intellectual property rights (I think-that's kind of a "lawyery" realm- but I'm sure we can be more flexible on that than Blogspot- I wonder if he read the fine print there?) He can have his own domain, and he can run his own ads. We have all the pro-plugins in place for all that and more. Rush is using all those things already except for the Ads but he can use them because we made his site Pro-site upgraded. If we do the same for Christian than he will have the same features available.

The only thing we want is to publish excerpts on our main page that would all link right to the original content on his blog- again- just like we have done with Rush. Also for him to display a widget with an ad to recruit new bloggers that would link to our contact page.

[elephantspike]

The Directory plugin (the "other sites" link in the header menu) is pretty much like that but you need to click on the individual listings to see the banners. ALso we can set it so users of a certain level can add and edit their own listings.

I started publishing excerpts from several sites' RSS feeds last night on our magazine template on the main page last night. I'll add him soon.

RIght now I'm working with Asiaguys.net on getting a subsite going for them and also putting together a tutorial video for admins on how to add sites and users and how the paypal Pro-site upgrade works (I fixed that illogical redirect glitch we got the other day by the way)

Also I need to get the file edits for the phpbbseo urls MOD (the one that makes our urls on thread pages have the actual words of the thread title in them) so when we do the redirect all the parts of the urls after the domainname.com/ will match so all existing links to threads in GOogle and everywhere will redirect to the right threads on the new domain.

Then I need to get ready for the big move. I think things like adding banner links to a page I can do after the big move (or one of you guys can do it- pretty easy- admin dash > lIstings > add new > then compose listing pretty much like composing a forum post.

[Surfcrest]

I've asked for a relationship with this new site;

http://gothaibefree.com/

[elephantspike]

They have an EXCELLENT RSS feed:

feed: http://gothaibefree.com/feed/

lots of images in it including some panoramic ones that would fit nicely in the slider. I can add them right away. Or should we wait until they realize they want a relationship with us?

[Surfcrest]

This looks like good content;

http://www.gaytravel.com/blog/entry/gay_travel_gurus_visit_to_bangkok_nightlife_and_cu lture

[elephantspike]

They publish their feed like that for a reason- they want people to syndicate it. We would be linking TO them just as we are with all our syndicated content. We are sending them traffic. It's the same as putting up a banner link to another site on your links page- the only differences being that the links are dynamic (in the literal sense: They constantly change) and unlike banner links people will actually be interested in clicking. It's only copyright infringement if you go to their site and copy and paste an article onto your site with a "By Surfcrest" byline and no backlink.

The thing I'm thinking, though, is not to seem like we need their content too much. Let them realize that they need us to send them traffic.