Study journal blogs

[roddy]

Update: It's now possible to start your own blog on here. The blogs are

1) Only for personal study or travel journals, with no commercial posts.

2) Currently only for individuals. Group blogs are possible but require more set-up. Let me know if you want one.

3) Not a fully featured blogging platform - it's an add on to a forum site, we're not Wordpress. Don't expect us to be.

4) Intended to be active. We're not saying you have to post every day, or even every week, but if you post once then disappear for three months, or just don't post for a year then we may remove your blog or move its posts.

 

Get Started. See below for discussion, and to ask questions.

 

Part of my reluctance to get people setting up study blogs on here is that they very often disappear after a few weeks - we've all had one of those fits of enthusiasm. What I'm thinking of doing is having one general study blog which we can add anyone interested to. That should stop us ending up with lots of dormant blogs. Anyone who actually posts regularly could later have their own blog if they wanted. 

 

Differences are - it's not currently easy to find all posts by one person in a group blog. Say you wanted to see John's progress over the last two months - there's no one page that'll show you all his posts. And if you're in a group blog you don't get to choose the blog name or header image.

 

Blogs are a bit more prominent than they were, as they're included in the 'all activity' and 'unread content' feeds, which should help.

 

@Mati1's volunteered to help run this. Haven't you, Mati...

 

Who's interested?

[Mati1]

Now that you mentioned it, I tried to find a listing of a person's blog entries and was indeed unsuccessful (not that I don't believe you or anything, but the webpage is kind of complex); didn't try everything though.

Inside a blog there is the "Sort By" dropdown. If creating author based pages would be too difficult (for now), maybe this could be used as a compromise, by adding "Sort By ... Contributor", if that can be done easily.

 

----

I am not sure what you want me to do.

If everyone had his own (micro-)blogging thread or blog it would be his / her own responsibility.

 

If several people would share a learning blog, I imagine their entries would still be unrelated and their own responsibility (+ the follow up discussions which are like normal discussion threads focused on the given blog entry, right?). Unless there would be some guidelines along the lines "Contributors of this multi-user blog are supposed to interact / refer to each other in their update posts or in each other's comments sections ...".

 

At the moment there is the weekly updates thread in the forum which, while being a monster thread and therefore confusing to scan over, has it's own advantages, the main one maybe offering a place for continued relaxed discussion embedded between everyone's updates.

I do not know what the "best" approach to multi-user blogging with tight community interaction is and if someone already coded it. Note that I did not plan to open a (multi-user) blog in the official blog section, unless that is what the admins prefer for micro-blogging (...), otherwise I would have asked you explicitly to open one. That does not mean that I am against it though.

If that blog is opened we should invite contributors of relevant threads.

 

Another thing is that others are or have been much more active in language learning, on the forum or in the community overall than I have been, so I do not feel to be especially qualified to "guide" them haha.

[Guest]

While I get the improvement of moving from dormant study blogs aplenty to a single study blog which willing users can contribute to, I'm unsure what the perks/benefits are of having a blog as opposed to a thread. I currently have a progress thread to add my weekly updates to - what would be the advantage of switching to a blog format?

[edelweis]

One advantage I can think of is that each blog entry has its own thread of comments. So discussion of each other's study methods would be perhaps easier? more concentrated in a single place instead of mixed with further updates.

[mackie1402]

Over the last few years on different forums, I find that as much as some peoples posts have a lot of resources, they can be a bit dull to read. I enjoy a good read as much as the content itself! I'd prefer separate study logs personally. That way each language log would have its own kind of flavor. However I completely agree about dormant blogs. I still like the idea of using threads for logs, but perhaps with warnings and closures after a preset time period of inactivity.

[Angelina]

Me. Actually, I need to work on my Chinese writing, so maybe a bilingual one. 

[Mati1]

5 hours ago, Angelina said:

Me. Actually, I need to work on my Chinese writing, so maybe a bilingual one.

I'd read it. Though, it seems to me the problem with learning Chinese is not so much the writing part, it's the getting your fellows to correct it for you part. 怎么办？

[laurenth]

23 hours ago, roddy said:

Who's interested?

 

I might be. I've had such a blog/study log for four years on How to learn any language first and afterwards on language learners.org. As I've basically stopped studying any other language than Chinese, it would make more sense for me to post updates here. In addition, the "language learners" site is now blocked at my workplace, while chinese-forums is not (yet?).

 

From my experience on language learners.org, personal threads tend to be more interesting than "one thread for all", because it's easier and more useful to follow people who share your interests, who are at a comparable level or with whom you just get along well.

 

That said, Roddy is right: even on the above-mentioned sites, the vast majority of study logs are dormant. The difference is that those two sites attract (attracted, for the former) so many people who absolutely positively want to log their progress that there's always a critical mass of active logs at any point in time.

 

[edelweis]

One drawback of personal blogs is that they are highly visible, so maybe not very well suited to "daily grind" study logs, which are rather mundane and not particularly interesting to other people.

I would blog about a particular study method or study resources or milestone reached.

But I wouldn't blog my daily study habit tracking - it's pretty boring.

[Mati1]

1 hour ago, edelweis said:

One drawback of personal blogs is that they are highly visible, so maybe not very well suited to "daily grind" study logs, which are rather mundane and not particularly interesting to other people.

One person's daily study log is another person's fuel. You never know.

[Kevin Li]

Would love to see personal study logs! Would it be possible link those blogs from one single thread detailing when they have been updated last and maybe giving some general info? That way some discussion across different blogs could be managed while everyone still would have his or her own study blog. Or am I missing something?

[Mati1]

To see the date of the last update of every blogger they would need to have their own blog (the blogs page shows the date of the newest blog) or their own blog-like thread, locked for comments, which would be kind of boring.

 

Am I missing something?

[roddy]

Ok, I've just made it possible for people to start their own blogs. Group blogs require a little more work - get a few folk together and let me know. Edited information into the first post, let me know if you have any questions.

[Mati1]

On 16.2.2017 at 11:12 AM, roddy said:

1) Only for personal study or travel journals, with no commercial posts.

 

Could you please define "personal study journal" in more detail? I am not sure about things I might post there that might otherwise end up in the forum.

 

And for everyone who wasn't in this thread and just clicks on "Create a blog" there should be a quick info about this, better yet a link to the guidelines.

[pon00050]

7 hours ago, roddy said:

let me know if you have any questions

 

Is it not possible to include embed code generated by Soundcloud in a blog post?

I tried doing it but I don't see the Soundcloud player in the blog post.