How Much Do You Love Blogging?

I mean do you love it this much?

How about this much?

Well, if you love blogging this much, then you’re probably interested in starting a blog. If you have one then you’d probaly start another blog if you thought it could help end bloglessness, right?¹

Well, if that’s you, read on!

The Backstory

You may know that I started a project called Engage The Gorge last autumn. Well, that project immediately struck a partnership with rediviva Magazine² and the latter ended up, in a sense, consuming the former.

The new effort is focused on energizing the community in the Gorge in a slightly different way, but with the same with the same long-term goal of building and recognizing our gorge community. As a first step toward this goal, we are creating rediviva Blogs, an effort to end bloglessness in The Gorge.

rediviva Blogs is a WordPressMU site similar to WordPress.com. The site will host free blogs and provide blogging support for people primarily in and around the Columbia River Gorge. Our goal is to provide a home, and help, for those folks who want to blog in or about The Columbia River Watershed.

You Can Help End Bloglessness

In an effort to make blogging as easy and fun as possible, I’m trying to knock off the rough edges of our  site by adding as many useful plugins, important themes and fun bells and whistles as I can. You can help this effort in two different ways (Actually, three if you include “giving John money” as a way). The first is by being an honest-to-goodness beta tester, the second is by being an honest-to-goodness blogger.

Beta-testers

If you’d like to help by being a real beta-tester, all you have to do is create a blog and put it through the ringer. Test the plugins, try the themes. If there’s anything you don’t like, think the site should have,  or- god forbid- is downright broken, let me know. The site’s just being built, so I’m sure there’ll be a lot that you don’t like or which needs to be fixed.

Serious bloggers

If you are a serious blogger, and interested in having rediviva Blogs host your site, there are some things to consider. Currently, the site is very new; therefore, things may be a bit rough. This is bad if you want to only write, and want everything to be perfect. It’s good if you don’t mind stepping over a bit of building debris in exchange for the long-term benefit.

One positive aspect to joining rediviva Blogs now is, well, me.

At this stage, you will have my near undivided attention. If there’s a plugin you think the site should have, I’ll likely just install it for you without question. If there’s an issue, I’ll likely jump right on it. Also, you will be automatically signed up for any special functionality that we may charge for later in the way WordPress.com does. We have no plans to charge for anything, but in the event that we ever do, you won’t pay a cent, I promise.

Sign Me Up!

rediviva Blogs is scheduled to launch on February 1st. At that time we hope to have the site in a stable state, until then, we’ll be cleaning up. If you are interested in either helping us test, or having rediviva Blogs host your site during this beta period, contact me at mettadore@gmail.com or via Twitter or Identi.ca.

1. uh, the Columbia River Gorge End Bloglessness Campaign is not associated with BeerAndBlogs, the BeerAndBlogs End Bloglessness campaign, or any efforts to end bloglessness in Portland or any of its subsidiary towns, cities and municipalities [↩]
2. The rediviva Divas are currently working on their new site, with plans to launch Feb. 1st, so that link is a bit of a bore, I’m afraid [↩]

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