Category Archives: NJcircles

Building a Community News Blog Day 3

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Day 3.  Follow along as metaprinter.com founder and senior writer Robert Ivan builds a community news blog for Aberdeen Township New Jersey at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship.

Today I added pages for Services and Township Stats to help emphasize my focus on Aberdeen Township.  The services page lists and links to things like the police dept., municipal court, tax collector, planning, etc…  The township stats page aggregate information about the township in one location and links out for greater detail.

The idea is to get search engines associating targeted content to the site. I published two posts for this very reason and to start seeing what people are interested in.  Ideally I should be posting 5 quality post per day to build traffic and see what works. Continue reading →

Building a Community News Blog Day 2

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Still messing around with the design and layout especially adding page navigation to the header.  Working with Movable Type is not as intuitive as WordPress I’ve decided, but some great features are built right in and updating and changing styles is a snap.

I’ve also added a “schools” page which i’ll build on to give parents a reason to visit.  Like emergency phone numbers  and places to find school closing info.

Building a Community News Blog Day 1

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Follow along as metaprinter.com founder and senior writer Robert Ivan builds a community news blog for Aberdeen Township New Jersey at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship.

I figure this could be a huge help for many of my readers who are either interested in starting their own community site (some call this BeatBlogging).  To my main stream media readers  who come here to stay on top of news media trends, this entire exercise could be a real lesson in the new realities of online publishing.

The site is called NJcircles (because I already had the domain from a previous project) and is located at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship and built using Movable Type.  I selected MT because the metaprinter site is built on WordPress and I’ve got those skills down pretty good, so I want to learn Movable Type CMS and share that experience as well.   It doesn’t hurt that MT is used by power bloggers like Jason Kottke, media companies like National Geographic, and community news sites like Baristanet.

Here are the first steps.  I’m going to assume you know how to do certain things so please let me know if you need help and we’ll work through this together. Continue reading →