Thanks to Jim Nellis for suggesting this blog, and for advice on setting it up.
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The blog works well and it is a nice interface. I think that a discussion group might be better suited to your goals though. A blog is oriented to sharing primarily one person’s thoughts with a group and the group can comment on those thoughts. It is difficult to respond to people’s comments and then later follow a discussion because of the linear nature of the blog format.
A discussion group is better suited to this task. Most importantly, it facilitates branching threads within one main topic. Another big advantage is that it is easy to include quotes from previous participants so that comments can be viewed in context.
A good discussion group venue is http://groups.google.com/.
Threaded discussions would certainly make very long discussions (like the voucher/charter one) easier to follow. I’ll look into it.
This blog is not for “sharing one person’s thoughts, though, and I’ve tried not to use the main posts for that. It was established to have communication between the steering committee take place more than once a week for those who want it, (without flooding the mailboxes of people who don’t, AND for allowing people to share ideas.
I assume a discussion group would also permit everyone to start threads. That’s great, though I’m not sure we want THIS blog to be for that. It would not serve ESPEC well if it stopped informing people because it became overwhelmed with posts on somebody’s pet subjects, like how selfish and terrible east siders are for wanting good publc schools for their neighborhoods instead of tryng to fix all the schools at once (believe me, I hear it a lot) or, just to pick something at random, vouchers
And, without suggesting for one moment that you should stop posting in support of vouchers here, is there a discussion group or something already in existence that you can point people to where this topic is covered more in depth? (Maybe best to put it under the Vouchers post)
I know that your intention is to enable everyone to participate.
With the discussion group, you could still have as much control as you want. All posts can go through the moderator. You could approve new threads, etc. Or not. I think that the level of moderation you are providing is good.
Now I’ve seen posts by Tom that have nicely formatted quotes included. How are those done? I’ll test a few things which I know work in other places:
_italic_
*bold*
> quote
“quote”
I looked around wordpress but couldn’t find documentation.
WordPress has a wonderful WISWYG editor. I played around with knobs and switches, but I can't see how to make it work below the administrator level. It doesn't even work for me in comments. I'll put in an inquiry with the management, and let you know what pops out.
hmmm.. it appears I can post a comment, and if I go back to edit, the editor appears. But it doesn't appear when I first post the comment. Annoying!
Here are some more tests.
bold
bold?not bold?
underline
italic
codeBrilliant, Mitch
(You didn't actually put any tags around "underline")