Snoskred - Life in the Country

We made a little something to celebrate 6 months of the Aussie Bloggers Blog and Forums.. Make sure to check it out!

Our Present To You - The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator.

Over 29,000 posts.

Over 590 members ( currently 4 members shy of 600)

Two meets. Plus a couple of “unofficial hey, I’m in town, anyone want to catch up” situations.

It shouldn’t surprise me given the amount of bloggers out there. However the success of the Aussie Bloggers Forums has been quite surprising to those of us who were involved in the starting of the forums. I do not think we ever anticipated such a large amount of regular members, such a huge amount of posts, to find great new blogs so regularly.

A heck of a lot of smilies, good times, great people who help each other out, discussions about all manner of topics from Dexter to blogging to Aldi to music, movies and what is for dinner tonight.. in fact the What’s For Dinner Tonight thread has currently been viewed 14,571 times, and is the top replied to topic with 472 replies. It has also served as an inspiration for my own dinner from time to time, and there’s a few recipes dotted through the thread which I am glad were posted!

So you see, we don’t just talk about blogging on the forums. Everyone is welcome - Aussie or not - there is a great spirit of friendliness and if you have any kind of blogging problem you can generally post it there and someone will come up with an idea or an answer. But if you don’t have a blog at all, you can hang out in Kaos and Mayhem and just talk about regular non-blogging related stuff.

I personally love the forums. In fact The Admin and I built them ourselves - they are hosted on our servers. Meg from Dipping Into The Blogpond provided the idea - emailing myself and AndrewBoyd with the concept and offering use of the domain name. The Admin and I built the forums ourselves - they are hosted on our servers and we did a lot of the technical stuff - from the picture of clouds in the top left corner to adjusting the themes and changing a lot of the message icons to suit our purposes..

Forum members can choose a light or dark theme for the forums - you can switch from one to the other in a couple of clicks and you can change it as often as you like, whenever you like - and I have to say there are days when I switch to the dark theme towards the end of a long looking at the computer screen day and feel a great relief within my eyeballs. That is a thing of beauty.

Over the past six months I have discovered that our Admins and Moderators - some of whom I didn’t know very well when we began the forums - are all people I deeply respect and admire, and people I would happily be stuck on a desert island with. Or a dessert island, for that matter. With or without cheesecake.

So if you have not joined yet and you’re looking for a place to hang out, head on over to the forums and sign up as a member. Introduce yourself, and then get busy making new friends and finding new blogs to read.

There is also the Aussie Bloggers Blog - you can usually find me live blogging Australia’s Next Top Model there once a week - and a lot of great posts from mods and forum members too.

Over on Aussie Bloggers, we have a thread titled “Favourite Search Term Of The Day”.

It is now 16 pages long, and it regularly inspires me to check out what search terms are bringing people to the blog. You should check out the thread and you can by clicking here.

Some of today’s search terms -
sock stuck in front loader
how do cows know the time??
make myself a fake check online

To the person searching for the last one - that would be *illegal* - not a good idea! I’ve been asking myself how do cows know when it is time to go home for ages, but I suspect they really don’t care what the time is otherwise. It isn’t like they have to get to an appointment. And congratulations to the person who got a sock stuck in their front loader - I did not know that was possible, quite a feat!

We installed a new forum modification on the Aussie Bloggers forums last night. It seemed to be working fine for a little bit, and then things went rather haywire and a lot of the words got all jumbled up or something. The Admin who knows what he is doing (my other half) is asleep in bed.

Luckily most of the Aussies is asleep, but now I can’t sleep because I want to fix it and don’t know how. Plus they played all the good movies at once last night so there’s nothing to watch on the teev.

Anyway I thought I would share that. Maybe I will try to catch some zzz’s. But how can I when I know there is chaos in the online world?

Happy Australia Day!

Check out this interview with Darren Rowse from Problogger on the Aussie Bloggers Blog.

For the last couple of weeks I have been involved in a project to launch a new blog and a set of forums with a group of other Aussie Bloggers - most of us have been bursting to post about it but we wanted to get everything perfect first.

Today the Aussie Bloggers forums are officially open, so why not drop by and sign up?

You don’t have to be an Aussie to join the forums, all nationalities are welcome. Unlike other forums out there on the web, questions are welcome and you will find lots of friendly Aussies willing to help. Helping out mates is part of the Aussie way, after all.

Squadron made us this fantastic launch video - check it out!

The blog launches on the 21st of January but you can see it now - Aussie Bloggers - another Freedom Green redesign, and I made that header graphic, do you like it?

Thanks to my fellow forum Administrators - Meg and AndrewBoyd - and a huge good on ya mate to the Forum Moderators many of whom are bravely moderating a forum for the first time ever - Cellobella, ChristineParfitt, Jaycee, John Lampard, Kelley, LaniGiesen, Lightening, Martin Neumann, miscmum, servantofchaos, squadron, StephenCronin, Sueblimely and trib.

Also a special thanks to Sephyroth for dropping by and scattering links to his wonderful how to posts through the forums. He writes a fantastic how to, people. Even though he’s not an Aussie but an Aussie In Training.

I’ve put in some scroll bars on my links lists. You might want to do this as well. The code is fairly simple - <div style="overflow: auto; height: 200px">PUT LIST OF LINKS HERE</div> - you can change the height of the box to suit yourself as well, just change 200px to whatever amount of pixels high you would like the box to be. Thanks go to Sephy who figured out how to do this.

I’m going to set myself the challenge of visiting all the blogs in the blogging chicks network, and commenting on as many as I can. I recently joined the network and I can’t wait to get into reading through the blogs on it. You can see the list of blogs in my sidebar. If you’re a chick you should join.

Also, I’ve finally finished adding the blogs I read in google reader to my sidebar. This means I now have some organisation going on here people! And one of the new things I am implementing is a “new blogz” folder in google reader. When I find a new blog I like, I’m adding it to that section and commenting to people that I’ve added them to my google reader. Hopefully depending on the amount of time I have, once a month or so I will go through and add them all to my sidebar.

It might seem like I’m a slave to reading blogs if you look at the amount of blogs there. The truth is quite different. I’m a really fast reader. I always have been. On average it takes me 2 hours to read a book of average size. So when it comes to blog reading, I turn up here with my coffee in the morning and I whiz through 100+ blog posts in the space of half an hour. Any ones I want to comment on (and this is becoming more and more lately) I open them in a new tab. Once I’m done with coffee, I spend a little time commenting, then it’s off to other tasks for the day. From time to time during the day when I have completed a task, I reward myself by checking in on any new blog posts. Not all of the people on the list blog daily, some of the people on the list blog once or twice a month.

The best new thing I’ve been involved with recently has been the Australian Blog Community. I love the RSS feed because it gives you the first 250 characters of a post and if that interests me, I right click and read the rest. I am really enjoying it, and I also am reading the US Blog Community which was set up by Sephy. If you’re in either of these countries and you have a blog, why not join the communities? If you’re elsewhere, why not make one for your country?