Monday, June 30, 2008

Once we get our blog working, with lots of steady reader traffic, we want interactions with our readers.

Eventually, we get tired of native Blogger commenting, and its inability to use comments to conduct casual and meaningful conversations with our readers. Sometimes, our thoughts turn to having a forum, where we and our readers can chat with each other.

One very light weight forum can be embedded in the sidebar.

CBox and Meebo are chat rooms embedded in HTML / JavaScript, and an IFrame. It's very easy to setup CBox or Meebo on your web site - just register and get the code for either, and add it to an HTML / JavaScript page element. You can see Cbox in action on my home blog, and Meebo on my Layout Test blog. ShoutMix is a similar, alternative product.

If you want a full featured forum, Google Groups lets you setup a forum - and then embed it into your blog - as easily as you can setup a blog. Or any other forum will do just as well. It all depends upon what you want.

A full featured forum, using industry standard software, will involve hosting a phpBB based forum.
  • Load the phpBB software onto a suitably setup server.
  • Configure the software to provide your forum, as fits your personal vision of your forum.

Having setup the forum which pleases you, it's now a matter of combining your new forum and your blog, just like any two web sites - using blog feeds, iframes, and / or links - and your imagination.

Elm0D

Author & Editor

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