Last week I was having dinner with my friend Daniel Odio. He’s a successful tech entrepreneur whose given me a bunch of good advice on SETT, and will be the first person who’s not named Tynan to switch his blog to SETT. In other words, he’s a dude who knows what’s up.
He asked me how SETT was going, and I told him that everything was going great– the site is functioning really well, the discussions following each blog post are far more substantial than before, I’m enjoying blogging more than ever, and people are embracing a bunch of the new features we’ve rolled out. The only thing I was hoping for, I told him, was for the community section to be more active.
“Hmm… what’s that?”
Oops. I guess there’s a problem when one of your main differentiating features has been overlooked by someone smack dab in the middle of your target audience. Since then I’ve done a little bit to make it more visible, and am working on other ideas to make it even more obvious, but a quick explanaton of the community section and how it came about is probably in order.
The central idea behind SETT is that a blog should be a natural starting point for a community. After all, if you’re reading this, you probably share at least a few ideas with fellow readers. You might be into travel, independence, or health, for example. But with previous blogging platforms, there was no real way for you to initiate a conversation about any of that. The only way your voice could be heard would be through a comment on one of my blog posts (and I won’t even get started on how bad those comment systems are).
SETT’s solution to the problem is to have a community section. You can go there directly at http://tynan.com/community, or you can click the community button on the front page of the blog. While the styling of the community section is identical to the front page, there are two big differences in how it functions.
First, anyone can post there. If you click the “create new post” button at the top left of the community section, you can start a new topic. The best way to think of this is like a messageboard. On my particular blog you’d probably get the best response posting something relating to the topics I post about (one of the best threads going right now is one where my friend Brian is detailing his Rialta RV conversion), but you’re welcome to post about anything.
Second, when posts are sorted by date, replying to a message will bump it to the top. If you’ve been active on a forum before, then you’re familiar with this concept. On the other hand, the rank sort works a bit differently than the front page. On the front page, sorting by rank will show the all time highest rated posts, but on the community page we weight by recency, to show what’s hot right now.
Also worth knowing is that as the moderator of this blog, I can promote any post from the community section to the front page, and it will show up as if it was a guest post. So, for example, if someone writes a guide to motorcycling around Indonesia, and I think it’s great, I could promote it for my whole audience to see.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, take a look at the community section. I’d love for you to post there, or just join the existing conversations going on. Right now I’m too busy working on SETT to post more than once a week, so if you have something great to post, I’m definitely looking for stuff to promote.
By clicking the subscribe icon in either the front page view or community view, you can also subscribe to the community section and be notified whenever there’s a new post there.
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Picture is my recently found POGs collection. Don’t ask why.
This is the first blog post I’ve ever written on a treadmill desk. I set one up at my mom’s house and am scheming on how to do the same in the RV. I may have to cut a hole in the roof and put in a dome for clearance.
I saw a Rialta with a solar panel on it in the HEB parking lot in Austin today. Whose was it?
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