Thripp.com: the blogging network

I’ve slaved hours away on Thripp.com: the blogging network, and it’s now open in a public beta. :grin: Sign up for your spot now. This is great step forward for social blogging, and you can take advantage of the same great scripts I use to multicast this blog to LiveJournal and Xanga. Read on . . .

I wrote this two days ago, but didn’t expect to get rolling so quickly:

People have been signing up for Thripp.com despite my lack of advertising. I’ll work on the layout and features in July. I can’t get virtual subdomains like I want without upgrading to a virtual private server, which I won’t yet pay for, so you just get a name like thripp.com/foobar instead of foobar.thripp.com (which I know you’d prefer). Sorry for that. If you start blogging for some reason, I added plugins you can activate to multicast to Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter, and Xanga, like I do (see links in my footer). You’ll have to hand over your passwords, but they’re safe with me.

Today, 2008 May 24, it all starts. I’ve established a WordPress MU powered blogging network here at Thripp.com, complete with an integrated community forum (thanks to bbPress), log-in and blog management links right from the side-bar, the same clean design from Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp, RSS links for each blog right in the footer, and PHP scripts that automatically aggregate the latest blogs, comments, and posts. I’ve gone ahead and done it with subdirectories instead of subdomains, but they are no less memorable, especially with the eye-catching Thripp.com name. 14 people have already gotten started, with fascinating blogs like OpinionSource and Wisconsin Mortgage. You can get started immediately, as this is a public beta.

Thripp.com plugins

I’ve even added some great plugins to enrich your blogging experience, which you can activate under “Plugins” on your dashboard, after you sign up, of course. Advanced Category Excluder lets you leave out any categories you pick from the home page, RSS feeds, or archives, with handy check boxes. Top Level Categories cuts out the “/category” part of your category URIs, keeping your addresses short. WP Grins lets your commenters add emoticons with ease, while Wordbook, Twitter Tools, Xanga Cross Post, and LiveJournal Crossposter (under “Settings”) let you automatically and seamlessly broadcast your blogging to Facebook, Twitter, Xanga, and LiveJournal, complete with links back to your original entries at Thripp.com.

Social commenting is actively encouraged. Gone are the Captchas, registration forms, and moderation queues you see on other networks; here anyone can contribute feedback to any post, immediately and with ease. And if you’re against unmoderated commenting, you can go to “Settings > Discussion” and suit your tastes. This is backed with the excellent spam filtering of Akismet, to stop the Viagra ads in their tracks.

This is beta because it hasn’t all been thoroughly tested, and I’m on shared hosting so I don’t know how far I can push the network. Feel free to make a donation to help keep me out of the red. I’m open to any suggestions or feedback; just add them to the comments on this post.

Cheers. Contribute, blog safely, and share alike. I’ll be reading.

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