[rmfo-blogs.com]: About

Sarah decides to give us a brief life history in her first entry.

Richard desires to see the glory God in the ordinary things in life. That’s a worthy goal in anyone’s book!

… one rmfo-blog at a time. Welcome, Katie.

JP has asked me not to link to him with his full name, so I’ll ask you to do the same.

Welcome, JP.

… but Heather thinks it makes her cool to have an rmfo-blog. Works for us!

Brian, we don’t think you’re the odd man out. But yeah, you should get better service from an accountant than that!

So’s you know, thanks are always appreciated, but not necessary with your first post, or something.

Welcome, Cakeboy. [Insert cake joke here.]

Jim Wright has returned from a long hiatus in Iowa and now has an [rmfo-blog]. How does he start? The Hot Ham & Cheese Incident, of course.

Lauren seems to think that this is all pressure-filled. I sure don’t think so.

This was discussed quietly in the [rocksmyfaceoff.net] Services Board, but there are now four required links for [rmfo-blogs] users. ([RMFO-Pro] users are not required to have these as links, but they’re encouraged.) They are listed under RMFO Links on every installation of WordPress, and they’re owned by the “admin” user [in other words, me :)] so that you can’t delete them.

If you’d rather use the text links than the images, go to Links –> Links Categories, edit “RMFO Links”, and uncheck the checkbox next to “Images”.

What’s the purpose of required links? Simply put, I want people to know what RMFO, in terms of a community, is all about. I’m aware that you’ll probably tell lots of people—people who have no idea who Caedmon’s Call or Derek Webb even are!—about your new Weblog, and well … this lets them know.

Plus, it helps us out with Google a little.

We think the required links are a small price to pay.

I don’t ever expect that people who consider getting an [rmfo-blog] are new to Weblogging [although some are, and that's cool that this is their first experience]. So, I often get questions about importing content from old Weblogs into an [rmfo-blog]. Best as I can, here are answers for that:

Q: I use Blog*spot. Can I import my old entries and comments?

A: Entries, absolutely. Comments is another story; while Google/Blogger has recently started to provide commenting native to the Blogger system [and, by extension, on Blog*spot blogs], this hasn’t always been the case. If you’ve been using a third-party comments provider [YACCS, RateYourMusic, etc.], no … your comments can’t be imported without doing it by hand. [That's a pain, and I don't expect anyone to be interested in that.] I have read that comments provided directly from Blogger, however, can be imported [although I haven't done that].

Additionally, Justin of justinsomnia.org has a highly detailed synopsis of how to move from Blogger to WordPress. I’m happy to assist people making these transitions.

Q: I use LiveJournal. Can I import my old entries and comments?

A: Entries, yes. Comments, … not really. There are a couple very experimental methods of doing that, but I haven’t seen them be very successful.

Q: I use Xanga. Can I import my old entries and comments?

A: Entries, yes, although it’s a pain. There’s no way at present to get Xanga to give you a dump of your data, so you have to import them either by hand [which is a pain] or by using an RSS importer … which means that you have to delete entries from Xanga in batches, which scares lots of people [and understandably so].

Q: I don’t want to lose my LiveJournal / Xanga users … any way to keep them in touch?

A: Plugins exist to cross-post to both LiveJournal and Xanga; I’ll help you set those up.

Q: I’ve never used WordPress. Do I have to install it?

A: Nope. I do the installation for you, and I also maintain it by keeping up with the latest releases. Why do I take this on? Chances are that I know more about WordPress than you do, and I’d rather do it than have to fix someone else’s screwups. [Trust me, I've made plenty of WordPress screwups myself!] By the time I get around to upgrading [rmfo-blogs.com], I’ve worked up a sure-and-certain upgrade path, and it’s better to just let me go at it.

I’d like to thank everyone for their patience in the long period where I had to suspend signups for [rmfo-blogs.com]. The upgrade from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5 is great for our users, but it took a lot of time and effort on my part, more than I’d honestly imagined in the first place. Not having signups competing for my attention made it go faster.

Anyhow, signups are now back open. Understand that the limitations on signups are the same as they’ve always been: you still have to be a member of the community, and I have to trust you. These are admittedly low barriers to entry, but I have to have some barrier.

If you have no idea what we’re talking about, perhaps you should look up the rationale for creating [rmfo-blogs.com] in the first place.

I’ll be extending these FAQs as time permits over the next few days.