Welcome to GreensMPs
Blog Post
Sunday 24th August 2008, 2:06pm
by TimNorton in
Welcome to the all new, singing, dancing and blogging GreensMPs website.
You'll find a range of web based systems designed to better inform you of the Australian Greens Senators' work, including newsroom, galleries, videos, parliamentary achives, info and our collective GreensBlog.
Those of you coming through from our old blog site will notice we have switched blogging platforms - please update your links and rss feeds.
We are extremely confident that this new GreensMPs site will provide you, the users, with a much better service in terms of both finding out the Greens' position in detail and commenting on it, making your views heard, contributing to the democratic process. We will be cycling out the Senators' old sites, bringing everything together here as we become an officially recognised party in the Parliament.
We're far from complete here either - in the coming months we'll be adding a whole range of interactive features designed to make your involvement with the Greens Senators and their work both inside and out of the Parliament much easier.
In the meantime, we encourage you to have a browse around, check out some of our new features and continue to stay involved in GreensBlog at its new home here on GreensMPs. If you do come across any errors/problems/concerns/comments, please drop us a line at webeditor@greensmps.org.au.
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Great to see this up and
Great to see this up and running, it looks fantastic!
Congratulations and good luck
The new site is fantastic Timmeh, ya'll have done a fantastic job! May going live been pain-free and a raging success!
MP's Page
I like the new MP page it looks pretty good so far. Lets hope all the Greens pages become the same and more uniformed.
Full Feed RSS
It's a shame that the new all singing and all dancing website doesn't have a full RSS feed, I rely on RSS to read hundreds of web pages and feeds with only samples in the body are quite annoying and slow reading down. If you aren't making money from ads on your website (which I certainly hope you aren't), there is no reason to have only partial feeds.
Greensblog?
Does this mean that the Greensblog has been incorporated into this website? I tested the old site and it has been shutdown. Just wanted to know...
Old GreensBlog
Daniel - the old GreensBlog has indeed been incorporated into this website. We've still got some tweaks and changes to go through, but we're hoping this site will enable us to blog better, with more interactivity with our other sections.
Coupla comments
Lovely new site... But I'd like to augment the request above about full feeds - I assume what the commenter means is that he'd like the full text of posts in the RSS feed. I am utterly in agreement - I hate having to always click through to read a full post.
Not only this, but:
a) It'd be nice if the blog's front page had full posts instead of *tiny* excerpts. It really does mean that far fewer people are going to read the actual posts. Even if this means not going back as far in the post history on the main page, I think that's a fine compromise. Also,
b) It should be more obvious that you can actually still subscribe to just the blogs feed (at http://greensmps.org.au/blog/feed) rather than the whole site. I didn't see this till I scrolled right to the bottom. Just sticking the RSS link at the top of the blog column would help ;)
Congrats on the new site, guys!
Well done!
Great to see all the hard work come to fruition.
A couple of questions, where would I post something on this new site like this? It comes under the heading 'climate change induced global famine and military responses' or similar. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/25/2345829.htm
And in the tradition of libertarian free speech and democracy, is there a place on this new site for posting things Green related and vetted but not officially sanctioned? Haven't found it yet - not even sure what you'd call it - The Green Goss? Could be unruly, but that's life.
And the last few posts (3 I think) are missing from the feed in tariff - last calls for submissions thread. As I was placed in moderation before the site changes, perhaps they have been deleted and deemed too abrasive/provocative?
Now let's see if I can count to seven ................
last comments on old blog
Hi mcfarm, apologies for the last few comments not coming through from the old blog. It's only because of the timing issues - we shifted the content across here before we shut down the old blog. Nothing sinister going on.
Re free posts - perhaps we should start an open thread tradition here at the new site? A place where people can regularly post points of interest that might not find a home in other threads. We'll consider and hopefully deliver if it looks like that's something people want.
And is there a place on this
And is there a place on this new site for articles like this
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/26/2346335.htm
A critique of the Business Council of Australia's recently released controversial report on the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme?
on RSS
Thanks Peter and Patrick. Dead right about the RSS feeds. That's being fixed.
Peter, re the splitting of posts, I agree entirely that we need more than the top hundred words or so on the front page, but I don't think we want the whole post. We're looking to do manual splitting as we had at the old wordpress blog. Should be sorted soon.
Individual MPs' sites
You're probably on the case with that too, but presumably the way the CMS works, the individual MPs' sites show only content relevant to that MP. This means that the Greensblog menu item on Christine Milne's site goes to http://christine-milne.greensmps.org.au/blog - which makes sense, it's great in fact, but I think maybe the menu item should just say "Blog", or "Christine's Blog" or something?
GreensBlog header
Good point Peter - we'll look into that. You're right - the individual sites are designed to only show that particular Senators' content, but we might need to work on the ambiguity of the menu items.
Excellent
I'm a hard one to please when it comes to unveiling a website design, but I like it. It's about time all this information was brought together on a single page.
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