Blog Community Info and Updates

Using the Custom CSS Feature in blogs, Part 1

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 01:29:20 GMT

When you get to the point where you want to go beyond our existing skins available to you in your PipeTrader blog, you can use the Custom CSS feature to modify the behavior of your skin to make it more to your liking. Check out the samples in this article...

During Beta Program, Please See Beta Blog...

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:20:51 GMT

During the duration of the Beta Program for PipeTrader, please look to the Beta Blog for the must up to date information about the progress of the Beta program. The Beta Blog would also be the correct place to post your comments or to reach out via the contact to give us feedback on the good, the bad and ugly while you use the site.

Once we graduate out of Beta, this blog will be come the primary blog for updates, tips and tricks on how best to use the PipeTrader.com community.

Setting Up Your Blog

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Thu, 24 May 2007 22:03:45 GMT

Well, I guess I got a little bit ahead of myself when I posted about using Windows Live Writer to manage your blog posting. I probably should have posted an article about how to configure your blog and to manage it using the web interface. For the purpose of this lesson, we'll use an imaginary blog called Meerschaum Musings.

The first thing you'll after you log into your administration URL is the following screen:

From this screen, you'll want to click first on the Options tab. On the Options page, you'll have access to the following options: Configure, Syndication, Comments, Key Words, Password and Preferences.

You should only need to select Configure the first time you enter your site and set up the options that will control the look and feel of your site. The options that are available to you include the Title and Subtitle, which appear in the header of your page, the username (should be no need to change this) and the Owner's Display Name and email address. You have the choice to use whatever you'd like for these fields but please don't make the name offensive as this would be contradictory to the nature of this blog community.

The next section you can try that will affect your blog's look and feel is to choose a display skin. The easiest way to envision these is to either select one, save your change and then view the site in another browser. Alternatively, you can check the SubText skin site for the default skins or any custom skins you'd like to see us add to the list.

The remaining portions of the admin gives you the ability to set your locale and a few other settings that are pretty much self-explanatory. The News/Announcements section are displayed in some skins, usually at the top of the right right of the site. For example, on the Tobacco Barn blog, you'll find it in the top right rail.

The Custom CSS field will allow you to override certain aspects of the site. This allows you to change the look and feel of certain elements of your chosen display skin. The use of this feature will be addressed in a future blog posting.

The Syndication option allows you to manage various aspects of how your content (blog postings) are made available to people. For the most part, the only thing you should need to change will be to select Enable Syndication. The other options have descriptions next to them that you can read by clicking on the question mark next to each option's label/title.

The Comments section controls how your readers can communicate with you through the site. Most of our customers will just click the Enable Comments, Enable Trackbacks and either Moderate Comments or Enable Captcha. If you Enable Captcha, you are allowing the system to determine if the person submitting the comment is a real person or a spam-bot. We recommend instead that our bloggers select the Moderate Comments. When this option is selected, you will be emailed to moderate any new incoming comments as they are posted. They will not show on the site until you've given the thumbs up to the content of the comment.

The Preferences option page allows you to define various aspects of how the administration site works for you. How you set these is entirely up to you. The first option defines whether you want an article published (visible to the outside world)) as soon as you save it or if you'd rather work on multiple revisions of it before explicitly publishing it by checking the Publish checkbox under Advanced Options. The Always Expand option will determine whether or not the Advanced Options section shows on the Add/Edit Post page. The Auto-Generate Friendly URL will give your blog posts a name that is more people and search engine friendly. The URL will be generated based on the title of the particular article. Check the URL of this page for an example.

That's about it for now. We'll do Manage Your Blog via Web Interface hopefully over the weekend that will assist with managing your blog postings.

Trading on PipeTrader.com

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Sat, 05 May 2007 12:06:05 GMT

Our vision for the initial launch of PipeTrader.com community will include, in addition to blogs (see previous posting), a robust trading and e-commerce platform. This engine will provide not only standard auctions, but also dutch auctions, fix-priced sales, classified ads and trading.

We plan on making this engine cleaner and easier to work with than other big auction sites and, to go one better, given it's "narrow" focus on pipe smokers and carvers, will bring more and better traffic. In addition to ensuring that we have a great number of listings when we launch, we will be backing this up with significant advertisements in relevant trade publications to drive traffic.

In addition to creating listings, everyone will be able to define payment terms (like PayPal, etc.), shipping methods, preferred currency (we currently support estimated conversion rates for USD, AUD, GBP, CAD, EUR and can add more as requested), pricing (starting, reserve and Buy Now), start dates, end dates, auto relisting if not sold and counters, PipeTraders can also elect to upsell their listings. Opportunities for upselling include being featured on the home page of the PipeTrader site, being featured on the home page for the category chosen for the object for sale, to have the listing highlighted, to make the listing bold or additional images beyond the initial 2 free images.

Descriptions for listings can be created using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that looks like most word processors with as much fancy HTML as you'd like.

Since buying (and selling) online can be a chore for some people, we also plan on offering a service called PipeTrader Certified Estate Pipes. For a single low price, we will accept pipes from our members (also known as PipeTraders) for reconditioning and listing. We will clean them, photograph them and list the items for sale on behalf of the seller. Buyers will gain the confidence that when buying a PipeTrader Certifed Estate Pipe, they have the ability to return the pipe, unsmoked, within 10 days to ensure that what they bought and what they thought they were buying were the same thing! Every Certified Estate Pipe will get a pre-defined package of upsells and will be listed on the Certified Estate Pipe storefront until it is sold or until the seller pulls it off the market.

Storefronts, you ask? Well storefronts are locations in the PipeTrader system where individual traders, carvers, retailers and clubs can list all of their items on a single page, branded to them, with a unique address (URL) that they direct their customers to.

If you can think of other features you'd like to see added, please use the comment form below and we'll be glad to carry on this discussion online.

The next posting should discuss more about the Pipe Wiki on PipeTraders.com so stay tuned for more great information. As always, you can subscribe to this information using RSS feeds using the image at right, clicking on the XML button at top left or by using the address http://blogs.pipetrader.com/Updates/RSS.aspx.

About PipeTrader.com Blogs

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:51:46 GMT

You know, we've been so busy lately trying to prepare the core of this system and pulling together stuff in time for the Chicago Pipe Show, that we figured we should probably let you in a little bit about what the PipeTrader is going to be all about.

Hopefully by now, you've gone through the PipeTrader.com splash site and have taken the time to sign up for advance notice of site launch. If not, take a moment and go do that now at the PipeTrader.com website.

While there, you probably will have seen the short description of some of the features of the PipeTrader community. In fact, you are reading part of it now.

We intend to create a community of blogs (for those of you not in the know, these are essentially websites that act as places for experts to share their ideas with the world much as a columnist does in your favorite magazine or newspaper). This content is not only published in their individual blogs, but will be available for individuals to subscribe to (more on this later). Other members of the community (like yourself for instance) can not only read these opinions online but also comment on them and start a true dialog between community members in a open and secure manner.

As for syndication, each blogger (or columnist if you prefer) can define whether or not they want their articles to be syndicated via RSS/ATOM feeds. They can also decide if their articles are to integrated into the primary site feed as well. If the terms syndicated or RSS/ATOM feeds are greek to you, then think of it as a way to bring these postings (or articles) to you as soon as they are posted. You could think of this as something akin to having a newspaper coming directly to you comprised of articles of interest to you but not having to wait until it is published. Instead it becomes available almost immediately in your favorite feed reader, content aggregators (we'll post instructions on this in subsequent articles) or browsers. You can embed this information into your Google or Yahoo home pages as well if that is your preference.

Initially, we will be opening up blogs to carvers, retailers and other "experts" in the industry. Shortly after that, we'll open up this free service to other members of the PipeTrader.com community.

Our hope is that the .com in PipeTrader.com will become synonymous with community.

My next posting will give more details about the Auction/Classified/Trading portion of our community.

If you have questions or comments on this posting or anthying else about PipeTrader.com, please use the comments form below or send me a private email using the comment form.

Using Windows Live Writer To Manage Your Blog

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:26:35 GMT

Ok, so you've got a blog, what now? How best to get ideas from my mind out to my blog? Might I humbly suggest (for those of you living in a Windows world) that yo

Welcome to the PipeTrader.com Blog Community!

PipeTrader Blog Admin — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:22:15 GMT

This is our own little Blog Community specifically for pipe smokers and carvers. We are hoping that all of our customers will find this a quick and easy service to use to get a blog going that they find useful and yet still easy to use.

Over the coming days, we'll be posting tips and tricks on this portion of the site to help people better understand the tools we are making available to them.

Enjoy!