Blogher06

BlogHer site scaling as the Conference approaches

2006-07-19T13:48:42-05:00

The buzz on BlogHer is booming. I think we got the main BlogHer site moved to a scalable multi-server setup just in the nick of time. Kudos to our hosting partners on the BlogHer website project, Firebright, for their hard work! The new setup is humming!

Via BlogHer Contributing Editor Jeneane Sessum, I've learned that also speaking of (not at, unfortunately) BlogHer is Shelley Powers, who's back blogging on three blogs (so far). (Her old flagship, Burningbird.com, now seems to showcase some of her beautiful photography.) Shelley has noticed the incredible growing sponsor list on BlogHer's home page. The sidebar full of sponsor logos indeed has shot roots down deep 'below the fold' of the pages. (In fact, the sheer weight of the logo images was becoming a server load issue on the former hosting configuration -- a 'good problem to have,' to be sure, but still something that kept the server working harder than anticipated.)

When we got involved with BlogHer's site development, BlogHer's web presence was basically a Typepad blog used to disseminate info about the BlogHer Conference '05. The new site, powered by Drupal (with some customizations), has become an incredibly robust community. And not only that, but now it's the center of a new ad network that is poised to grow rapidly.

Shelley states:

I had originally thought of Blogher as a loosely organized non-profit formed from consensus. It wasn’t until I read the Bostom.com article and saw the list of sponsors that I realized that Blogher is actually a prime example of what it takes to be a succcessful Web 2.0 company.

Company co-founders, Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort, and Lisa Stone have taken a grass roots effort and turned it into a professionally run media company, with it’s own ad network, and featured in Media Daily, as well as various other ad and media related publications.The three are now in great demand as speakers on the issue of women in weblogging, but it won’t be long before they’ll be in demand as speakers for their success as Web 2.0 company founders.

and adds, at the end:

Congratulations to Blogher, the company and good luck with the conference next week. I have a feeling it will be the ‘it’ conference of the year.

I have a feeling it won't be just the conference that will comprise the all-things-BlogHer-that-are-'it' category.

Related: Boston.com article on BlogHer

BlogHer (beta)

2006-03-25T00:58:15-06:00

This is the 2006 BlogHer website. At the time of this screenshot (and this writing), the site is still in beta -- i.e., public but still undergoing further development and design work.

The BlogHer website itself serves as a clearinghouse of information for the 2006 BlogHer Conference itself, but it's also a vibrant online builder of community for women with its multiple daily front-page blogs about what women (and men, too) are writing about on blogs covering all kinds of topics.

The BlogHer Blogroll is the third main component -- categorized blogs whose listings are submitted by any and all who register on the site. We did some custom coding to get all those blogrolls to list the appropriate categories while paginating gracefully and linking directly to the linked sites while still tracking click-throughs. We also have forums set up, and a few other things planned.

We're proud to be sponsors of this year's BlogHer Conference.

More on the BlogHer site to come once it's launched and I write a little development case study. -Laura

New BlogHer.org launches beta

2006-01-30T08:17:45-06:00

Today we have taken BlogHer.org live with a beta launch. [Note: The domain's DNS settings were changed only 14 hours ago, so if you go to the domain and see a Typepad site, please try again in a few hours.]

This is a community site built to serve both as a community base for the BlogHer Conference 2006 and as a directory to answer the ever-persistent question asked by A-list bloggers, "Where are all the women bloggers?" (Where? BlogHer.org is where!)

Our official association with BlogHer began last year, when we hosted the BlogHer chatroom. We are delighted to have been able to expand our involvement with this community by designing and developing their new website using Drupal.

It would have been wonderful to implement this site in Drupal 4.7, but our timetable was too pressing and our contributed modular needs were too demanding. So the site is built on Drupal 4.6, with several contributed modules, a few module hacks and a handful of php scripts to achieve what Drupal's not quite designed to do "out of the box."

The site is still in beta. There are some odds and ends of code to add, some theme tweaks and so on. (If anyone finds any bugs, please let us know using the website feedback form on BlogHer. Thanks!)

Blogher '06 announced

2005-10-13T00:24:45-05:00

The Blogher organizers have announced the dates of the 2006 conference: Friday July 28 and Saturday July 29, 2006, somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. (Maybe the 30th, too, I'm told ... but that's not on the website [yet].)

The theme is: "How is your blog changing the world?" I think it's pretty safe to say my blogs haven't changed things much on the global scale, but blogs in general are disrupting the old order in business, media, politics, you name it. But that's a topic for another post series of posts....

...and a conference.

I'm not sure what our official role with Blogher '06 will be yet. pingVision is looking forward to partnering with Blogher in any way we can help.

But tonight I received a personal invitation to be on their Advisory Board to help brainstorm and plan the event. And in the next couple of days, I'm going to be talking with Lisa Stone about what they have in mind. I have some crazy ideas, and one or two not-so-crazy ones. More on them later.

As soon as I first heard about the idea of a women's blogger conference, I knew in my heart that it would succeed famously. I think it exceeded everyone's expectations. Now those expectations are raised for next year. But I wouldn't bet against exceeding them yet again.

Mark your calendar.