Editor’s note: One of the most important roles we play here at Smart Chicago is to serve as an archivist to the movement . We currently have over 330 posts published and are producing content at a prodigious rate. Many of the blog posts we produce cover civic innovation solutions like our posts on Largelots, Schoolcuts, Expunge.io, and others.
I’ve been using blogs to help me and other organizations express themselves for about a decade now. I had an obituary-themed blog on Salon in the early 2000s, helped my brother develop CTA Tattler, and taught a couple hundred people how to use blogs to publish themselves.
In the course of this work, and with the huge help of the prolific Christopher Whitaker, I’ve developed some pretty clear thoughts on how to blog. Christopher has written up this post on the steps we take to do what we do. –DXO
It always starts with a nice Creative Commons photo that we import from Flickr.
Flickr is a fantastic tool for finding pictures. I personally have more than 30,000 photos licensed as Creative Commons) We use Flickr’s embed tool to publish directly into WordPress.
WordPress is wonderful and has several features that make blogging easy. The first of which is the “More” feature. After we introduce subject of the post, we’ll include the “More” tag to the text to create the post’s ‘fold’ so that our home page doesn’t get too cluttered. Like so:
