Peace Arena to become two-ring circus, soon with acrobats AND elephants

Crossed off my to-do list: WP upgrade to multiblog. Finally. Yay!

Yes, that upgrade I threatened back in June has finally been accomplished. A couple of life changes later.

Close followers of this blog (all two of you) might remember that I installed WPmu a couple of years ago, but had some technical issues with it and abandoned the idea. Well, now, WP and WPmu are merged, supposedly said issues are past (and I surrendered to using WP in the site root) and so I can gather up a number of blogs I’ve been hosting with their own separate installs and have them managed, and best of all updated, all at once. Hallelujah!

I’m also looking at installing BuddyPress alongside WP 3.0. I had set up (but never promoted or used) a bbPress forum with a shared user table with WP, but apparently the future is BuddyPress so I’m going with it. It includes a Groups feature along with the bbpress forums as a wP plugin, altogether making it much like Drupal with Organic Groups module, which I’ve used on other sites. There are some cases where a more sophisticated CMS like Drupal are still called for, but they are becoming less and less necessary (for my needs at least) as WP evolves. And you just can’t beat WP for its easy interface and active community, not to mention the eleventy million themes.

Anyway, the afore-mentioned life changes included the death of my mother, for whom I cared for for the past several years, leaving little time or need for additional income. But now, sadly but also with some enthusiasm for new adventures and opportunities, I’m back to full-time freelance self-employment.

Thus, I hereby announce upcoming content changes coming to this space: the splitting of Peace Arena into .org and .com branches. The former will be pretty much the politically oriented blog you see here, and .com will feature some for-pay services I am offering (web development and IT consulting, etc.) and tech tips and such.

I will be offering web hosting, domain registration, web development, training in the use of technology in activism, and other services to the progressive community in Oklahoma. Obviously I will take business from non-progressives, baring ethical issues, but my heart will be in using my skills to help advance my progressive values and the common good for my Oklahoma friends and neighbors, and that’s what peacearena.com will be dedicated to, from a business angle, while peacearena.org keeps plugging a radical (“from the root”) change in our civic and political lives, and just serving as a site where I (and maybe others) share opinions and activist activities, with hopes of expanding the dialog through forums, chats and other means.

Finally, I’m working on a more fun and colorful theme for this .org branch, and will use the current one (or something similarly frill-less) for the .com services branch.

If you have any questions or (constructive) suggestions, please feel free, comments are open for a month.