Alright, @voretaq7, it's not too hard.

The first step is we get your account setup. Head to aviation.blogoverflow.com/wp-admin. You should get the general prompt to login with OpenID, use the same as your account on SE.

the last time someone said that to me I wound up managing remotely deployed Ubuntu laptops

ok so far no fires :-)

Alright, I've promoted you to Administrator. You can now assign permissions to other users when they register. They should all do the same thing you did - go to that same URL, and use the same login they use to access Stack Exchange. It's still the old login page UI, but it still works.

Don't let anyone try to do any of WP's normal signup process. Just do the SE way. It's smoother and faster on everyone.

Awesome :)

When they've created an account, you access the dashboard (same URL, conveniently), there should be "Users" on the left sidebar. From there, pick the new user (their name will match their ID number, don't worry on it as it will fetch their SE name on actual posts and comments), and just set their permissions level.

I'll probably superping our volunteers into here at some point - probably the easiest way to get everyone together

Yep. Let's just get the quick overview so you know what to do when that time comes.

YupYup

Everyone who signs up via the OpenID deal will automatically be assigned as a Subscriber, which only lets them comment. So you'll need to promote to whatever position based on how your community wants to run things. You can have the writers be mostly Contributors so that everything has to go through a review stage, or you can trust everyone as Editors and they all handle drafting and publishing together without needing it mechanically enforced.

There's a few other tasks that everyone has to do before I'll get the sysadmins to hook up the blog to the site so that you can access it from the Top Bar and new posts will show up in the Community Bulletin.

First, you guys need to edit your About page. You can find the edit page here: aviation.blogoverflow.com/wp-admin/…

It doesn't need to be elaborate, just needs to overview what your blog is generally going to talk about. So a lot of the stuff contained in the earlier Meta post you guys have. Here's an example from our Islam Stack Exchange Blog.

Second, you guys need to drum up some posts. You only really need at least one post to start, but I like to suggest that you guys should have 2 or more posts lined up to be posted on whatever schedule y'all plan. When that's done, you will nuke the current "Hello World!" intro post and replace it with your own post.

yeah I want to have at least a couple of cycles of posts in the pipe before we go live just in case Real Life interferes

Usually the first post on the blog will introduce the blog and what you guys plan to do, before your first actual article.

When you've got your users all gathered, your About page written up, and your first few posts ready in the pipeline, just poke me and I'll start the integration process.

cool

That should cover all of the initial stuff. You guys don't have a graduated design so you get the general SE theme which means you're basically ready on the design front. I've already enabled our general suite of settings on the site.

The only other optional ones are that I can enable Syntax Highlighting (which I doubt you guys need) and MathJax (which you don't have on the site yet but I've heard murmurs).

Yeah syntax highlighting won't do much for us - Personally I'm still on the fence about MathJax but I hate equations

@voretaq7 yeah, we have the occasional math, but I don't think it's common enough to warrant a full blown mathjax. From what I hear it's kinda heavy

@roe it's a noticeable hit on rendering time (cf. math.stackexchange.com/questions/738424/… -- which has enough MathJax that I can watch it render in my browser) -- the equations do look Dead Sexy though :-)

@voretaq7 Actually that one was pretty instantaneous on my end (except the slight delay during which it showed the TeX stuff, maybe a second long). But things have sped up since i switched to xfce :) I am never going back ;)

@roe that's about what it takes on Safari too.

so let's see we've got @roe, and @casey... our other poor saps brave volunteer authors are @manfred @stevev. and @qantas94heavy

If you guys go through the account setup at aviation.blogoverflow.com/wp-admin I'll start getting everyone switched on

@voretaq7 been there done that already ;)

@GraceNote What's with the 19881@fake.blogoverflow.com-email address, does it forward to me? Or do I need to change it?

Don't worry about it - you need an email for WP to have an account but the blog emails are used for absolutely nothing.

@GraceNote excellent, thanks

@GraceNote the openid/SE integration with wordpress is very elegant by the way, I like it

The only people who can see your blog email will be the blog admins - everyone else, all stuff on the blog itself will point at your Aviation Stack Exchange account

@GraceNote Oh, the bio too?

Yeah, the little name plate when you comment and post, the same plugin also makes it so that those link to your Aviation profile.

@GraceNote cool

@voretaq7 regarding these equations, one idea is the time you need something you can screenshot it off MS word or similar and add it as a picture. i don't think it will happen too often. not beautiful but it might work.

Anybody have any plans on what to write about yet? I was thinking of doing some elementary stuff on Aerospace Engineering, along the lines of 'How many hot-air balloons do you need to lift a person' or something....

or covering something of flightgear 3.0 perhaps.

google used to have a nice webservice, just to tex in the URL and it'd spit out an image, so you could but the tex righ there in the img src, but I think they discontinued it

@Manfred I'd like to go in-depth on some of the questions we've received

@voretaq7 @Manfred Scrolling through chat transcripts might provide some good topics too

@roe yup. One of the perennial items would be soliciting headset reviews :)

@voretaq7 can I get promoted on the blog admin thing?

@BretCopeland five dolla :-)

@BretCopeland yeah, I'm waiting for that too

<goes to bump everyone's permissions>

@voretaq7 do you accept unicoins?

yay, more features

awesome :)

@BretCopeland . . . no but I'll accept unicorns :)

(I'll probably make all the mods admins just for the sake of sanity - right now I'll set everyone else to Author & we can sort out more granularity later if need be)

@roe that cat looks stoned...

I spent some time last night editing together the video from my December flight around Manhattan. I was going to write about it on my personal blog at some point, but perhaps I could write about it here instead.

@BretCopeland Id read it

@BretCopeland that would definitely fit under "places to fly" :)

could even work in some references to the FAA Safety training video on how to do it without pissing anyone off :)

yeah, I think writing about it here would actually be better anyway, because my original intention was to write targeted to non-pilots, but it it's targeted to pilots, I could go into a lot more detail of exactly how to do it and what to expect if you also wanted to fly it.

@voretaq7 hey, its a unicorn cat, he's gotta be high or he wouldn't be seeing all those rainbows..

@roe UniCat?

First step, either we pick a more creative name for this room, or we don't deserve a blog.

@BretCopeland Indeed. We have many, many good options for names (including the ones we rejected for the main room @ meta.aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/24/… )

"Say Again"?

I liked that blog

@roe He still blogs (occasionally even about ATC/Aviation) :)

@voretaq7 really?? where?

@roe gettheflick.blogspot.com

"Read Back" might be an appropriate name.

@BretCopeland ooh I like that one

@BretCopeland yeah, that's good too

@voretaq7 Wow, he's pretty active too.

room topic changed to Read Back: What should we blog about? aviation.blogoverflow.com (no tags)

@roe when facility safety reps retire from ATC they have nothing to do but take pictures and blog apparently :-)

We can change it later if someone comes up with something better.

@voretaq7 indeed

@voretaq7 do you want to work on a draft of an opening post?

@BretCopeland Yeah I can make some notes toward that - we should also think about the about page since the two will likely cover some of the same ground

I signed up on the blog site!

@casey you can has Authorship

thanks!

@voretaq7 I wonder if it would be a better policy to make everyone a contributor who wants to be, instead of author. Not because we don't trust them, but just so people don't accidentally publish posts before someone else has proof-read it, and so we can maintain a publishing schedule (don't really want three posts published on the same day and then nothing for two weeks). Anyone who is really active in the blog should be promoted to Editor role so they can help with the review process.

@BretCopeland Yeah that would be sane too

we'll probably rejigger permissions before going live :)

<suspiciously eyes @CanadianLuke> . . . have you come to throw geese into our engines?

Tricksy Canadians....

@voretaq7 I just changed them now. It's easier do do now and then just add people the right way from now on.

@BretCopeland I don't plan on publishing any of my own content directly. I know my writing needs an editor's review :)

@casey well, you're a contributor now, so write away.

:)

Rule 42: All blog postings to be written in crayon on the back of old Terminal Charts.

(This is our way of propping up Aeronav's paper charts division)

@voretaq7 Saw a room called 'Read back' when on the AV site, thought I'd just check it out