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4th July 2010 21:55 | by Andrew Tindall
Today the Pirate Party can announce the launch of our new community blog, PirateShip.org.uk.
The Pirate Ship is what is known as a "blog aggregator", which takes posts from the blogs of party members and presents them all together in one website, allowing you to keep up to date on the latest political issues and debates without ever having to leave the page.
To get your blog listed on The Pirate Ship, you must be a member of Pirate Party UK. Members who wish to have their blog syndicated can do so by going here.
As it is a community site, there are few guidelines on what should and should not be listed. However, we would hope the majority of posts would remain on the topics of the Pirate Parties and relevant political issues. As such we encourage you to make use of tags on your blog, and to only link that tag's feed to The Pirate Ship.
Remember - Opinions expressed on The Pirate Ship are those of members posting in a personal capacity, and may not represent official Pirate Party policy.
With that said, I hope you enjoy reading it, and maybe even contributing to it.
28 comments
Jul 04 2010 09:07 by PeterBrett
It would be nice to be able to get an RSS feed for The Pirate Ship. 
Jul 04 2010 09:07 by Sharkz
Added my blog's feed with the tag "PPUK", Only had one post with that tag so far but I have some new Pirate Party UK posts planned soon
Jul 04 2010 10:07 by barton71
Can someone maybe post a guide to adding your blog? I am not sure how to add my blog (Feed URL, RSS/ATOM format?) or how to only make posts with certain tags appear on the blog. Thanks.
Jul 04 2010 11:07 by glambert
peterbrett wrote: It would be nice to be able to get an RSS feed for The Pirate Ship.
This.
Would also like to know how I get my blog hooked up. Would give me added incentive to take time out from my busy life and post a blog every now and then.
Jul 04 2010 11:07 by Sharkz
barton71 wrote: Can someone maybe post a guide to adding your blog? I am not sure how to add my blog (Feed URL, RSS/ATOM format?) or how to only make posts with certain tags appear on the blog. Thanks.
-Vague Wordpress Guide-
(Might work for other Blogs, idk)
Change the bits in Bold accordingly.
If you just want the feed, use:
http://yoursite.com/feed/
If you want a tag feed you need:
http://yoursite.com/tag/yourtag/feed/
If you want a category feed you need:
http://yoursite.com/category/yourcategory/feed/
Hopefully that works, not tested it yet but it should do. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I'm pretty new to this stuff
Jul 05 2010 06:07 by Tom
peterbrett wrote: It would be nice to be able to get an RSS feed for The Pirate Ship.
Pirate Ship RSS feed.
Jul 05 2010 06:07 by PeterBrett
tom wrote:peterbrett wrote: It would be nice to be able to get an RSS feed for The Pirate Ship.
Pirate Ship RSS feed.
Woo, that's great.
Unfortunately the feed still has the crowsnest.pirateparty.org.uk as the homepage address. 
Now, another annoying request: in the feed, is it possible to add some way of identifying which blog each post was originally from? Other sites do that by putting something like "<username>: <post title>" in the RSS title field.
This is cool, I like it!
Jul 08 2010 03:07 by borgs8472
Is the scope of the pirate ship only member blogs? What about submissions from existing news sites, similar to how we use the news forum currently?Also I would say it is in dire need of right hand sidebar splitting by dates, tags, search function and similar bells and whistles.
Jul 08 2010 03:07 by PeterBrett
borgs8472 wrote: Is the scope of the pirate ship only member blogs?
Yes.
Of course, you're always welcome to write a blog post about an interesting news story that's come your way with some nice commentary and some links to related coverage.
Jul 08 2010 03:07 by borgs8472
More feedback, not all blogs RSS are dropping a 'comment' link at the bottom of their posts, forcing you to scroll up to the top of a potentially long article to visit its source if you want to make a comment. Could the template simply drop in a 'view origonal post' link linking to the same title link at the bottom of the posts?
Jul 08 2010 03:07 by PeterBrett
borgs8472 wrote: More feedback, not all blogs RSS are dropping a 'comment' link at the bottom of their posts, forcing you to scroll up to the top of a potentially long article to visit its source if you want to make a comment. Could the template simply drop in a 'view origonal post' link linking to the same title link at the bottom of the posts?
Not a bad idea, but don't most RSS readers scroll to the top of the current article when you hit the 'Home' key?
Jul 08 2010 04:07 by borgs8472
I don't know, I don't use one. I'm saying on the pirate ship default web interface it could use that feature.
Jul 09 2010 06:07 by azrael
Shouldn't be difficult, I could add this to the template if you want Peter?
Jul 09 2010 06:07 by PeterBrett
Sure, why not. *shrug* Maybe make it reasonably unobtrusive (right aligned in the central column)?
Jul 15 2010 06:07 by epriezka
we would hope the majority of posts would remain on the topics of the Pirate Parties and relevant political issues
Well, those hopes have been dashed already. Now that we're seeing the ship is already veering off course, is somebody going to take hold of the rudder?
Jul 16 2010 08:07 by rancidpunk
I don't really think it's such a problem about it being off topic, if it was soley related to pirate stuff it could/should be posted on the party home page (it is a bit stagnant atm). I like finding out more about what pirates think about off topic stuff that they can't say on the forums.
Jul 16 2010 10:07 by epriezka
rancidpunk wrote: I don't really think it's such a problem about it being off topic, if it was soley related to pirate stuff it could/should be posted on the party home page (it is a bit stagnant atm). I like finding out more about what pirates think about off topic stuff that they can't say on the forums.
Fair enough. I'm just extrapolating that if non-pirate stuff has grown to 50% of content already, then the ratio of non-pirate stuff is likely to keep on growing and become dominant. If most of the content is non-pirate, then people won't bother reading it for the pirate content. Wouldn't that defeat the point?
Jul 16 2010 10:07 by azrael
depends whether you view it as a platform for members to collaborate and deliver a pirate message to the public, or a place for members to share their view (both pirate and non-pirate) with other members
Jul 16 2010 11:07 by epriezka
azrael wrote: depends whether you view it as a platform for members to collaborate and deliver a pirate message to the public, or a place for members to share their view (both pirate and non-pirate) with other members
I thought it was the former.
If it's not the former, there's no point getting upset about it, so I'm not going to. But let's clarify if it's not meant to serve the former mission because we do need something that tries to talk to the public. The few pirates we have won't be successful if they only talk to each other. Talking to the public is the big challenge.
Jul 16 2010 11:07 by azrael
I think this is the general issue with Planets. The pirateship is a 'pirate party uk community blog'. Does that mean a blog for the UK party community to post about Pirate stuff? Or a blog for the UK pirate party to post about stuff?I'm not sure if that question has been answered, or if it's somewhere in between both
Jul 16 2010 12:07 by epriezka
azrael wrote: I'm not sure if that question has been answered, or if it's somewhere in between both
We should be wary of ending up being inbetween/both. When that happens, you risk ending up with neither.
It now seems to me that from the way this conversation is going and based on the content that's on the site, we're inevitably heading down the path of it being for PPUK members to talk about anything to each other. However, I did want to highlight that it isn't doing what Peter said he hoped it would do, and stick mostly to a pirate topic.
Jul 16 2010 01:07 by azrael
The RSS feed I fed into it for my blog was specifically via a ppuk tag, so that it doesn't just pull through everything. I'm not sure what others have done but my personal preference would be everyone to do something similar so that they can explicitly determine whether a post they make it relevant or not to the pirateship.Not sure how the feed approval works (could be automatic) but if anyone has to process it manually might well be worth setting up guidelines on what to accept or not in terms of a feed, and/or to make it core explicit what we want authors to only send through 'relevant' posts.
Jul 16 2010 01:07 by epriezka
azrael wrote: The RSS feed I fed into it for my blog was specifically via a ppuk tag, so that it doesn't just pull through everything.
That would lend itself to an obvious 2-stage solution. Let people submit a feed with a relevant tag for the pirate-specific aggregation, and let them submit the comprehensive feed to a second aggregation that includes everything. Then let readers decide for themselves if they want pirate-specific posts or warts 'n' all. Downside: it requires people to make an effort distinguishing the two feeds. That's probably where this idea would fall down.
Jul 16 2010 02:07 by PeterBrett
epriezka wrote:azrael wrote: depends whether you view it as a platform for members to collaborate and deliver a pirate message to the public, or a place for members to share their view (both pirate and non-pirate) with other members
I thought it was the former.
No.
Jul 16 2010 03:07 by epriezka
peterbrett wrote:epriezka wrote:azrael wrote: depends whether you view it as a platform for members to collaborate and deliver a pirate message to the public, or a place for members to share their view (both pirate and non-pirate) with other members
I thought it was the former.
No.
So the purpose is the latter - for pirates by pirates about whatever? And it's not aimed at the wider public?
Jul 18 2010 09:07 by PeterBrett
I originally envisaged it as a community-building exercise rather than as a promotional endeavour. Now, if there's a strong argument for changing that premise, then I'd be totally happy to give the idea some serious consideration.
Jul 18 2010 10:07 by azrael
I think community building is a good idea. But we shouldn't forget that it's also open to the public to view and hence can be good/bad publicity. It should be down to community members to moderate themselves when it comes to the content they post, but I guess in theory there should be some guidelines on what is and isn't acceptable, along with an understanding that your feed may get pulled if it doesn't comply (or more that a member is reminded of the guidelines and taught how to tag and serve up a feed conforming to a specific pirateship tag) *gasp* run on sentences!
Jul 25 2010 08:07 by ahdkaw
I added mine, although you might not want it.