Eve Bloggers has a new Community Manager

Back in February 2009 I created the Eve Bloggers Portal (www.evebloggers.com), a single location for the sharing of all the Eve blogs and their posts. I also created the Eve Bloggers Facebook group which, surprisingly, seems to still be active, even though I have gone through phases of forgetting about it over the past couple of years...  Also in early 2009 I created the in-game chat channel 'EVE-BLOGGERS' for Eve bloggers to keep in touch with each other, and I'm happy that it's still quite popular today.

I set them all up to be low maintenance, so that I could have them going in the background without much of my own involvement. The biggest area of maintenance and administration was evebloggers.com, because I've been responsible for adding new blogs to it about once or twice a month, on average.

Over the previous two years, there had been various blogs that had come and gone and were now inactive. I had a listing of over 700 blogs, and I knew that I needed to cull quite a few. I also know I couldn't do this myself due to my own lack of time.  So I decided that I needed to get someone to help me.

Back in March this year, I put out a call to the community to find someone to help me with administration.  Would you believe that out of the hundreds of people that read my blog, only one offered to help? I was a little disappointed with the lack of interest, but not that much - I was excited to have at least one person wanting to help!

Their in-game name is Biore, and he was very friendly and available, and sincerely wanted to help with whatever I needed help with.  So I tasked him with going through over 700 blogs and itemising those that needed to be removed. What would have taken me weeks, took him a few hours. Holy crap! Needless to say, I was impressed.  I then went through his list and started removing the inactive blogs from my list, and managed to get it down to about 500-something blogs, but then got distracted again by Real Life.

Six months later, I contacted Biore again (just the other day) and asked him if he was still interested and available in helping. He was - yay!  So I made him the new 'administration assistant' to the Eve Bloggers Portal.

Over the weekend just gone, I transferred the RSS feeds of all the Eve blogs (641 of them) out of my applicable personal RSS folder in Google Reader (which was driving the feed behind www.evebloggers.com) and transferred it all over into its own Google Reader account, updating the portal accordingly so that the blog updates were coming from the new RSS feed location. I then gave Biore access to that account, along with instructions on how to remove the RSS feeds of inactive blogs.

I will continue to administrate the Portal itself, with the adding of new blogs to the site and the evebloggers RSS feed, and Biore will look after the removal of inactive or irrelevant blogs.

I'm very excited that this move has been made, because I feel that having an enthusiastic assistant like Biore will be a great step forward in the management of these Eve Bloggers features.

Also, after thinking about it and then discussing it with him just yesterday, I felt that it would be a great idea for EVE BLOGGERS to have its own Community Manager, with access to the Facebook page, as well as to the EVE-BLOGGERS channel in-game.  Biore agreed with me, and graciously accepted my offer.

Therefore, please join with me in welcoming Eve Bloggers' new Community Manager, Biore!

Within the space of 48 hours, he has managed to get the list of 641 Eve blogs down to only 234.  As Biore said to me, it's a shame that so many Eve blogs have come and gone, and no longer active. From the 700+ blogs I once had a list of, there's now only 200+.

I'm still encouraged by the regular influx of people wanting their blogs added to the list and shared out via the portal.  You can see the list of blogs as they've been added here, on the Eve Bloggers Latest Blogs page. As you can see, every single month there have been new people joining the list of Eve bloggers.

Please make sure you add yours to the list if you haven't already done so.



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