UPDATE: identicons, however, are broken. Working on it…

UPDATE 2: fixed.

One of the features that Talk Islam will soon support is user diaries - basically, fully-functional wordpress blogs for any user hosted as subdomains under talkislam.info. The idea is to provide a more personalized blog hosting service - for free - to the Islamsphere, where you have full control over your own blog. Posts from user diaries will be featured on the front page at Talk Islam, and unlike wordpress.com-hosted blogs, users can put their own google ads on their diaries to earn a little cash.

There are a lot of technical issues that still need to be resolved, which is why we haven’t formally rolled out user diaries yet. Most notable among these is the need to stop spam blog signups, which is a gigantic problem. We will probably disallow automated signups and require anyone requesting a diary to email the admin to request one be setup.

Another issue is the question of what themes to make available. In general if a user really wants a given theme then we can make it available, but the intention is to have a default set of high quality themes available from the outset so that setting up a new blog is really easy. One obvious choice will be K2, but I also have been impressed of late with Thesis. In fact I really want to make Thesis the default option because it has such excellent customizability and is so highly optimized for search engines (meaning users’ posts will get the love they deserve from google). Unfortunately Thesis is not free and will cost $167 USD for a site license, so it may be a while before we can make that available (presently, and for the forseeable future, Talk Islam’s expenses are not covered by ad revenue). I think that a higher priority than buying a license for Thesis is to get some basic design work done to make the site overall look better, but I would like to solicit opinions from you all on that.

At any rate, we will have user diaries soon- I am aiming for the end of the year inshallah to get these issues sorted out. Please do give your thoughts/requests/ideas on the matter below. Also, if nayone wants a diary to play with I would appreciate some beta testers, just drop an email to salaam at talkislam dot info.

UPDATE: site also upgraded to Wordpress MU 2.6.

We’re going to talk about my upcoming monthly comic book series AIR, along with CAIRO, Islam’s relationship with the graphic arts and God knows what else. Join us.

14 comment(s) on … - most recent by Willow

instead of

14 comment(s) on Late-nite funny story: a couple of Sunda … - most recent by Willow

I’ve been going in and adding titles manually to posts where this happens. My recommendation is to try and avoid having your post start with a link for now, I am filing the bug report and hopefully we will get a patch soon. Anyone with a flair for PHP is welcome to download the source and see if you can figure out a fix.

Apparently upscale=booze in everything, even the stuff they don’t tell you about. Also apparently, after years of abstention I have become a total and complete lightweight.

- the rotating books widget has been changed to reflect bestsellers in Islamic theology from Amazon, not just bestsellers in Islam, the latter being overly polluted by jafis. Islamophobia seems to sell.

- if you scroll down, you will see a new section for latest user diaries (ie, sub-blogs of the form name.talkislam.info). As yet we don’t have many diaries on the site, so I would like to request that anyone who is willing to give this feature a try please let me know. We need more user diaries for testing some of the site features.

- What are your thoughts on retiring the Carnival of Brass entirely? It seems that Talk Islam has made the Carnival redundant - both the blogs and media variants. Your thoughts much appreciated.