That same system is helpful in preventing spam comments from invading articles throughout the site. “But Andy,” I hear you saying, “I just saw a spam comment (or a dozen) on my blog a few minutes ago!” Indeed. And that’s why I’m here, writing this. Spam comments are no fun for anyone, but they can be easily dealt with by adjusting a few settings in your admin area.

1. The easiest options can be found in theSettings > Discussion panel. By checking the box next to “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”, you can prevent unregistered (spam!) users from commenting. Be aware that this will require anybody who does want to join the discussion to register on Citizen Wausau.
2. In the same area, you also have the option to turn off comments completely (”Allow people to post comments on new articles”) or you can close the article to new comments after a set period of time (”Automatically close comments on article older than __ days”).
3. You can decide whether you always want to approve comments beforehand (”An administrator must always approve the comment”) or only for the first time someone posts (”Comment author must have a previously approved comment”).
4. If your spam comments contain a lot of links, chances are they’ll be held in moderation already. However, spam and spam prevention tools are constantly leapfrogging eachother, so this will not necessarily solve the problem.
5. Finally, you can use the “Comment Moderation” and “Comment Blacklist” areas to add keywords, usernames, emails, or IP addresses (”Cialis”, for example, would block comments using that word). I’d recommend just using the moderation box unless you’re sure it’s a word that won’t EVER come up in conversation.

There you have it! Some quick and easy options to cut down on work for yourself, or at least make the occasional influx of spam comments a little more occasional.

ZZZZZZ.

1. An item $100,000 or less
2. An item $10,000 or less
3. An item $1,000 or less
4. An item $100 or less
5. An item $10 or less
6. And finally, an item $1 or less

What’s on your list? Keep in mind it needs to be an actual item you can buy (eBay, Amazon, whatever). And no gift cards. Mine would look something like this:

1. 2009 Porsche Carrera 4S
2. Samsung LN55A950 – 55″ LED-backlit LCD TV
3. Canon Digital Rebel XSi – dSLR camera
4. Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens
5. A carwash
6. 3 Subway chocolate chip cookies

Your turn!

I hope we can count on your continued support and enthusiasm for the site!

Likewise for those who Flickr. Examples to the left. Knock yourselves out (figuratively).

Validation Station

New blogs will now undergo a short validation period. Basically this just means we look at a blog when it’s registered, and if the username isn’t something like kdjalskfjewo and the title actually is coherent, we turn it on. Note: don’t just type in random characters for your username. If you activate your blog and don’t hear from us within 24 hours, please let us know. We’ve decided to remove this, for now, as I think the second step outlined below is handling things just fine. We shall see. I was wrong.

Private Public

Also, by default, new blogs will no longer be indexed and publicly viewable until you turn that option on in your admin panel. Again, this doesn’t affect existing blogs!

To make your blog public, follow this steps:

1. In the admin panel, click on the Options tab.
2. On the options page, click the Privacy sub-tab.
3. Select “I would like my blog to be visible to anyone who visits…”
4. Click Update Options

And just like that, you’re done! And now, I’m off to rehearse for some show about a barber.

But it’s funny what a little peer pressure can do, especially when it’s a peer whose opinion holds a lot of weight in your decisions. So I tried out. And not 2 hours afterwards, I was offered the part of Nick, a young New Yorker who visits his Italian grandparents (all four of them!) every Sunday for dinner, until he gets offered a promotion… and it’s in Seattle. In a last-ditch effort to keep their grandson close, they secretly invite a special someone to dinner in hopes that he’ll fall head over heels and just won’t be able to leave.

As with any show, it’s the cast and crew that brought this script to life. Everyone fell so naturally into their characters – it was a real pleasure from the first read-through all the way to the final performance. And yet, this is drama and we were not without drama of our own. But that all melts away when you decide what to remember, and I’ll remember what turned out to be a wonderful experience and awesome people.

What’s next, now that this show has come to a close? Easy answer: we’ve already started rehearsals for Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It’s a sort of polar opposite to this show: huge cast, huge music, subjective subject matter, and at the Grand Theater. But it will be great fun, and I can’t wait.

It’s an artificial group.

Creatives, especially the web-oriented sort, travel in packs. We have our core group of friends or colleagues that we use as a sounding board for ideas and a resource for solving problems. Most importantly, when there’s a project that’s too much for us to handle on our own, those are the people we call. This is our real group. We’ve spent years developing it and maintaining it without even thinking about it. It just happens.

This is coworking at its most refined, at its most basic. It’s a brilliant system. But when you try to organize that, for whatever reason, it doesn’t quite work. Often the people in a group are not full-time freelancers; they simply enjoy finding projects on the side is a way to flex the creative muscles and make a little extra scratch. I certainly fall into this category, and I can say the same for pretty much everyone in my group. We communicate when we can, via email or IM or phone or Twitter or whatever works at the time, as long as the necessary group members get the message.

But never in person. Almost never. A good portion of my group is scattered about the country, and yet we still manage to accomplish things, which amazes me. I love the internet.

Here’s another thing: no two groups are the same. I might have a group with A, B, C, and D, while D has a group of me, E, F, and J. Overlapping is not guaranteed, so the ideal group for you is not necessarily the ideal group for your groupmates. They may not get along with eachother, or they may just not know eachother. It makes for a tangled web for sure, but who am I to argue with efficiency?

What I’m trying to say is, these workgroups are incredibly organic; they’re constantly evolving as we meet new people or lose touch with others. The internet has made this possible on a national or even worldwide scale. One thing’s for sure, very rarely is it possible to constrain an efficient group to a single place.

I could stop right there and have succinctly described the Jelly, a gathering taking place at Citizen Desk this week. People in Wausau like social gatherings so this “Jelly” seems to be on track for success in that regard, though I have a feeling more than a few of the names on the list will be absent for whatever reason. My reason is that I wasn’t invited.

But the real purpose of the event is to serve as a sort of “look at me!” for Citizen Desk. Unfortunately, while the idea of a co-working space has merit, the fact that we are in the rural midwest where space is cheaply had (home office, anyone?) and that people value their privacy when it comes to professional matters makes it a non-starter. There may be a few exceptions, but what then?

Let’s say I shell out $150 (or whatever amount) per month for a desk at CD. That gets me a workspace with no storage, up 4 flights of stairs, in an office space with a great view but no cross ventilation and a hard-to-explain location. Internet is included, but wireless, and I have to bring my own tools.

Speaking of tools, trying to design on a laptop SUCKS.

Assuming you get past the architectural and hardware-related issues, we come to the people you’ll be sharing your space with. Because CD is in it for the money first and foremost (as are most businesses doomed to fail), I see it as unlikely that anybody who wants a desk will be refused one. Which means your entire work environment could be completely altered by one person.

Nobody wants that kind of unpredictability when they are trying to get work done. Instead, save that $150 a month and spend it on your own internet, keeping your hardware and software up to date, and if nothing else, on doing nice things for your clients. Meet your friends and colleagues for lunch, and then you can all go back to your respective workspaces, spaces that you’ve optimized for yourselves, and most importantly, get work done.

There have been some questions regarding the functionality of Citizen Wausau’s admin panels (the parts you see when you’re writing a blog post or updating your user information). The whole site is driven by a modified version of WordPress which accommodates a vast number of individual blogs that are all basically on a network.

Because this is built on top of existing software, some of the UI functionality isn’t quite as clear as I’d like. This has become evident in the fact that it’s just downright confusing or complicated at times. The most commonly asked question is “how do I get to my admin panel to write posts?”

The easiest way I can suggest is to go to this address: http://citizenwausau.com/yourblogname/wp-admin/. That will take you directly to the admin panel of your blog.

The site is set up in such a way that your profile links take you to http://citizenwausau.com/wp-admin (note that there’s no blog name in that address), which will put you at the admin area of the main Citizen Wausau blog. From there you can get to your blog using the arrow next to the title on the top left.

For most users this is a non-issue because they only write on their own blogs and comment on the main blog. However, we have a few users who both keep a personal blog and contribute to the Citizen Wausau blog, and they’ve expressed concern about accidentally publishing an article on the wrong blog.

So again, the best advice I can offer: check the title on the top left if you’re not sure where you are! We at CW would love to see this system improved, but for the time being we are at the mercy of the WPMU team.

I hope this clears things up a little bit for those who’ve been confused!