UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat Blogs, love em or hate em?

fwiw - i've recently changed my mind about blogs, atleast in regards to putting them too good use in non-traditional way (for-business-purposes rather than for the usual personal 'me-generation' journal type thing)

my first blog venture was for a website customer that wanted a way to post sales & inventory related announcements easily without my help http://tankdr.blogspot.com

that went over so well, i sat back and seriously thought about non-traditional uses for a blog, and came up with a great idea for my ubb site... one big downside of a messageboard is that valueable info in a chatty community can get drowned out and scattered around. and since my community isnt real techy savvy, lots of folks said they couldnt find something after it faded abit. for us - that was key race event info.

so we started a "race blog" for the current race season where it's like a showcase catalog of race reports and links to all the important stuff related to a given event.

http://dballey.blogspot.com/

and we're using a couple of 3rd party moblogging (mobile blogging) services so that race reporters can post stuff on the blog right from the race. i was a lil scared this would be abit too newfangled for folks to take an instant liking too but i was wrong -> response has been fantastic!! and the racers love it cuz they point their sponsors to simple lowfat one-stop-shopping place to see just what the sponsor wants to know -> race event info.

finding ways to tie the two sites together (forums & blog) was kind of fun. i reused abunch of stuff from the sidebar in my ubb on the blog sidebar. plus i have a scheduled task to grab the blog's feed every half hour and automagically show a lil "blog last updated" block with most recent datetimestamp on the my ubb sidebar. all this is just KISS integration, but i'm stewing up a couple of ideas for a custom mod that would do much fancier tricks.