New blog up and running!

New blog up and running!

By | 2015-06-18T15:16:52-04:00 June 18th, 2015|Categories: Announcements|2 Comments

It’s finally here! Welcome to the new Resources For Ace Survivors WordPress blog!

You can follow our RSS feed on Feedly or any other RSS reader you like. (Here’s a handy guide to RSS readers with startup packages of great ace blogs to follow!) Or, you can follow the Resources for Ace Survivors Tumblr, which will still be running alongside this new blog.

We have several options for integrating this blog with our Tumblr. I want to check in with you all here to find out what would be the most comfortable option for everyone.

  • We can set up our WordPress blog to automatically share links to posts made here in a specific category to Tumblr, with a small excerpt. Everyone who submits would then have the option of whether they want to share their post on Tumblr or not. This seems like the best WP-to-Tumblr option to me. Those who want to opt out of auto-shared posts may instead request that only a link be shared.
  • For Tumblr-to-WP, we have several options. We can have just a link to our Tumblr in the sidebar (as we do now), or we can import posts from Tumblr into a sidebar widget either: a) only posts with a specific tag, b) all posts except those with a specific tag, or c) all posts.
  • Question: Are there specific types of posts that we should make it a policy not to share on this website? For example, asks?

Please also be aware when posting links to Tumblr in the comments here that WordPress automatically imports the whole post when you just paste the URL. I am not sure how to turn that completely off yet, but I am working on it. In the meantime, all comments with links to tumblr are set to go through a moderation queue, so we can make sure that this doesn’t accidentally happen and unnecessarily trigger anyone.

We are still working on our comment policy and a list of tags and trigger warnings for people to refer to. It’s very hard to come up with an exhaustive list, because there is always something we might forget. So if you have any triggers you especially need warnings about, please let us know and we’ll add them to the list. We have a good idea of where we’re going with the comment policy, but if you have any specific suggestions or worries about it, feel free to let us know.

Seeking Moderators

We are still developing our forum’s rules and policies, so it will take a little bit longer for us to launch that. Currently, it is set to invite-only (because we were getting a lot of spam applications), so if you’d like to join, you’ll need to request an invite. Because we’re still working on getting it going and very short-handed moderation-wise though, there may be a delay before we send you an invite code. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to launch the forum fully. If you are on The List or want to volunteer for us, you can of course join our discussions right away.

Currently, we have two moderators:

  • NormaCenva
  • Raven (seasonal, and in her off-season)

…and me, although I’m really more of an admin. All of us have to take breaks now and then, and unfortunately sometimes our breaks coincide! So I think we need at least 3 or 4 more mods so that we can have a better safety net. If you’d like to volunteer, please send an email to volunteer@asexualsurvivors.org. After you get an invite code to the forum, you’ll then have to post to the Moderator Volunteer Thread, so that we can all coordinate availability and such.

Some things you should know about moderating:

  • Moderators can have email addresses hosted here on our server, to preserve your confidentiality and make things run more smoothly.
  • You can be a moderator for WordPress comments, too, even if you don’t want to be a blogger.
  • We are looking for a moderator who wants to host a regular insightful question feature like the Asexual Agenda’s Question of the Week, except with both a public blog post and a private, members-only forum discussion. (We have a good list of ideas already, and will take suggestions.)
  • You can choose a username that is totally separate from whatever you post under at other sites, and it takes all of 30 seconds for me to change your forum username to something else. However, WordPress usernames cannot be changed, so I’d have to make you a totally new profile if you want to change that. (Ditto for email addresses.)
  • Our forum also allows anyone to post as anonymous as well, as long as you are a registered member.

Seeking Regular Bloggers and Submissions

As always, we are open for submissions! Here’s more information on how to contribute. You can of course contribute anonymously.

You can also join our team and blog here more regularly. There’s no strict rule about how often you have to blog or anything like that. We all have busy times and periods where we have to disengage for a while. We are also understanding of dyslexia, non-native English, and so on; I will be here to help if you need an editor or just want some feedback. For regular blogging, you’ll have to choose at least a pseudonym of some sort to serve as your username, but more sensitive posts can always be made as anonymous submissions instead.

We have gotten some great submissions, which we will share with you soon! Please also check out the June Carnival of Aces on asexuality and mental health; we can host an anonymous carnival submission for you here if you’d like.

If you have any links to share regarding asexuality and mental health, or anything that might be helpful for ace survivors, supporters of survivors, or professionals treating survivors, please do!

Take care, everyone.

About the Author:

Elizabeth is a 30-something asexual woman who is often mistaken for a lesbian, due to the fact that she is partnered to a lady. She is actually bi (but not biromantic) and somewhere on the aromantic spectrum. She is formally trained in creative writing with a focus on non-fiction and poetry. She writes for The Asexual Agenda and maintains a personal blog called Prismatic Entanglements. In her spare time, she enjoys being cat furniture, coming up with new Pokemon strategies and never going to church.

2 Comments

  1. Queenie June 19, 2015 at 11:07 am - Reply

    I’m of the opinion that we shouldn’t automate any of the WP-to-tumblr stuff. Mostly because it doesn’t take that long, and I’ve seen how well automatically generated quotations work (not well, especially if you have trigger warnings at the top of posts).

    • Elizabeth Leuw June 20, 2015 at 3:51 am - Reply

      Well, they don’t have to be automatically generated quotations. We can manually set our own excerpts for the posts, and tell the plugin to use the excerpt, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. (This should be possible on wordpress.com too actually. I haven’t used IFTTT before but surely that’s an option?)

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