If you are not familiar with DiscoveringHuntsville.com, let me give you the quick run-down.

DiscoveringHuntsville.com is a brand new blog / website about, you guess it, Huntsville! But not just Huntsville. We want to make DH a resource for our extended area around Huntsville. The plan is to launch the site before the end of June with original content about the community we call home. The best places to eat, best coffee shops, where to find a good plumber or see a great movie. We even have a couple of authors lined up already to bring us stories of Huntsville’s past. VERY exciting stuff!!

Best of all, DiscoveringHuntsville.com will be a platform to support community generated content! If you’re interested in reading about Huntsville, DH will be the place to come. And if you’re interested in writing, shooting photos, videos, or creating original podcasts… DH will be the place for that as well! You can even make a little extra cash by contributing… and not the .002 cents per page view you get other places! Our model is built around sharing the success of the site with the contributors that make it successful!

If you think you’d be interested in finding out more about DiscoveringHuntsville.com and maybe contributing to its success, join us next Tuesday night to find out more. BTW, because we’ll have somewhat limited space, I’ve created an EventBrite ticketing event for the meetup. The meetup is totally FREE but please get a ticket so we’ll reserve enough space! (HINT: Use the “Click To Register” button!)

Don’t worry about not knowing what to write about, we can help with that!

Don’t worry about no one wanting to read what you write, we can help with that too!

If you have any questions, by all means shoot me an email or hit me up on Twitter! See ya Tuesday!

@jtrigsby
email: jtrigsby [at] jtrigsby.com

Just wanted to drop a quick note with a little bit of site news.

First, a reminder that we’ve implemented a feed aggregator. That means you can write about BNBHuntsville on your own blog (and you’re all doing that… right!) and with a little configuration magic, it will also post here on the BNBHuntsville site! Check out the Beer & Blog Huntsville Meetup Recap for May 4th for all the details.

Second, we are also pulling in content from Twitter in the LifeStream over on the right-hand side of the page. Be sure to use the hashtag #bnbhsv anytime you post something related to BNBHuntsville via Twitter!

Third, and speaking of Twitter… if you’re following @bnbhuntsville (and you all are, right!) you’ll now get a tweet when a new post goes up on the site. I’d expect that Tuesday nights and Wednesdays will be the most active days for this plugin since everyone will be writing their recaps and having them auto-post over here… but I digress…

Finally, if you’re interested in getting a good quality link with your choice of anchor text, you’re in luck. I’ve put together a BNBHsv Friends page on the site. Shoot me an email or a tweet if you’d like to get a link there. I’ll need the URL you want to link to and the anchor text you’d like displayed.

Ok, that’s it for now. See y’all next Tuesday!

@jtrigsby

Man… was it a gorgeous day out Tuesday… well maybe not for @JimShoe since the sun was beaming right into his face! But for the rest of us it was AWESOME. As usual the conversation was all over the place and included a little “make money” talk even!

The big thing was that @strages and I got to spend a little time talking about a post aggregator for Beer & Blog Huntsville. We’d actually talked about it the week earlier and we both came up with options.

So, Here’s the Good News

We’ve put together a plan that will keep the Beer & Blog Huntsville site up to date!!!

And Now Even Better News

YOU can help keep it up to date and all you have to do is post to your own blog!

Huh?

Ok, so that might sound a little strange, let me try to explain. One of the things we’ve been missing are good recaps of each week’s meetup. There’s tons of great information and conversation that goes on and its just tough to get it written up. Its even tougher when there are different conversations going on at the same time. SO…

Everybody that attends is welcomed… encouraged even… to write their own recap of the meetup, tag it, and post it to their blog. When you do, your post will automatically get cross-posted to the BnB site! Easy, right!

If most (or all) of the attendees contribute in this way, we’ll have the most awesome collection of information and notes anywhere!

Ok, Sounds Good… Now What?

Well, I already know one person this won’t work for, we’ll work on his feed next week. In the meantime…

If you’re using WordPress, here’s what you do:

• Write your post
• Add a tag or category for bnbHuntsville (I added a category but a tag will work too)
• Publish the post
• Send me an email with the category/tag you used and whether its a category or tag
• I’ll wave my magic wand over the site admin pages
• Tada! You post appears

If you don’t use WordPress or these instructions look like they might as well be a NASA engineering document… no worries! Shoot me an email with the URL to your blog and we’ll get it figured out.

By the way…
We’ll also be able to pull in pics from Flickr soon!

And don’t forget to use the #bnbhsv hashtag for everything on Twitter.

Ok, that’s enough for this week. Have fun out there!

@jtrigsby

Well, we’ve got another awesome Beer & Blog Huntsville meetup in the books! I took a break from working on Life In the Internetto hang out with a great bunch of folks at the West End Grill on Old Madison Pike.

I realized tonight that I don’t really tell the good folks that attend our weekly get-togethers just how much I appreciate them making the trip out. Yeah, the make-up of the group changes from week to week but its still pretty great getting to catch up with everyone every Tuesday night.

In the six months or so that we’ve been doing Beer & Blog, I can’t think of a week where conversation was lacking, and this week was no exception. Just a few of the MANY topics we hit:

• Is blogging journalism?
• Are bloggers protected by shield laws?
• Are Twitter and Facebook “real” blogging platforms?
• How can we get more folks to our meetups?
• What is the meaning of life (well, sorta)?

It took me a full four hours to get all that in this week, can’t do that every week but this time we were just on a roll.

Thanks again everybody, I really enjoyed it!

@jtrigsby

I realized tonight that I don’t really tell the good folks that attend our weekly get-togethers just how much I appreciate them making the trip out. Yeah, the make-up of the group changes from week to week but its still pretty great getting to catch up with everyone every Tuesday night.

In the six months or so that we’ve been doing Beer & Blog, I can’t think of a week where conversation was lacking, and this week was no exception. Just a few of the MANY topics we hit:

• Is blogging journalism?
• Are bloggers protected by shield laws?
• Are Twitter and Facebook “real” blogging platforms?
• How can we get more folks to our meetups?
• What is the meaning of life (well, sorta)?

It took me a full four hours to get all that in this week, can’t do that every week but this time we were just on a roll.

Thanks again everybody, I really enjoyed it!

@jtrigsby

Hey gang, @jtrigsby here.

First, thanks to all that made it out tonight. I don’t say this enough but I really appreciate everyone who attends!

I’ll actually save my personal recap of the meeting to post on my own site, but I wanted to get something out in front of all our previous and regular attenders.

One of the topics of discussion around the table tonight was doing a better job talking up Beer & Blog Huntsville and trying a little harder to get the word out.

To that end, we each agreed to contribute our recap of the meetup to our respective online platforms. Whether that recap takes the form of a blog post, pics on Flickr, video on Ustream… whatever.

Eventually, we will bring all those separate recaps together to create a single, aggregated recap of the event, but for now, we’re just gonna start generating the recaps.

So if you were there tonight, make your recap then send a tweet with a link to @bnbHuntsville and hashtag it with #bnbhsv. That should make it show up in the LifeStream over in the right margin.

If you weren’t there tonight, we’d love for you to (re)join us next Tuesday night at West End Grill on Old Madison Pike. If you need directions or more info, feel free to shoot me an email at jtrigsby [at] jtrigsby [dot] com or hit me up on Twitter @jtrigsby.

Thom

Oh, and tell bring a friend!!

@jtrigsby

Be sure to spread the word around… and pardon the mess while WE’RE (you know who you are!) are getting things back in order.

You may notice this is not you usual installation of WordPress. It is actually WordPress + BuddyPress which gives us some community / social network features. You can create your very own account over in the right sidebar and have fun!

Members… you’ll note that there is an activity feed over in the right sidebar that can contain links to your posts or other feed. Send me a dm or email to get your events included in the feed!

Hit me up on Twitter if you have any questions @jtrigsby.