Signing Up as a Democratic Convention Blogger

SIgnups for Democratic Convention Bloggers are now open. This is a pretty simple process, but it involves multiple steps.

1. SIgn up for an account on the Rootswire.Org web site. Just use the JOIN tab on the front page. When you sign up, the site will ask you want kind of account you want - click on Democratic Convention Blogger.You should apply for the account using the name that you want to have appear as the name of your blog after it is aggregated in.
2. The site will send you a confirmation email to make sure that you are actually at the email account you applied from. Click on the confirmation link in the email. Congratulations, you are now a member, and you can change your password or anything else about your account at the "My Account" page (in the navigation menu on your left).
3. Make the following changes to your account:

• Upload your site logo (whatever logo you want to have attached to your posts and aggregated articles) as your picture on the "My Account" page.
• If you want to participate in receiving tips for your articles, sign up for a tipjoy account , and then put your tipjoy user name in the field in the "my account" page.
• Please fill in at least your city and state in the address portion of your account page. This will allow us to build maps, etc. of where all the participating blogs are.

4. You now need to add your feed to the site. When you are logged in to the site, you'll see a dropdown menu at the top of every page where you can select a content type to create. Pull it down and select Convention Feed - Fill out the form, and your site will be added in to the feed. If you have a separate RSS feed for convention coverage, use that and click the checkbox saying that it is a specific feed. Otherwise, just put in the RSS feed URL for your main RSS feed, and we'll filter it for you.Note that currently the filter will include any post that contains any of the key words Democratic Convention,convention,denver,pepsi center.

Once I sign up, what happens?

We'll read your RSS feed once per hour (more or less - it'll be a little slower if posting gets heavy), and update on our site if there are changes (we'll also check to see if any of your blog entries have been updated).  We aggregate in as much of your blog entry as you put out on your RSS feed, and re-post it on our site with the picture you've uploaded.  Each article also contains a link to the original article on your site.  

We also have produced a Democratic Convention widget, which you can use on your own site (or on any other site) to carry the aggregated convention feed.  The widget is available at http://www.springwidgets.com/widgets/view/23/?param_param=http%3A%2F%2Ff...

Or you can just go to it from the widget displayed on this site, or any of the other sites carrying it.  You can modify the widget quite a lot to make it fit your site and change colors, etc.

Welcome to the crew!