Hey guys. Happy New year and all that jazz.
I hear what you are saying Geeves and Teach, it's definitely very quiet around here. I take some of the responsibility for that as I have been pretty distracted with family and health issues in the last couple of years and didn't have the energy to devote to Rugbyheads or Fantasy Rugby.
I know it is the offseason, but even during the rugby season in the last couple of seasons activity on the site has been dwindling. I take some of the responsibility for that as I have been pretty distracted with family and health issues in the last couple of years and side projects like Rugbyheads haven't been a priority.
Even in my absence there has still been a lot of interesting discussion on the site, and plenty of discussion board contributors that have posted far more often to the board than I have. I have posted 555 posts, and there are at least a dozen Rugbyheads who have posted more than me, but even that most prolific posters have started to dwindle in the last year. It is all about communication, so if you post something and no one replies then your interest in posting something else wanes, after all you can talk to yourself anytime you like!
I want to change that this year though. My health is on the mend and it's going to be a great year to be a Rugby Fan, and I'd like it to be a great year to be a RugbyHeads supporter/contributor too. Even if it turns out to be a last hurrah for the site I am keen to give it a try.
I have a few ideas how we can kick start things again.
Here is my plan (that started rough, but has fleshed out considerably as I wrote it!):
1) Move the site to rugbyheads.com
Move the site to rugbyheads.com rather than hosting it under planetnz.com/rugbyheads. Rugbyheads.com currently redirects here but I think the site can have more of it's own identity under it's own domain. (I can set it up so all search engine links can redirect to the Rugbyheads.com domain so we can maintain existing traffic).
2) Revert RH to original format
Reboot the site by reverting back to the site's original format, articles written by suitably qualified Rugbyheads (in terms of membership and loyalty, probably based on number of posts on the board for a start) and a discussion board. I would consider all of you as immediately qualified to start posting your own articles. You could consider it a personal rugby blog in essence, but your posts would just be a subset of the whole Rugbyheads experience.
You can already see a list of all the posts by a particular user on the Discussion Board via their profile, so I see it as an extension of that.
eg:
http://www.planetnz.com/rugbyheads/board/index.php?action=profile;u=1;sa=showPostsWe can enable comments on the articles (or posts) so that people can comment directly on your article, and discussions can flow that way.
3) Use WordPress for main part of site
My idea for reinstating the article publication process is to use a local install of the WordPress blog software, which I have some experience configuring. This allows multiple authors at different levels of access (read-only, author-with moderation, author-without moderation, editor, admin).
4) Promote old content on site
Once we get that going we can migrate the old articles over to it, which still have some amusement value but have been buried for ages. You can see them here to refresh your memory.
http://www.planetnz.com/rugbyheads/articles/?pg=articles5) Promote rugbyheads.com
Once we get the blog going we could make a concerted effort to let people know there is some live here again. I know some of you had set up a Rugbyheads group on FaceBook, and I used to contribute to FantasyRugby.com which got us quite a bit of traffic, but if we are all keen to promote it then I think we can quite quickly get some attention flowing back.
6) Other fancy bits
Once we get to that point then we can look at some other additions. We had some of these in the past, but they required a lot of administration to keep up to date, so my preference would be to try and automate things like match results and competition scoreboards, and news articles from other sites. Twitter might provide some of that, I have just created a rugbyheads twitter account to have a play with.
My thoughts are that if we can get the first 3 things done in the next week or two (I have the time at the moment) then we can look to start pulling ex-Rugbyheads back to the site and promote the site to potential new Rugbyheads in time for the start of the Super 15.
Of course I'm not going to go to all this effort if I have to generate all the content, so hopefully you are inspired to be able to help, even if it's just posting new articles and starting new discussions on the board.
I look forward to your thoughts.
Cheers, Jules
