I would venture to say that quite a few of you out there have decided to take your blogging experience to the next level and go about setting up your own outside blog. The ability to customize the look and feel of your own blog and to have something that is uniquely yours is the natural progression of blogging on ActiveRain.
Today, we released an internal beta version of our outside blog platform. We currently have about 15 ActiveRain members testing the functionality of it and giving us feedback on a variety of topics. We tried to pick 15 members of varying skill level and acclamation to ActiveRain. We have members who have been here over a year, we have one that has been here for all of a week. We have members that have just learned how to use pictures on their AR blog, we have members that are constantly challenging our programmers by being ahead of the curve. The hope is that we will be able to provide a platform that is easily adoptable by our members, new and old.
A few of the highlights of our outside blog platform:
- You will be able to host your blog on your own domain. For example, you can have your posts feed to bobisgreat.com if you own that domain.
- You will be able to customize the look and feel of your blog.
- It's easy to set up your outside blog. You can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
- You will be able to build your posts in ActiveRain. You won't have to learn a new platform.
- You will be able to decide where you want your posts to publish. Do you just want your outside blog to be about local content pertinent to your local market? You will be able to decide which posts go where. Send your local market reports to your outside blog. Send your real estate industry related posts to ActiveRain. The choice is yours.
- You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.
- You will be able to brand your own blog while at the same time staying connected with the ActiveRain community. Your comments will be syndicated between your ActiveRain blog and your outside blog.
**above is a screen shot of a portion of the user interface.
Our beta testers are giving us a run for our money. They have already found some bugs for us to fix, and given us some great overall feedback. With their help, we hope to have this platform available for everyone by the first week of next year!!
Here are some samples of our outside blog platform. Please note that there could be a bug or two, and these blogs may temporarily go offline from time to time. :)
(we'll be adding more once they are up and running)
Stay tuned to my blog and Jon's blog for updates and some great specials we will be having around our outside blog platform.
Posted by 
Bob -this sounds like great stuff. Too bad you only needed 15 people:) Would this allow you to have categories and IDX? if the answer is "yes", it would be really great.