I do have a few technologies which I have chosen as the candidates for my “online community platform”.

.Net “portal” software called DotNetNuke provides a very modular and extensible framework for hosting all kinds of interwoven features,  all stored in a single SQLServer database, a nd includes such modules as a Discussion Module (to add a threaded discussion anywhere,  link lists to which logged on members can contribute,  and a still to be released Weblog component (which is the featrure I most want to add to this.)   I have two weblog platforms I’m now using,  one is a Desktop based “Weblog generator” called Radio Userland (where I am composing this entry for the Theology Project section of my weblog called Theoblogical Community,  on which I have cut my “weblog teeth”.  In the past two months,  I have added a “mirror” of thatWeblog in “Movable Type”,  and have called that version or instance “Movable Theoblogical”.  There are still many additional longer articles I have yet to copy from the Radio Userkand version to the Movable Type version,  and still want to do this since there are additional features in MOvable Type that Radio does not yet offer (like “TrackBack”,  which is a way for differrnt weblogs to”notify” each other that a reference — and this usually means a comment— has been made by another author to this entry ,  and usually shows up as a numeric count of  “Trackback(s)” beneath the entry itself.  Selecting the Trackback link will open a list of links to the entries on other weblogs where this reference has been made.   The other weblog has sent a “Ping” to the referenced weblog as a “notification”. 

The Weblog world,  even though mostly based on XML technologies which are touted as “Standardized” are not yet in sync as to how their entries are “tagged” and what additional features are supplied.   The longer articles I wrote in Radio Userland did not get picked up bythe export process I used to convert all the other entries into a format “importable” by the other system.  Further, the entries that did get migrated over have quite a few “Shortcuts” which Radio outputs to the html files as a href links,  but the export tool left in their native “Radio shortcut format” ,, which was simply to enclose the “Shortcut” in double quotes (like “this is a link”.  Radio stores the Shortcut names in a special table that it checks for matches to what’s in the quotes (which now seems lilke an odd choice to have us unsupsecting Radio “shortcut users” use).  Now I’ve got all these “quoted” titles ,  many of which are  actually article and entry titles that get converted to html links on the fly when Radio builds the html files with the latest entries included.