I installed the WordPress app for my iPhone. I am officially going mobile.

One important aspect of running an online community is safety.  Keeping your software up to date is one of the best way to ensure your community stays safe.

Today I updated CommunityAdministrator.com with the latest WordPress software. I also needed to update the theme and 5 plugins. There are times when an update is simply a bug fix or a gives you additional features. You can even introduce security holes when you update, but generally the latest software is the most secure.

Not all software tells you when an update is available. WordPress does a great job of letting you know there is an update. Vbulletin also let’s you know but it’s not as obvious. To get notification of new updated you should sign up for the vendor’s mailing list or add their RSS feed to your RSS reader. Most software vendors will announce new versions one of these two ways. There’s also the Twitter and Facebook options, but not all of the software vendors announce updates this way.

It’s important to stay up to date. You have a responsibility to your community to try and keep them safe while they are on your site.

Our Twitter account is up and running if you would like to follow up.

Here’s to a great 2011, I hope all of your online communities are busy and prosperous.

P.S. If you use WordPress make sure to upgrade. A security flaw was found so you need to patch things up to be safe. 3.0.4 is the latest version.

Wow things have been busy setting up sites and building partnerships.  I have not had a change to keep this blog up to date.  I will become a more constant blogger here once I get a few things taken care of.

In the mean time stupid spammers have been busy.  I have hundreds of spam posts.  None of them are getting through so you spammer are wasting your time.  Get a life.

I have quite a few new projects started. These should keep me busy for a while.

Advertising
I am working to consolidate all of my adverting through a single source. I have chosen Openx as my platform. Currently my advertising as has been scattered through direct images, third party served ads, application specific ad scripts, and openx. I am now going to be running everything through Openx under my new parent company called Sacramento Publishing. The ads will run from a single domain sacpub.net. This way none of my stats will get intermixed with serving an ad.

I will still serve up third party ads like adsense, but they will all run through my Openx install. This will allow me greater control of what is displayed and when. I will also have much better tracking of all my ads and websites. I will be able to better see what ads do well and websites are performing better than others.

Forums
I have several sites running forums. I am trying to consolidate and upgrade all of them. I am still evaluating all of the software packages out there. My current direction is all of my sites with free forum software will run MyBB. All sites with paid for software will run vBulletin. None of my vBulletin sites have been upgraded to VB4 yet, but that is not too far in the future. They are currently at 4.02. I may wait until 4.03 if they plan on changing the theme system.

Community Administrator
This site has a lot of growing to do. I am nowhere near happy with the theme. This is a relatively low priority for me right now, but it is something I will be working on in the months to come.

Analytics
I have a few of my sites running Google Analytics, but I need to get all of them running it. It’s a good tool to see where your traffic is coming from, what people do on your site, and what keywords people use to find your site. Currently I monitor all of my traffic through awstats. While awstats works well it is a pain to open each installation to see different stats for different websites. A single stats location will be nice.

Quantcast
I feel the need to be able to show potential advertisers the demographics and stats for my sites before they buy an ad. I am not selling advertising simply to make money. I have a genuine desire to help other businesses especially small business. With Quantcast I can let me advertisers see who they will be advertising to.

Local Community Based Sites
I am hoping to expand my footprint in the Sacramento area. I have several geographic specific sites and I want to ad more. My first step will be to purchase some domain names. I really want to find partners in each geographic area that I expand into. If you are in the Sacramento area and are interested let me know.

I am officially starting to look for a theme for CommunityAdministrator.com.  The default WordPress theme just do not cut it.  People will judge your community based on the look and this blog looks pretty boring right now.

Since I am just starting with this blog I will look around for a free WordPress theme.  There are tons of them out there.

This is a brand new blog.  Here you will find information on running online communities.  From administering the big sites like Facebook and Myspace to your own blogs and forums.

I run several successful communities so I thought I should put down some of the thoughts, tips, suggestions to help other people in their quest to be a Community Administrator.