The forums have been dead lately, but those of us on twitter, almost daily, have been throwing out ideas for projects, and links to other stuff that doesn't constitute a thread on its own. Which is the point of twitter. I know lots of people don't understand twitter, or are against it for some reason, but I think it'd be nice for non-tweeters to be able to see whats going on. I'm pretty sure there's at least 1 wordpress plugin that could display recent items with our #tcmaker hash tag.

thoughts?

I know the following provides an rss feed of tweets tagged #tcmaker

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23tcmaker

Even better! I discovered this.

http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_search

Where you can create widgets that display the results of searches. Just fill it out to search for #tcmaker and you get this http://pyrodogg.com/tcwidget.html

If people haven't had time in recent days to interact using our forum, would they have time to interact using blog? Help me out!

I think jtbarclay's point is that there's not nothing going on with TCMaker, just that it's hidden from some subset of users based on subscription to Twitter or not.

For instance, anyone following me on Twitter would know I had a baby last week, because I tweeted about it, but I didn't have time to do much else.

It would require a little more discipline on the part of us tweet-a-makers, since I've seen things that would be of interest to TCMaker peeps without the hashtag. But it would probably be worth it.

exactly

I've run a forum for my hometown music scene as well as some close personal friends. I've learned over the years that having many different sections on a forum tends to dilute the content and people get a little overwhelmed when they haven't been on in a while or are new, and therefore opt out entirely. I've simplified everything down to a general discussion forum and maybe another section or two, and that helped keep people on the forums and active. 2 areas may be a little drastic for this forum, but I would reccomend simplifying the organization a bit.

Just my 2 cents.

efk, Thanks for your 2 cents! We've simplified the forum to some extent already, but yes, we could probably do a little more. We've seen some trouble though with our database getting corrupted in some ways when we move things around. If we do a database export for backup, I'm not adverse to trying some more simplification.