How to … make your own Open-Source magazine site

Our magazine regularly features a How To section which details projects that one person can do in the IT field.  Much of the rest of our magazine is related to big picture topics such as display industry growth for the third quarter of 2008 and other high-end topics, so these How To articles bring the focus back down to the individual.  And, actually, one of the reasons that I like the IT field so much is that it brings so much power to the fingertips of the individual.

And, if you are an individual looking to set up a magazine site similar to www.koreaittimes.com, just look in this month’s issue for instructions on how to do it!  Or, if you’d rather do it online, you can read this article for a week early preview.

How to Set Up Your Own Open Source Magazine Web Site

As you may have read or seen already, the Korea IT Times has a new web site at www.koreaittimes.com. It was all created using free, open source software that is readily available for anyone to use. The software is called Drupal. If you or someone you know would also be interested in starting up a magazine or newspaper-based web site, just follow this guide to get yourself started.

New Web site features

Our new web site is not anything revolutionary in the era of online news, but rather just bringing our outdated previous web site to a respectable standard of Web 2.0 techniques.  We are still proud to be a latecomer into the ranks of acccessible, socialiable online news.  

My major aims in making the web site were to make the work of the dedicated reporters here at the magazine accessible to a larger audience (that includes my own I must admit) and to develop a community of people who are interested in online news about the Korean IT industry.  Quite frankly I find the whole subject fascinating and I really want to discuss it with other interested people rather than boring my friends at parties.

So, here is a draft of the article we will run in this month’s magazine detailing the major new features of the web site at www.koreaittimes.com.

Comments and Social Bookmarks and Archives, Oh My!

The Korea IT Times is proud to announce that it has a new web site, which is located at a new web site address:  www.koreaittimes.com.  We encourage all our readers to stop by and visit the new site, and to experience the new features that we have on the site.

Official launch of the new web site!

Today marks the official launch of the new web site for the Korea IT Times.  With the redirect meta tags put into the existing web site and the official sitemap uploaded to google we can hope to start getting regular visitors now.  I have google analytics accounts set up for both domains, so I can see if it is effective to direct people to the new site.  I have some doubts because the previous site had some peculiarities with its domain names.  The domain ittimes.co.kr held only a small .html file which redirected a full-page frame to another domain containing the web site information.  So in order to direct both people who visited the main web site and people who directly visited stories, i had to insert several meta redirect tags throughout both HTML and PHP pages.  We’ll see how effective it is at driving traffic to the new web site.

In the next few days I’ll have to write up a comprehensive post detailing all the features of the new site and how I did it, which will also be articles in this month’s magazine.  But for now, I’ll just take a bit of a break.

Welcome to the Korea IT Times Blog

Welcome to the Korea IT Times blog.  The purpose of this blog is to give a more informal and easily accessible outlet for the staff at the Korea IT Times.  And, hopefully, to attract more interest to our magazine of course.  Welcome, everyone, to this blog.

I hope that the Korea IT Times will be able to increase its online presence and become an important resource for anyone who can’t read Korean to know what is going on in the world of Korean IT.

This is the second step in that plan, the first being a new, more user- and search engine-friendly web site.  I will write more about that later, along with giving a link to the web site.  However, I should finish it first.  There are two things left to do on the checklist.  The first is fixing one final design problem, and the second is to import four years of old data into the new site.  That’s going to be the hard part.

We at the Korea IT Times are also starting blogs in the Korean blogging system, at naver.com.  I hope to import our blog posts from there to here as well.  We’ll see how that goes.