When I first joined MRH my first post was a blog entry by accident. Thought I was making a forum post. My blog and I suspect other's blogs already exist outside of MRH. That might explain the limited blog entries. MRH blogs are a nice option for someone that doesn't already have one.

The way that MRH is organized, with everything under the "Recent Posts" tracker, there really isn't a lot of difference. But since some people are more comfortable with posting in one organizational style and other another, and it's easy enough to maintain both, we offer both options. 

With a blog, you own the thread - it's your blog and you can giude it however you like.

With a forum, that's more "bull session in the lounge" type conversation.and no one person owns the thread.

At least that's how its supposed to work.

Coming to this site a while after it started, I find in the Blogs 89 pages of unsorted threads. Being a bit of a linear thinker, as I start my layout planning I want to look at threads about track and train control. Research might be useful too :) And later I'll be interested in scenery-related topics and operation. So I looked in the Forums under those topics. But not much happens there. Those 89 Blog pages look pretty daunting to search for layout planning topics.

The way I see those blogs is as a huge unsorted mess, a great resource that will be hard to use. One of the recent forum threads is trying to resurrect the MR index, a way to find useful articles easily. People want to be able to find stuff. I think we're leaving a lot of the value of MRH's community potential on the table.

Let me say again that I like the site. The people are very generous with their time and experience. I definitely want to get Joe's scenery videos when the time arives. I just hope the site becomes easier for newcomers to use. It will make more of them stay.

I use the Blog to chronicle my efforts at building my model railroad. Little enough time for that.. its been almost a year since my last update. I use the forums for conversation.

The Blogs also have an advantage that they can be linked. I can provide a link to my blog

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/blog/chrisNH

to people outside this website so they can come see what I am doing. Its a very nice way to quickly steer people toward my efforts. I find it works quite well to that purpose. Its my "model railroad website".

About the only thing that is missing is a personal "intro" page for each person's blog that would make it more like the other blog hosting sites out there like blogspot.. but its not a big deal. The benefit to blogging here is my posts come up as new posts in the forum and I get a lot  more traffic then I would otherwise. Its very nice to get the feedback.

Regards,

Chris

If you want to research what has been posted around a certain topic, then you need to use the categories.

Let's say trackwork is the topic of interest. Go to the forums on Trackwork/Electrical/DCC and bring up a post - pretty much any post. At the bottom of the first thread you will find some tags - Trackwork for example.

Click the tag and voila! You get a list of all posts related to trackwork - blogs, forums, or otherwise!

This is a powerful way to search the content on this site - as long as posters make sure and categorize their post properly. This makes sense of out of all the forum and blog posts on here and turns this site into a dandy resource for researching a single topic.

Also click the search box at the top right and a page will come up that lets you use the advanced search. The advanced search lets you use categories plus search phrases to really pinpoint your search.

What Chris said is what I think of as blogging. And thanks Joe for that hint about tags. I didn't know about that way of searching. I'd tried the search box,searching on "splines". That result alone will keep me going for a while. But I'll explore tags too and see where they lead me. By the way, how do you tag? I don't see anything in the edit menu for tagging. Or is it a thread level thing?

It's thread level thing. You can't put categories on individual sub-posts in a thread.

I suppose, then, to be dilligent about what we who were earlier posters did, we should go back and edit our blogs and posts with some category selections.  I'm assuming that the option exists for earlier posts.  Is this correct?

If you go to the upper right side of any page click on Discussion forums. This will take you to all the subjects we discuss and it's all laid out Starting with The MRH Magazine link.

Next it lists General Discussion and your find close to 2500 posts this section is followed by a section on Troubleshooting. You won't find all the answers there but if you have a question about any Model Railroading subject just got up to the right hand upper section of the page and click on Create general content. Then Post your trouble and it will show up on the recent posts section as well as the trouble shooting section and 99.9% of the time within 15 min you will normally receive an answer.

While your waiting for an answer go back to the Discussion forums page and browse through all the Let's Talk Trains section which is laid out in 8 Main categories.

As you read through the "Let's Talk Trains" section another 7 or 8000 threads and find something you wish to comment on or have a question about just click on the word Reply on the bottom of any every post and blog age of post doesn't matter Just post your comment.

Your post will not only show up on that post but will also show up at the top of the page of recent posts. Now most of us check Recent posts first when we open up the MRH web site and start reading. Also recent posts is where you will find the hot topics being discussed.

If you can add to any conversation or any post feel free to jump right in  we all like to hear from new blood and more than listening to new people we like helping them out.

So if there is something you need to know or want to learn about just ask, even if we don't have the answers ourselves we normally can show you a link to somewhere on the web that can answer your questions.

Dan