Tag Archives: Blog

Publish on-line Q&A’s with Dilmot


The time has come to use an on-line software to organize and moderate interviews (Q&A’s) on your website or blog. Dilmot makes it very easy in only four steps

These are the instructions to get started with your Dilmot account:

Create an account

1 – Visit http://www.dilmot.com
2 – Select “Create Account”
3 – Choose your account name, e.g. “springfieldnews”
4 – You will receive an email and you have to click the link to confirm the account

Once you log in as administrator, you will notice that there are two items in the top menu: Streams and Account.

Dilmot top menu

Dilmot top menu

Account Settings

You may, as an option:
– upload an account logo
– upload an image (“avatar“) that will be used for the moderator/admin when she interacts in the stream chat
– put a description of what your account publications will be about (normally this can be the description of your medium)
– put the timezone

Dilmot account settings

Dilmot account settings

Create Q&A’s (Streams)

This web app is used to publish Q&A’s. In the application these are called “streams”. A stream is a sequence of questions and answers.

Each stream is held in a dedicated web page, where the readers will see the form to send their questions. Below the form, the Q&A will be published in real-time. No need to refresh the browser.

The Q&A can be embedded into other website. As a simple rule to remember, you just need to add the text “/embed” to the end of the url of the public stream, and you can use an iframe code like the example below:

<iframe src="http://mysubdomain.dilmot.com/streams/title-of-the-qna/embed"width="100%" height="800" scrolling="yes" frameborder="0"></iframe>

This iframe can be embedded into the page of WordPress, or any other content management system such as Joomla, Drupal, etc. And of course into any standard html website.

The cool thing about Dilmot is that you can manage a guest easily.

In the stream settings page, you may:

  • assign an image to the interview Q&A as well as to the guest (avatar). The difference is that the stream image will be shown in the lists of streams, and also next to the public form to send questions. The image assigned to the guest, or “guest avatar” will be shown next to the bubble where the guest responds. If there is no guest avatar set, then the stream image will be used as avatar, in reduced “thumbnail” size. If there is not even a stream image set, then a blank avatar will be shown.
  • For the guest to access the application and respond to the questions, you only need to send her the link that is given to you automatically by the application. You can find this link in the section “Guest information”. This is a secret link that has the password incorporated, so do not share it with anyone other than the person that will answer the questions.
Dilmot guest information section

Dilmot guest information section

Manage and moderate the interview Q&A

As soon as you create the stream you will be ready to receive questions from the readers. In the Panel page you will be able to delete the ones that the Guest should not be able to see.

When the Guest enters the application through the link that you have sent her, the only thing that she needs to do is click “answer”, type it and publish it. Besides answering the questions, it is also possible to write comments. This is useful, for example, to publish a welcome and farewell message.

The readers will see a page where they see on top the new questions, as they are being answered.

Once the administrator considers that the Q&A has come to an end, she can click “Close” stream. This can only be done by the administrator, not the Guest.

Once the stream is closed, the form used to send questions will disappear, and the questions will be sorted in reverse order, that is, the first one will be the oldest, like in a newspaper interview. On the other hand, while the Q&A is open, the last question published is shown on top, as if it was a Twitter stream.

One Q&A (stream) can last as long as you want. It can be open for hours, days, or months. It is a continuous thread of questions and answers. It can be used as a tool for live events, but you can also use it as an on-going page that is built along time.

After you close the interview, you may open it again at any time. And the form to send questions will reappear, and the sorting method will be again, “most recent answered question on top”.

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With this quick guide you will be able to publish your own interviews and Q&A’s, solve readers’ or clients’ questions, create faq pages or a forum with experts. It’s up to you what you would like to do with Dilmot!

And if you want to see further details, check out the Administrator and Moderator Manual for the Q&A

Should you have any question, please get in touch with us by writing a comment to this post or directly at http://www.dilmot.com/contact

wordpress.com vs. wordpress.org. Pros and cons of self-hosted blog


If you are considering to publish a blog using WordPress software, you should know that there are two main options for hosting it. Below we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each one

On one side, there is the possibility of hosting it in wordpress.com. Main things to bear in mind:

WordPress.com hosting:

  • Free if you use a wordpress subdomain, such as myblog.wordpress.com
  • Not possible to install new themes
  • Not possible to install new plugins

WordPress.com hosting:

  • You need to pay for a server
  • Use your own domain, without restrictions
  • Install your own themes
  • Install your own plugins

And what is a theme and a plugin

A theme is the look and feel of your blog. But it is a lot more, since there is some code in it, you can use your theme to achieve different behaviour in your content. For example, you can decide what categories are listed in the home, if there is a slider or not, and many more things that just the fonts or the css styles.

A plugin is an additional module that brings new functionality to your blog, allowing you for example to embed tweets in your blog with Twitget. There are a lot of plugins in https://wordpress.org/plugins/, and most of them are free to use.

Conclusion

Normally, if this is the first time you are going to blog, and you have no budget to spend, our recommendation is clear, go for a free wordpress.com account. It will also allow you to grow with their premium options.

Going for a self-hosted WordPress site requires that you have knowledge about servers and a bit of programming. You will need to configure a database, upload things to an ftp account and so on. If all of this sounds new to you, then bear in mind that you will have to learn it. It is not complex, but you need to like it or it will be heavy task. There are of course lots of professional agencies that can help you out and have a lot of experience in building a professional WordPress site.

Add a Q&A section to your website using Dilmot


Having a Q&A can be a great tool to be in touch with your followers, your fans, your potential clients, you name it. Using

Dilmot.com

publishing platform it is very simple

Let’s say you manage a website for a music band, or for a writer, or a sportswoman, or an expert or celebrity. Or just for yourself. If you want to publicly address questions from your fans or visitors, it would be great to have a tool to let you manage those questions and answer in a simple manner.

Well this on-line tool exists and it is called Dilmot. Just open an account at dilmot.com and start managing your Q&A.

Dilmot is closely connected to the main social networks, so there are some things that you can do such as receiving questions that the users send with certain #hashtag. You could announce, for example, send your questions using Twitter with the #askSamantha. And everytime a tweet is sent with that #hashtag, it will be automatically added to the questions in your inbox.

Also, the users that send questions can identify themselves using their Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Using Q&A’s has proven to be a valuable method of creating content for your website and create engagement for your readers.

So, what are you waiting for? Get your account today, it is free 🙂

How does Dilmot work?


Dilmot is an online publishing tool that allows you to host Q&A’s in real-time. These conversations are moderated.

The Q&A’s can be of many kinds. There are users creating Q&A’s with experts, celebrities, executives, professors, etc. It’s up to you decide who you want to give voice to, who you want to introduce to your audience.

You can invite a guest and simply send her a link to the web page where she can answer to the questions. Or you can answer to the questions yourself.

You can make the questions or let the audience send the questions. They can even send questions using the Twitter #hashtag that you define. In any case, you can filter the questions that will be published. You act as the moderator of the Q&A.

By opening an account in Dilmot.com you receive a website hosted for you. This website will host your streams. A Stream is where you hold the Q&A, interview, dialogue, discussion, forum,… you name it.

You can announce a time for the Stream to start. But this is only informative. And you can make a Q&A last as long as you want, just keep it open and publish whenever you want.
Your website will be hosted in a subdomain of dilmot.com. You choose the name of the subdomain, for example if you choose “myname”, it will be hosted in http://myname.dilmot.com.

But we also give you the option to host the account under your domain of choice. Imagine that your organisation has a website in www.myorganisation.com. You could decide to use interviews.myorganisation.com and redirect the domain to the Dilmot application.

Getting an account in Dilmot is free, you just have to agree to the Terms of Service, that are the usual terms to use a blog. Actually we are using the same as WordPress.com does. We only charge if you would like to upgrade your account to enjoy certain features such as custom domain redirection, custom design, etc.

If you would like to see some new feature in Dilmot, please get in touch with us and let us know.