Welcome, Visitor! You are here: Yet another update
Fri, 06/15/2007 - 8:25am
Yet another update
Well, it's been a couple weeks since my last update and I've been busy adding things to the site. For those of you who haven't read my previous notes, we are live in the sense that the public is welcome to join and use the site, but not officially launched, yet. It's sort of like a public beta test, I guess. It's pretty dead around here and likely will be for some time as I'm not doing any sort of advertising until the site is ready to launch. But, if you're reading this, and want to get involved, feel free to sign up and start chatting.
Here's my roadmap and where each thing is:
- Forums - The forums are working and ready to be used. There are a few small issues, especially when a post gets to be 2 pages, but they are 95% working well.
- Neighbor profiles - All done, so go ahead and fill yours out and let us know more about you.
- Community information - This is sort of in limbo right now as I started it but want to work on some other areas before coming back to it. If you want to "adopt" a community and gather information about it, just let me know.
- Area events - There are still some issues with this that I'm able to work around when I enter events, but I can't open up event adding to the public until I get them sorted out. I also haven't been able to add the event search, yet, due to a bug. So the calendar works and you can see events that I enter on the calendar, but that's it at this point.
- Images - I've started on this and have some of the display in place. You can see it by clicking "Photo Galleries" on the menu. I haven't opened up image adding to the public, yet, but will soon.
- Area directory - I'm nearly done with the structure of this. I still need to make business listings look nice. Parks are working good. Again, though, this isn't opened up for the public to add to, yet. This is getting to be a broken record, I know. The problem is that the backend is messy and confusing and needs to be cleaned up before non-geeks are going to want to use it.
- Classified ads - I'll be adding a classified ads section where anyone can post an ad. I have a pretty cool idea for handling garage sale ads but, unfortunately, that probably won't be ready before garage sale season is over for the year.
- Advertising - This site is slow and sometimes doesn't come up at all due to the fact that I'm on cheap shared hosting. I want to move up to better hosting but that will run around $50 a month, which is out of my budget. So I plan on putting some ads on the site to try and raise the funds. I promise they won't take over the site and be obnoxious, though.
- Help files - Ok, so this should be much higher up on the list but I'm a programmer and writing help files is no fun. :P Eventually, though, if I want people to actually use this site I suppose I should put in some docs.
- Special interest groups - One cool thing I'd like to offer is the ability to make SIGs. Say you really like to cook. You could create a group for cooking and get together with others who like to cook in your group. Unfortunately, the module I need for this takes a lot of resources and may not be doable until I can upgrade the hosting.
- Real time chat - I'm going to wait until people are actively using the site to add this. Not much point in having an empty chat room.
Michelle
Well this is too cool!!! Thanks for starting this site. I don't have a lot of time on my hand. Have a brand new baby and run a Daycare, but I'll be checking in as much as I can! Thanks for the invite!
Welcome!
New baby and a daycare? Wow, you must be busy! Thanks for taking the time to come on over.
I've got a new baby due in 3 weeks so I'm scrambling to try and get this site done before then. Well, maybe not done as websites never seem to be really done, but I at least want to get all the major features in place. I've got my laptop on the kitchen counter so I can work on it whenever my son settles in and plays for a while. Not sure how this is going to work with a baby added into the mix.
Well, my son just said he's hungry. Better get off the computer and make some breakfast.
Thanks again for joining up! (Can you tell I'm excited to talk to someone besides myself in the forum? LOL!)
Michelle
Congrats to being pregnant. You're close. How old is your son and do you know what this one is yet? I haven't had a chance to check your homepage out, but my oldest son did. I'm hoping him and his wife will join too. He's 22, I see there are a few people here. How many people are actually members as of right now?
My son is almost 2.5. The unborn one is another boy. I'm not sure how much my son understands about the whole thing, but he likes to come and "hug his brother" and if you ask him where the baby is, he knows. Of course, he thinks he's got one in his tummy, too, so... :D
Hope your son and wife join. The more the merrier.
I'm really hoping this place will turn into a really active conversation place. It's just so hard to get things rolling. I've pestered all my friends but they just aren't into talking on the computer. Heck, if they check their emails every few days it's a miracle!
As for active people on the site, now, well, so far it's just you and me. Laura is one of those friends that I've been pestering to no avail.
Chris is someone I know online that lives in Germany but likes the Coulee Region. I don't think he's been back since he signed up. Jax I don't know. He signed up and didn't come back. b3antang I don't know. The name doesn't match the people I contacted on MySpace. I contacted 10 people there and you're the only one that signed up. I didn't want to go any higher than that because I was afraid it would be considered spamming even though I'm not selling anything. Maybe more will come from that, though. It was just yesterday and not everyone is on the computer every chance they get like me. 
I've been thinking of putting flyers up around town but I want to wait until I get a few more things working and get a bit of conversation going. Back to that old catch-22 I was talking about. If I advertise a lot now I worry I'll bring a bunch of people that will see there's not much here and just move on. I'm hoping the area directory, especially the parks section, will draw people in and that they'll stay to chat.
We'll see how it goes...
Michelle
Sorry it took me so long to reply. I'm not on the internet every day, especially not Monday through Wednesday. Hopefully you haven't had your Baby yet. I'm sure if you give it some time, more people will join. There are lots of people From around here on the internet. My grand-daughter was like that. She told us she had a baby in her tummy when her Mom and I were pregnant. She was a little over 2 as well.
That's ok. I know not everyone is online as much as me.
I've got a laptop sitting on the kitchen counter so I can pop on and off midsentence (in fact, as I was typing that, I went over to help my son get unstuck from the toy bucket he decided to sit in. :D). I'm hoping more people join. I really want this site to be more than just another directory listing... I want to have an active community chatting away. That was my reason for making this site... to chat with people. So I get really excited when I see a new post that I didn't write. LOL
Well, my son just came over to get me to play, so I'm off for a while.
Michelle
Greetings from Stuttgart, Germany!
I just need to be reminded. Maybe I should set up an RSS feed, eh?
Marketing a website -- there's a whole other specialty beyond creating one.
My family is from Wisconsin and my wife and family are from Minnesota. We lived in Minneapolis until we moved to Germany. Actually, we still own our house there and my wife's sister is housesitting for us while we are gone.
We will come back in the not distant future. My dream is to build our own house at that time, and I really like the Coulee region. Maybe we will end up building somewhere along the river on a picturesque bluff. I can dream, can't I?
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