Gosh! It’s been six days since my last devJournal post. On the one hand, I would prefer to post more frequently. On the other, I’ve been the busy beaver, immersed in ‘the build’ as I continue to determine and deploy the various components of my social site project. I very much look forward to ending this mystique and simply disclosing the domain name, however gotta be patient and make sure that I am properly prepared for the show, even though, to start, it will be a ‘soft launch’ for the good folks who are patiently following the journey here…

So what’s been accomplished in the hiatus since last Friday’s post?

Some essential steps, actually.

WordPress publishing platform: there’s a new kid on the block in the crowded world of WordPress theme providers, and I’ve been lucky enough to find myself as an early user in the first phase of a new start-up. It’s a ‘Swiss Army knife‘ soup-to-nuts all-inclusive solution for WordPress site building. I am keen to promote Shane’s elegant initiative, however – after a very brief introductory window of one week (this week!) – he is going dormant for a period of time after this Sunday, 16th February, to absorb the feedback that us beta testers are providing in his User Forum in order to continue to tweak his plugin‘s broad functionality. So here I am cloaking something else! My thinking is: why publish a link to a provider’s site if it’s not currently responsive (for the techies, that’s an intended pun), so I’ll ballyhoo Shane’s endeavour when he’s ready to go into his public release.

Learning resources platform plank: I mentioned earlier that the intention for the social site is twofold; firstly, to curate milestone activities in the prolific world of social media, and; secondly; to offer learning resources for individuals and business that guide and support best practices and effective use. To do that requires two transactional components, a shopping cart and a payment gateway. Well, I have set up accounts for both parts, and they will be built seamlessly into the ‘back end’ of the project site. A big step forward…

Amazon: I griped earlier about the 7-headed giant (7 countries, 7 separate stores, 7 different links for any e-book I want to recommend). So to get my puppy walking, I’ve set up an account with the US site, Amazon dot com, and we’ll get going for my readers here who have accounts at amazon.com and progress from there…

Email list management: I have set up an auto-responder account to effectively facilitate access to the learning resources that will be available on the social site. The thinking is to prepare for scale rather than to risk getting overwhelmed using manual email if this dream child actually finds some popularity. Shane’s theme plugin integrates with the auto-responder (its inherent in his theme design, actually — which is a key factor in my choosing his plugin solution).

So! Next steps will be to start meshing these gears together (just how many mixed metaphors I can get away with remains to be seen).

I admit my age when I recall the cliffhanger movies we went to on Saturday afternoons when admission was 99 cents…