VillageToolbox Blog

Wow, so it’s been over a year since the last post. Much has happened since then, but not much work has been done on the toolbox. I’m beginning to think about it again, so hopefully you’ll see some new features and blog posts showing up soon.

It’s been a while since I last posted.  Things got pretty busy here with Supergroup, fly and Darkstar taking up most waking hours.  This weekend, I put it all aside, and focused on getting all the recent improvements from the beta site over to the live site.  We’ve added tabs for most of the content to improve the site interface, and we’ve now completely implemented the ad engine.

You can now design a complete banner ad right on the villagetoolbox site, add clipart, customize the background and schedule it to run for you community.  Pretty cool, I think.

Summertime so far has been busy, filled with camping trips, friends cottages and sunny days in the lake.  Adding this to an already full schedule has been a little difficult, and has significantly slowed down the development of VillageToolBox.  Still, it’s important to practise what you preach, and so time with the kid, and time spent on neighbourhood pursuits has overshadowed my plans for world domination.

Soon, I’ll be back into the full swing of development, and hope to really take the site live in the early fall.  Still for the time being, I have a few more sunburns to rack up.

Actually it’s a good thing.  I’ve been spending my Village Toolbox hours lately taking care of design issues, administrative stuff, and (I’ll admit it) the odd night of doing nothing at all. Anyway, tonight, I need to reconfigure our internal server, then it’s back to actual real honest-to-goodness coding.  Yippee.

It’s a good thing.

Our local citizen’s group, Guelp Civic League, is putting on a conference in a few weeks. Communities In Action is of interest to me from two points of view. One, I might be able to convince another strong community to get involved with the early stages of VillageToolbox, and two, it is probably a good place to push forward in my bbq fight with city hall. More on that soon.

I’ve been working on making the landing page for non-members a bit nicer.  Hopefully something that does a better job of conveying the purpose of the site without all the extra stuff they don’t need.

Next priorities are a decent moderator engine, getting the privacy policy and terms of use in place, and then a bit of a rewrite on the gallery and toolshares, based on Blair and Co’s feedback.

I noticed it’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything.  Life has been busy lately with a big deadline at Barking Dog, Supergroup website has been pushing its first deadline, and a few other clients have been waking up and asking for time, so we’ve been pretty busy.  I’ve been putting in an hour or so a day on VillageToolbox, just to keep things moving forwards.

My main focus has been on improving the pre-signup experience (landing page and Browse communities).  The site changes should go live soon, as soon as I am happy with the css.

Last Friday, I spent some time with Blair Nonnecke  and several of his students at the UofG HCI (Human Computer Interaction) department.  We poked and prodded at the site for a couple of hours and came up with a big list of suggestions. I’ve started rolling a number of these things into the staging site, so they should appear on the live site soon.  

First up is a community dashboard page.  This will be the landing page for each community, and should serve as a good metric for the health of a community, showing recent activity in the various different departments.  Look for it soon.

Alright, here is where things stand right now… The site is currently in early beta testing.  Most features are working, but few are polished. The mailing lists work, but rich text messages are not storing quite right in the archives (the database is storing both rich and plain text versions.)  The various directories are all working, but the request system is spotty at best.  

I am currently implementing the post reporting system and the moderator pages, and then next up is the Ad engine, ’cause as much as I love Kevin, I’m guessing users are getting tired off his placeholder face at the bottom of every screen.

Also on tap are the classified directory, maybe an ‘Invite a Random Neighbour for Coffee’ feature, and a bunch more content in the ideas section.

Wow, 2008 is here. Everyone and their dog and their dog’s fleas has a blog, and you are now reading my first post. 

First and foremost, I plan on using this space to share my thoughts on VillageToolbox development, and to keep any who cares up to date with feature changes and other exciting stuff. Along the way, you may get subjected to random musings, and miscellaneous other crap.  We’ll see, I guess.