a million monkeys typing

DIYPlanner.com Progress

Posted August 15th, 2005 at 06:04pm

Well, I’m pleased to say that Drupal is living up to my expectations so far for creating a community site. It’s a difficult learning curve, but lightbulbs are going on daily. Coming up with the taxonomy (in layman’s terms, the categorisation) is probably the most challenging bit, since Drupal’s inherent power in this area tends to push administrators to do a lot more initial legwork than most other systems. My ultimate goal is to make DIYPlanner.com as simple as possible for end-users –you shouldn’t have to be a techie to use and like the system.

A few updates:

• There are now four writers/editors involved in the project (and counting), all of whom I respect very highly, and who bring completely different things to the table and possess quite varied writing styles. I’ll announce them all at a later date.
• There will be a daily blog, complete with feeds, so you can tune in daily for your paper productivity fix. (There will also be feeds for the forums, so you can follow along without manually jumping into each one.)
• The Handbooks for the various D*I*Y Planner kits are being merged into one online handbook that can be easily kept up-to-date. Comments will be allowed for registered users, so you can make suggestions on the content.
• You can access all content and leave comments anonymously, but registered users can chat in the discussion forums, submit various items, send private messages, and see other perks.
• Not only will there be the official D*I*Y Planner kits and add-ons, but hopefully there will be a number of other community-submitted templates, as well as links to external sites.
• Also planned are sections that help newbies create their own templates, along with examples, sample forms and instructions.
• There’s a nice little image gallery where you can download and share images for use on your planner covers. (A la the OOo template that comes with the classic Planner 2.0 kit.)
• I’m shooting for a nice organic, comfortable look, far removed from the noisy techno stylings of many other community sites. It will be a constant evolution, I suspect, but we want something welcoming to begin with.
• The info on the site will be rather sparse at first, but I suspect it will increase very rapidly. There’s a lot of dedicated and/or creative people out there with a lot to share.
• I’m currently soliciting guest posts to cover many topics and perspectives. In particular, at the moment I’m looking for people who have used the D*I*Y Planner kits or other paper solutions to successfully cope with the difficulties of ADD and other similar issues. If this is you, please drop me an email (my address is at bottom right): I’d love to hear from you. If you have doubt in your writing skills, no matter: we can edit and help you along the way.
• I’m also looking for a contributor who is long-time journal keeper, and can offer advice on things like journalling, diaries, dream logs, scrapbooking and other personal “life-logging”.
• If you’re knowledgable about paper-planning issues or templates, and you’d like to write a post or two, please drop me a line. Similarly, if you have a template you’d like to share with other users, we’d be happy to give you a place to host it (or a link to your site).

Stay tuned….