I don’t think I’ve ever told the story, but IndieRiver was a domain that Bryan picked up in early 2006. Around the same time, Ron picked up Indiemand.com, and Casella was pushing what ended up becoming the Square Peg idea. [To be fair, I think this is something that all the Pegs were considering, but I distinctly remember having more discussions about it with Jerry than anyone else.] As you might expect, we decided that it made sense to combine forces; as such, IndieRiver sorta sat on the sidelines, unused, and then when I fell in love with BitTorrent for distribution of allowable concert bootlegs, well … torrent, river, you got it.

It takes a village, people.

Me: “Honestly, pretty shitty. I spent all weekend tangling with my Web server and got three hours’ sleep.”

Boss: “I’m not really sure that it’s worth the time that you put into it.”

Me: “Trust me, on days like today, I wonder about that myself.”

Change in such situations is hard, either because those in power rarely want to give it up or because people just generally fear change. I think that the reason that the Rumor [rocksmyfaceoff.net] Forum had the growth that it did is that both Bryan and I were willing to cede power in favor of growing the community. I mean, really … we’ve had a Web community for four years, and you can count on one hand the number of people we’ve banned in that time. It’s not as if we dodge tough issues, either: politics, music, and religion are our biggest topics!

And yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about community.

Frankly, nothing that we’re doing is anything we couldn’t have done four years ago. We are breaking very little, if any, new technical ground.

I mean, I think that I was getting el softo soapo, but … ugh.

New Add Event Form

As the number of events on Upcoming grew, several parts of the original design have become harder and harder to use over time. A perfect example was the “Add Event” form, which used a pulldown menu for choosing a venue. That worked fine in the beginning, but some metros have thousands of venues! Not fun.

That was the inspiration for the new Add Event form, which addresses some of our long-standing complaints. Among the changes:

• Venue autocompletion. Pick a venue by typing a couple characters in the venue’s name, and it will do a real-time search across all metros. No more huge dropdowns.
• Inline venue adding. If the venue you’re looking for doesn’t exist, click the “Add a new venue” link to open a window to add it without leaving the page.
• Better calendar. The calendar picker is much improved or you can still type right into the date fields, if you like.
• Better duplicate checking. We’re doing a number of tests to find events and venues similar to the ones you’re adding, which helps everyone.
• Add an event from anywhere! In the past, if you wanted to add an event, you needed to find the metro first. This was a big frustration for new users, in particular, so we’ve lifted the restriction and put the “Add Event” link right in the header.

Man, yeah. That’s badly needed. I use Upcoming [or, well, I'm working on it ... the initial data entry is a cast-iron bitch, and I haven't managed the workflow properly ... grrrr] for managing the collaborative calendar over on squarepegalliance.net; I dump SPA shows to the Square Peg Alliance group, which tumps it over with one of Upcoming’s badges. Saves me time.

B: I think we should be in on this Square Peg thing.

G: I agree. Let me go look at domains …

B: [a line of conversation I don't remember]

G: Okay, we now own the .net, .org, and .info.

B: Excellent.

G: Now to get on board.

So we—being myself, Bryan, and Ron [whom I'd met at the AP Christmas show in 2004, never really realizing that he'd become a key part of my musical universe inside of 18 months]—talked it over with the Pegs we all new and, suddenly, we were in. So in, in fact, that the news link on their site points to SquarePegAlliance.net. Cool.

But as we were working all that, it occurred to me: Bryan’s awesome “indieriver” moniker was going nowhere. [And yeah, Ronzilla, I'm thinking just now that "indiemand" is still sitting on the horizon, waiting for a place. ] But then I was thinking … rivers have torrents. Hmmmmmm. So I set out on a quest to find something. Then I did. So now I have IndieRiver.net up and running, and with less than a week on it, we’ve already hit a dozen shows [mostly thanks to Richard]. Already, I’ve had a couple people tell me that exposure to these artists via bootlegs is making them want to buy more music. And for me … that’s what I’m wanting.

Better tools for creating and organizing data are generally going to beget more data. I’ve seen it in Weblogging—as soon as I first started using b2, I wanted to write more—and I’ve seen it in Web forums. Shoot, with better cameras and audio field recording equipment, I generate more data, too … I unfortunately don’t generate more time to sift through it all.

People want to tell their stories; communities want to tell them collaboratively. Give ‘em the space.

It runs a little long, but it’s wickedly funny. So funny that, when we first watched it, I thought Scott was going to laugh himself into hyperventilation.

As you know, Bryan Allain is the founder of [caedmonscall.net] and [derekwebb.net]. He is a great friend and a fun partner in crime. Derek actually got the DMFnet ball rolling, hooking up Don with Bryan. That’s pretty awesome.

Why is my involvement limited? For one, I have other fish frying; for another, I’ve never read any of Miller’s stuff. Bryan is hounding me to make time for it, though, and I will.gfm

There was only one issue: in an effort to hide FS.c from Google’s prying eyes, I’d moved wp-config.php to wp-config-moved.php. No big deal, but … I’d forgotten to include that move in the shell script-fu. [Actually, I would have needed a second shell script, but anyway.] So, come 6:30 p.m. Saturday night, I pull out my Treo to check FS.c and make sure that all went well. I saw WordPress’s “I can’t see your database” error, and I began to panic.

After trying a couple different things with cPanel—forgetting that cPanel’s File Manager is written to use frames; my Treo never stood a chance—I sought Google’s help. “There’s got to be an SSH client for the Treo!” And there is: TuSSH will work on a Treo to give you that in-a-pinch SSH access. I then held my breath and downloaded it, not knowing if Treos were smart enough to install packages downloaded through its on-board browser. [Hey, I'd never had to do it before!] A minute or so later, and I was happy-dancing; another minute later, and all was fixed.

The lesson, as always, is that I’m never as clever as I think I am.

If you didn’t check out the comment I linked, let me quote myself:

I’ve just gotten my Web community to near self-sufficiency. Know how that happened? I told them the costs involved.

Now, we’re a non-profit, and also seeking to just break even … , but … still.

We’ve made fundraising pitches at [rocksmyfaceoff.net] before, but I think this time we hit on the magic trifecta of how to get people to donate:

1. We gave them incentive to do so. In making the wider Rumor Forum experience optional but placing a value on it, we gave people a reason to support us [wanting to be involved in the full community experience] without degrading the basic experience [talking about the bands that form the basis for the community].
2. We gave them a simple mechanism to support us. Prior to this point, supporting us was an admittedly byzantine issue. Make it easy for people to support you, and they will.
3. We told them why we needed their support. This is quite similar to Kevin Burton’s Golden Tickets for TailRank—he explained where the community funding would be spent, and he got people [including me] to support him.

I think that there are lessons to be learned here. Simply: openness about your needs, incentives for support, and simple mechanisms to allow people to support you. The 2005 Internet supports all this, so when you have a fait accompli, I think you can make it happen.

I don’t think you can do this when you don’t have a reputation or a product that people are already familliar with; if you’re an unknown quantity with an unknown product, you’re going to fail. If your product or your reputation are known values, though, I think you can leverage this mechanism to get yourself to self-sufficiency. [Yes, this means that you have to spend some capital to make some money.]

It’s all speculation, though, until they actually launch and enough geeks read the stuff to figure out what it’s good for…

All this because of WordPress. WordPress is the marijuana of the personal productivity software marketplace.

• Sat 17 Sep: Off to Chattanooga with Rick [and hopefully Jessica ] to go see Derek, Sandra, and Cason play at Covenant College. Hanging with my people is awesome. It’s Sarah H.’s, concert, and it’ll be good to see her again.
• Fri 23 Sep: Off to the DC area to go see Caedmon’s play in Maryland. I’m hoping to get to hang out with Chrissy during the day before the show; haven’t seen her since before she went to Ireland, and I want to hear all her stories. Bryan and Erica and Joe and Rhonda will be at the show for sure, and I’m really hopeful that Christiana, Mark, and Karyn will be there. My heart may not be able to take the awesomeness.
• Sat 24 Sep: Shake off the awesomeness hangover, drive back to IAD, hope a plane to GSO, and hopefully drive down to Charlotte real fast, kidnap Brandon and Sarah, then bring them to the Greensboro area for Mike’s birthday party. I’m ready to see him and Kari, Brian and Sarah, and hopefully Charles, Jason, and Susan. I don’t know that I’ll be able to take two days in a row like this!

Also, looks like I’ll be headed back to KSC for more of the same in October.

Okay, so I guess I could have gotten that off of the Song Vault page for “Petrified Heart”, since it’s right there with the lyrics and all. And really, I should have known that. But I didn’t, and … I can admit that.

Maybe.

Wait, I just did.

Hopefully the citizen-subjects of the .net will not revolt against my tyranny and expect me to be overthrown. If nothing else, I’ll restrict all my posting to AYOR for a day … or something.

It’s been two months, but this photo is still really great for me.

I played a small part in Brandon and Sarah getting together for the first time, and I figured that the first .net wedding needed a staff representative of the .net.

That, and Brandon and Sarah had me be the MC of the reception. That’s why I’m in a tuxedo.

There’s some really great folks in that photo. I like ‘em lots.

Too cool.

Now, to install MediaWiki and play with it and figure out how we’ll implement it on [caedmonscall.net] and [derekwebb.net] …

To be fair, it’s not a straight WP upgrade. I have a blend of plugins that I like to use, a way of keeping WP installs neat and orderly that I like, and also some general cruft cleanup that I’m doing with this. I also had found a couple installs that had egregiously escaped upgrade for a couple cycles now.

I thought I’d be done by 5:00 p.m. or so tonight. Then I thought I’d be done by dark. Now, I’m just going to quit before midnight and pick up tomorrow. I could go for a while longer, but I better not do that.

I jokingly suggested this the other day on the Rumor Forum, and then … I just felt like I shouldn’t be joking about it. I fired an email off to Derek, and he told me that he’d support me. Derek’s been working with Blood:Water and raising money for them out on tour for some time now.

I would appreciate your support for Blood:Water, whether you donate through the Blogathon campaign that I’ve set up or directly on your own. If you do feel like you want to support me in this, do so with a link, some fun IMs while I spend next Saturday on a posting spree, and whatever other ways you can think of.

At least 48 posts in 24 hours? I can probably pull off 60. I’ll start my research this weekend so that I have some links at the ready for my perusal and postage when next Saturday rolls around.

[So sue me, I'd had four hours of sleep and had driven 250 miles, after a weekend of non-stop travel and toting.]

Today, well, today sucked. Servers going haywire. Spam reports to handle [related to server exploits that I've been chasing all day :sigh:]. I’d been away from the office for almost a week, so I was playing catch-up the entire time. I just never felt like I was on-pace for anything today, but as I prepare to go to bed, I feel like I have a bit more of a handle on things.

And if nothing else, we’re going to Tim’s Cajun Kitchen for lunch tomorrow, just us guys. I’m still amused by the hivemind thing we had going … someone randomly brought up “bread pudding” in a conversation where Jeff had discussed this sugary treat his mom used to make with leftover mashed potatoes, and then … 30 seconds later, lunch at Tim’s was planned. Scary how we all twigged really, really hard to that.

[I don't care who you are ... that's funny raight dere, even if you don't know Larry the Cable Guy's oeuvre.]

I wish more people would do this with [rocksmyfaceoff.net]. I guess I spent enough time in the sportswriting game to love, love, love feedback, so I know that I should give it, too.

[HT to Lifehacker.]