Blog Not Needed

As I mentioned on Friday, there’s something new coming. But that isn’t the only thing that’s in the works around here. So, I figured I’d spend a little time and quickly outline what is coming up. The one thing you’ll notice right away that’s missing from this post, as you go through it, is the absence of a timeline. I wish I could tell you dates for some of these things, but day jobs and life responsibilities must come first around here. That isn’t a cop-out, that’s just the way things are, but rest assured, that there is time dedicated to knocking these items out and getting them rolled into the site as soon as humanly possible.

Enough of my excuse-making, on with the point of this. Here’s a list of the things coming up:

• DiyShare (the priority) - A new concept for user-submitted content
• New Forums (I’m actually writing a message board system. I don’t really like the google groups concept for a message board)
• Extending “Link Details” page to include comments (if the link owners choose to enable). This will be tied into the new forums system where link owners could, in essence, create their own discussion forum for their site. I don’t see this as being a widely used feature, but its something I find interesting).
• Self-serve banner ad system (I’ve been putting this off, but I want to have another possible revenue generator for the site - where users can purchase banner ad space, upload their banner, pay for a package of impressions all without waiting)
• Subscriptions (this is a bit further down the line - but I want to enable users to purchase subscriptions, and in return be given extended features. One of them would be to have their site spidered so all of their links could be added to the database without doing it manually. This concept needs a lot of additional thinking around, not sure if its even feasable yet).
• Notification System (this isn’t so much a user-facing thing in that its more to help speed up things that require our or your attention. Things like notifying you why your link hasn’t been approved yet, notifying us if we haven’t gotten around to reviewing your link, things like that)

That’s the short list for now. There are other things that are more “back-end” in nature but the idea here is to keep the site as fresh and relevant as possible. Like I’ve said before, this is an old site, but the idea and concept behind it are as relevant as it ever has been, so I am going to do everything I can to make sure it stays useful. After all, that’s all we can do.