BetterMost Community Blogs > Skipping Stones Across the Pond of Life
Phil Skips Stones Across the Pond of Life
Phillip Dampier:
For those interested in learning about the daily ups and down of getting this site off the ground, I present my periodic "blog" or journal about its progress.
Phillip Dampier:
As of writing, this is day four of BetterMost (Wednesday). As you can see, things are now slowly evolving in the forums on here as the site look and feel gets tweaked and I get the hang of the forum software.
Challenges:
* Lots of guests but not very many people seem to take the time to register for the forums. It takes about two minutes to do, but people don't seem to be doing it. This is contrary to my usual personal experiences - I guess I am much faster about registering. For every one person registered, I see about nine unregistered visitors, so the site is seeing some browsing.
* Although you aren't seeing huge mega-messages from me in the last day or so, it doesn't mean I am ignoring the site. Behind the scenes, I am learning about how to deal with the advertising elements of the system, which might one day defray bandwidth costs, as well as just getting the site listed and recognized by Google. It's actually harder than I thought it would be.
* Figuring out forum formats. I appreciate the input from some of you about the site and what you'd like to see. It's like the mountain at the top of the screen - wide open and still sorta empty, so I can try all sorts of things to make this place work for each of us.
* Site Promotion. I am not one to want to go out and be sleazy about promoting this site by flooding message forums with promotions for it. If you like what you see and participate in forums where people are discussing the movie and how it affects them, let people know about BetterMost. Better yet, write some messages on here yourself so we can start building some traffic.
Plans:
For the rest of the week, I'll be focusing on site promotion, tweaking the forums further, finding some new Brokeback movie resources (if you can follow my general format example when posting your own, that will be helpful to people looking for something specific), and starting to outline some tutorials you can follow on using the forum software. I'll also be participating in the discussions that do occur here.
Phillip Dampier:
It's just turned Friday morning here in western NY (well, just after midnight anyway) and we're headed into the first full weekend the site has been online. Hopefully I will be able to do more posting over the weekend.
A major windstorm is set to strike the northeast tonight and early tomorrow and the weather people claim there could be widespread power outages if trees take out the power or, eeks... the cable modem. If I suddenly go missing, we can blame the weather.
Some users from Annie Proulx's own forum will likely take some time to stop by over the weekend on the forums. It will be interesting to see if we can pick up a few longtime fans of Annie's writings to help give us some perspective there.
Also, it's day six and Google still hasn't found the site. Argh....
On the advice of some web geniuses, http://www.beyondbrokebackmountain.com has been registered and is a duplicate of BetterMost. It's part of the effort to help properly brand the site. Either URL gets you to the same place.
It was also nice to pick up a few new users today. If I can add a few a day, I'm happy with that.
More from me by the weekend.
Phillip Dampier:
We are now one week into the experiment that is BetterMost. We finally turned up in a search engine today, albeit buried at #30 unless you get real specific - Yahoo! now has us indexed (as well as the search engines that rely on Yahoo!'s engine). I was surprised by that because Yahoo! was notoriously difficult to get a listing on for a long time. Google continues to be our problem - their search engine still hasn't found the site.
Thanks to 25 folks who joined during the first week. Of course, keeping you coming back for more will be the ongoing challenge of the site. I've tried to bring some content and projects in for our first week, especially in the forum for moving beyond the film.
Writing messages inspires others to write - we definitely need to see some more participation if we can get this thing jump started. I am noticing a definite fall off in traffic on some of the more general Brokeback movie forums as people begin to move on. If you participate on one and want to mention this site, that would be great. I am always uncomfortable joining forums elsewhere just to push my own site. It's almost spam like, and while I have contributed my fair share to other forums about the movie as a whole, I don't want to invest a huge amount of energy on those when I need to devote it to this own site. So if you can spread the word, that would be a great way to help the site. Remember, we're bettermost.net.
I hope week two will see some more messages from people other than me. ;)
Phillip Dampier:
I am happy to see we finally managed to make it into Google, albeit we're buried unless you know to type BetterMost. Rankings go up based on people linking to the site, so if there is an appropriate site you visit that has links to other BBM resources, ask them to list us!
I'm also happy to see some more message traffic starting. Keep it up. I am working behind the scenes to put together Brokeback Mountain Radio, which will let you stream music from the soundtrack and music I am searching for that fits the mood and theme of the film. To start, I'm going to blend a lot of instrumentals in and see how that goes. It will definitely be more background than foreground music to start. If you have any music requests, let me know and I'll see if I can fit it in.
I am assembling music right now, then have to re-encode it, log each song into the rights payment system (this will be a legal service) and get the stream up and running and linked through here.
I'm also working on an interview and some side issues.
I'm not seeing people doing some homework on the Now What forum. Remember, we don't simply want the site to be about the movie itself. Talk about the film will eventually die down as time passes. This site's relevance to people will depend entirely on carrying things forward from the film. We can talk about BBM, but let's also keep our eye on going forward.
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