Project 52

Can you believe that it’s nearly March already? As you can see, we’re finally starting to make some visible progress around here when it comes to Project 52. I hope that the lack of updates on this site hasn’t gotten in the way of you and your writing.

A Fresh Start

As the captain of this leaky boat, I consider it my duty to steer us in a more productive direction. I’ve decided to re-boot the project with a new launch date of March 17th — St. Patrick’s Day. I feel that we got off to a very unorganized start. This is due in part to the number of people that discovered the project after January 1st had already come and gone. Also, a lack of preparedness (in the amount of interest that was shown) brought the logistics of managing this machine to a crawl.

Again, just to be clear: our new dates will be from March17th, 2010 to March 17th, 2011. Please note that on your calendars.

So, for those of you already (and still) participating — thank you for your patience. We’re nearly ready to provide the inspiration and data that you’ve been asking for. If you’ve already got nine (or more) entries live on your site, then you are already leading the pack in your habits. But from what I’ve seen, there are still a lot of you who have signed up that have already stopped writing. Consider this a second chance to begin again. We would love to have you back in the fold!

Part of my decision to move the date was because I want to think forward about the future of this site. The amount of work it would take to go back and re-calculate the past nine weeks into the new system would be ridiculously tedious (and not fun). Especially considering the amount of false positives and missing data that would have to be managed manually. Rest assured, we still have the list of sites that have been submitted, and nearly all of the RSS feeds. It is our desire to make this an enjoyable creative experience for everyone, including myself (since I’m not just the owner, I’m a participant). This wasn’t an easy decision, but I hope you’ll understand how important it was to keeping this project alive.

Call for Entries

If you would like to write an article for this site, I would love to hear from you. I’m looking for topics that cover: tutorials on better writing (spelling, grammar, structure), inspirational pieces, or how-to articles related to begin more creative. These should be decent in length (single paragraph articles will not be accepted), and written with clarity and tact. If you have an idea, just head over to the contact form and let me know what you’re thinking.

Additionally, it would be nice to begin harvesting a library of links and resources that inspire. Inspiration comes most from things found, so having a place where we can all share our discoveries will hopefully help out those who are struggling with creativity. So if you have something to share with the group, be it a link or or type of resource, please let me know and I’ll begin building our library.

A P52 Podcast

Finally, I’d like to announce that there will be a Project 52 Podcast. I’d like to interview participants and hear their thoughts on creativity. There will also be a chance to talk about featured websites, who’s writing about what, and places people can go to find inspiration. The first episode will be available before April lands in our laps. Expect some fantastic special guests. If you would like to be a participant on the show, have a good voice and a decent microphone, you might have a shot at being on the show.

In closing, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for being so patient while we sorted out this little bit of chaos. With a little bit of luck, a piece of string, a bag of M&M’s, and some group effort, we’ll see this thing through to the end.

When I made the decision to reboot Project 52, it was one of great difficulty that I was hoping would be for the good of everyone involved. That not only would I be giving everyone a second chance, I would also be able to start with a fresh system of data that would be easier to manage.

Naturally, doubt kicks in. I’m still not sure if it was truly the right decision, because when it comes right down to it, I was leaning toward the majority of the lazy while ignoring the minority of the dedicated. From what I could tell in January,most of the participants had already given up on the project, or not even started at all. Which really makes me kind of sad for the community as a whole. Because I know that this will inevitably repeat itself. Many people will give up. I can’t help that, nor can I ask everyone to stick with it.

As cynical as this sounds, it’s the truth. The people who truly want to participate and are willing to be there for the long haul, are the smallest percentage. The most important detail of the demographics, and I realized it too late.

So, I’d like to apologize to those of you who supported me in the beginning. I should have consulted some of you first before rebooting this thing. I don’t want to change the date again, nor am I going to give up, but I do want to bring some attention to those who were there early. Also, I would like to let some of you help decide where this project goes from here.

My goal is the same now as it was from the beginning: To get people to be creative on their websites, to go beyond the character limits of Twitter and Facebook status updates and actually write something genuine from their hearts. To just inspire.

So, I’m going to proceed with this the best way that I know how. I’m going to keep blogging. The best way to move forward is to simply take it one step at a time. If you want to blog with me, I welcome you. A simple system will, in the long run, be the most effective. But we can’t lose sight of the goal.

In time, the system will settle itself into a comfortable routine that I feel a few of us will be comfortable with, and we’ll see who’s left at the end. Keep in mind,being a part of Project 52 is more a responsibility of yourself than it is me.

I have one final request:

If you have been blogging from January 1st, and have been dedicated to it week by week, please let me know (via the contact form). I’d like to put together a list of honored names. Perhaps I can do something special for you. And if you have any suggestions or ideas, please feel free to be completely open and honest with me. I am interested in hearing your opinions.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another year of writing (or a least making an honest attempt at it)! I think many of us can say that 2010 didn’t go so well. Granted, there have been some brilliant exceptions, a few shining stars who succeeded in making it through the year (you know who you are). As for the rest of us? Yeah, not so much. Myself included.

So let’s try this again, shall we? 2011 is creeping up on us very quickly, and I’d like to start immediately taking names of people who are interested in participating. There are a few very important details that I would like to go over before you join P52.

Sign-up in December

The ability to join will only be up until January 1st. After that, it will be too late. One month is plenty of time to decide if you want to participate or not. Plus, it keeps the system much more easy to maintain (through a leaner membership base). This project is going to run from January 1st, to December 31st, 2011. No reboots. No exceptions.

Serious Participants Only

Please do yourself (and me) a favor and take a moment to reflect on how serious you are about participating. The primary goal is to learn how to generate good content on a regular schedule. If you don’t feel that you can manage it, then please don’t sign up. There were far too many quitters in 2010 (and far too many people trying to join six months in). These fluctuations are a major part of what caused the first round to fail.

Here’s what’s allowed: Written content (200 word minimum is encouraged), Photography, Original Videos, or Art/Illustration.

Here’s what’s not allowed: Re-blogging, Twitter updates (or similar ilk), YouTube video posts of funny cats or other animals, or the numerous other things that will appear to be lacking in honest effort. Use your best judgement. I will be monitoring what comes in, and pruning links to entries that don’t appear to meet these standards.

Timing

You only need to come up with content once a week. Please don’t try to cram in five at once and claim to be “good for a month”. If possible, keep your ideas unpublished and in draft-mode, so that you can publish them on a regular weekly schedule (this will greatly help in how things are managed here, as well). If you miss a week (or three), don’t sweat it too much… you just won’t show up in the list of updated sites. If it appears that you have abandoned your account through inactivity (10 weeks is the limit), your account will be removed from the system, P52 will no longer accept updates from your domain, and you will not have access to the forum.

Where to Post

Even though you’ll be signing up on this website, your P52 account will be strictly used for forum access (available after January 1st), profile information, Website & RSS feed location, and as a way to reach you. Your content will still live on your own website.

After January 1st, this site will be active to receive pings from the website that you have listed in your profile. Basically, when you submit a post, your system will send a little signal to P52 that something is updated. This works much like an RSS aggregator. Instructions on how to set this up are unique for whatever system you happen to be using. If you’re not sure how to add a ping service, check the documentation of the CMS that you are in. The url to ping will be available shortly.

Registration Starts Here

Sign Up Here

You can start right now by filling out your account information with the above link. Registration is open today, immediately, and will remain open until the first moments of January 1st (US Central Time Zone [Chicago]). It’s not all that pretty, but it will get things rolling forward.

In the meantime, I will be activating accounts, setting up the forum, making sure that the ping server functions appropriately, and answering any questions that you may have.

Hey, look at that – a rhyme! Anyway, the first week is nearly over and I felt that perhaps it was time to update everyone on how Project 52 is going, and what you can expect in the next 51 weeks.

On Monitoring Content

After experimenting with several methods of getting content added to the site (from scraping RSS feeds, to having the users ping from their weblogs), there always seemed to be two consistent issues: The ability to ensure that the right content was actually logged to a single user, rather than one mass account, and asking every member to have a certain technical knowledge of either RSS (which some websites do not have), or the ability to ping a remote site. There was also the problem of grabbing entire clusters of posts, when perhaps only one was meant for P52.

Ultimately, I decided to let Project 52 become user-managed. That is, since each participant was going to have an account anyway (for the forum), why not create a small weblog with custom fields where the only requirement is that the user adds a link to their article when they are ready. This gives control to the people. We all get to choose what we want listed here, and when. This turned out to be far better than any automated solution, and from the comments in the forum thread, it seems that everyone so far agrees with this.

On the Amount of Content

Participation always seems to have two very different groups of people: those who are excited and anxious to post everything that they write, and those who have already forgotten that they signed up. I figure that the majority of the members here are somewhere between these two paths.

To those who write a lot of content – I suggest that you save up your posts, add one a week here, then when you have a dry week, you’ll have something in your back pocket to keep the weekly system happy.

And to those who don’t write anything – Don’t think that we won’t know. Every user has a running total of how many posts they’ve added here, and so far we’ve got quite a few that are just about to miss the first week. Now, maybe they didn’t realize what needed to be done to do this, so I’ll be giving everyone the benefit of the doubt for a few weeks, just to see how it pans out. If it looks like a user has totally given up on Project 52, they may find themselves at the mercy of the members who participate regularly.

Current Places of Importance

Right now we have a list of all the P52 participants (both active and inactive), there is a page that shows this week’s entries, and the forum (open to the public for reading).

What the Future Holds

As the weeks go by, the system will be able to grow. Information and statistics will become more prominent. Each and every week will be filed away will their respective posts, and visual graphs will be added once the data is a little more substantial. People will be able to subscribe to this site, and even download an opml file of all the sites to add to a feed reader (if you don’t know what this means, don’t worry about it).