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 If possible, keep your ideas unpublished and in draft-mode, so that you can publish them on a regular weekly schedule (this will greatly help in how things are managed here, as well).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.