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).