UsGuys News

This might come as a surprise to most of you but here's the #UsGuys Website. I have been working on creating this website for more than a month in my free time. I am calling the website unofficial for now as no one (except a few people at the last moment) knew about this website. It isn't official because the official website was being worked upon by a team of people whom I joined in May to work on. We planned the design and functionality but due to family issues I had to halt working on it. When I got back I got busy with work and others were busy with their things as well. This was fine as I had what I needed but the website we had didn’t give a community feel because it didn’t honor the spirit of #UsGuys. I have been in this group since January and what I love about the group was how it was open to all and everyone knew what was going on. So I let that site be and made a page with all information about #UsGuys at one place. We have many places to engage with each other and keeping a tack of places would've has been hard. I know people in the LinkedIn Group that never knew Facebook Groups and Page existed; our Facebook group is as active as the Twitter stream right now. There was no need for another place to engage at. So what I did was create a page with all information about us and links to other places where people can find us.

There has been a lot of thought put into this because I wanted to do it right. Many might have questions about how the website works and how do we update it. I have posted another post on the proposed method to maintain the website and how it works. Most of the pages on the website update on their own cause they are binded to the #UsGuys Community Tumblr Blog (that would be this blog). This blog is built on tumblr and is a group blog, which means any of the group blog members will be able to post into the main blog. Another noteworthy feature of the website is it can be downloaded by anyone and can be hosted as a mirror incase the main website goes down for any reason; we still have the mirror sites. The other blog post states how those work too, as I do not want to get too technical in this post. We also a simple member directory which lists all the member names, twitter links, short bios, and a link to their website. Everyone can add themselves to it on their own. The Event page lists all the recent blog posts tagged ‘event’ on the Events page. It is pretty simple to use but was a bit complex to make. The way it is made, the domain name doesn’t hold much power and the Members directory will not be indexed by Google either. It’s made for informational purposes only.

So that’s pretty much it, people need a tumblr account to access the blog. I’ll need your registered tumblr email address to add you to the first few to the group, and then they can add the others!  The how to and where is in the more technical blog post here.

Lemme know what you guys think in the comments!

I didn't wanna get too technical in the other blog post so here's an explanation of how the website works and how to use it.

How do the pages work?

The website consists of five pages which are Home, What is #UsGuys, News, Events and Members. Most of the pages update on their own and the ones that don't are edited manually. Home - The homepage consists of a live tweet stream and some basic information. It also has a Recent Community Update block which pulls the most recent blog post which is tagged update in this blog. What is #UsGuys (About) – This page has nothing that updates itself, and the updates need to be applied manually. I am currently working on a way to update it automatically as well but for now we are gonna rely on the update system (explained later on in the post). News - This is a simple iframe that loads the tumblr blog into the main site. Events - This page pulls the recent event posts from this blog which are tagged event and displays them on that page. Members - This page also is an iframe into the Member Directory page on the server, and is only browse able via this page. The member data is stored into a database on server which we may release as weekly updates to the people who mirror it but isn't available to everyone yet.

Now that's the summary of what the pages do and how they work. Now let's get into how the blog works.

How does the blog work?

The blog is powered by tumblr and is hosted on their servers. We chose tumblr to create the website as it has a nice API to fetch data to websites and it also has nice group blog functions. This way anyone in the group can post into the main website and also update the content on the main site and the mirrors.

More members can be added by existing members on this page. They need the persons tumblr email address to be able to add them. So as you see, it is pretty simple. I do know most of you might not have tumblr account but this might be a chance to try tumblr out. We didn't have any other alternatives that were as good.

The main website pulls data from the blog depending on how the blog posts are tagged. And there aren't many tags. Just two. The event tag updates the Event page and the update tag updates the Recent Community Update post on homepage. There aren't any rules on what qualifies as an update, if you think it's an update. Tag it as an update.

Mirrors? Download? Update? Whatt?

While thinking about an open site, I came up with an idea of letting people create mirrors with their own domain names and they may tweak their mirror the way they'd like. Achieving this was pretty simple but had to make the site so that it was easy for everyone to update it when it needs to be updated too.

So I decided to add in website versioning, if you notice the homepage's footer, you will see the website version, which is v1.0 right now. Right next to it is a download link which will open up the download link and some info about it. It also has a form to register yourself as a Mirror Host. Registering is useful as on each update I would send out an email with the link to the update file, the changelog and update instructions. And any other important information you may need to know before updating.

The Member Directory isn't included yet into the downloads as it needs a database to run. We may be providing the directory for download after we have the script optimized and integrated into the map which is in the works.

So that is how it works, it pretty much maintains itself and the blog can be used by everyone.