It looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
I have to admit, two recent individual’s reaching out to MomEx one after the other to work with us in various ways and help grow the site have inspired me to get a move on in releasing MomEx 2.0.
I’ve decided to use the extremely powerful Zen theme, which describes itself as the ‘ultimate starting theme for Drupal’ for good reason. It has ready – made CSS files which act as ‘placeholders’ for whatever styling rules you wanna use. You just slap in code, refresh your site and voila: results! Provided you understand CSS, which admittedly isn’t the easiest of things to grasp, especially absolute and relative values which I remember, when I was starting out, may as well had been written by extra terrestials since I couldn’t understand head nor tail.
But again like all coding, it’s really a mix of RTFM and experimentation, in my case, 20% of the former and 80% of the latter. Literally I just delete files or comment or uncomment lines in code, refresh, and keep doing so until I get desired results. At that point it becomes easy.
Anyway, I think I’m 10% away from releasing version 2.0. It’s gonna have exciting features that will promote self – sustaining content from and by the users, and the value of becoming a member will exponentially increase from the number of things they can do with it. Sorry if I am intentionally indirect but a lot of this is pretty new stuff – much like what MomEx was when it started out – so I wanna keep things in wraps until the release.
I’m flattered so many people find it valuable to their lives, enough to want to invest so much in enhancing it.
However, it’s my baby. All my sites are my work and therefore, extensions of me in the sense that they are products of my thoughts on how the Internet should be used by ordinary people. When I started working on the Exchanges all these were just untested thoughts in my head. Now that they’ve become influential I look at them with pride, as well as serving as validation for my theories.
Drupal now allows me to grow them even further. I have ideas which I think will enhance what we already have and make them even bigger, even more influential. I know I may sound like I’m blowing a lot of hot air right now but whenever people congratulate me about the sites, I feel like saying they haven’t seen anything yet. The stuff we’re gonna do is gonna be earth shaking. Right now, people see the sites as occasional entertainment – a respite, something to look at when you’re bored. By the time I’m finished, they’re gonna see them as absolute essentials. Websites that they absolutely positively cannot do without in their lives. Not just something interesting to read, but something they absolutely, without question, need to access in order to, say, buy the right item, or choose the right school, check if a product is safe or outright purchase something for their use.
The proper way to use the Internet isn’t just for viewing things passively. That’s so TV. The Internet allows for interaction, a two way experience between user and a web based service which serves as a way for them to interact with others still, and others even more.
One person sharing a thought or opinion, either by uploading a video or showing or explaining something on a website doesn’t seem to be worth much, but a lot of them, collectively, sharing thoughts, ideas, opinions and using different media, makes that web service far more powerful. THAT is what I wanna do. THAT’s what the ‘net is all about. THAT is why I called it ‘Exchange’.
Which of course, isn’t worth crap if I don’t finish it. But like I’m said, I’m really close. Baby Steps.