Contact System is Now Live

I guess it is time to come out of hiding.

So, I just added a contact system to the Community Color family of sites. I intend to use the same contact program for more than one site. For that matter, I am considering opening the program up to the community at large.

The program took a embarrassingly long time to write as I just haven't figured out what to do about spam. Spammers will hit any open form on web site with hundreds of thousands of fake hits.

Right now anonymous readers can leave message. If I get hit by spam, I will restrict it to registered users.

The program is in beta. Comments about the comments section are welcome.

Location, Location, Location

I've been working on the Location view. I think that I will make reports on venues a primary focus of the community directories. Here are a few of the changes:

The first change is that I show the location summary and event list side by side. You can view the page for Red Butte Gardens. This was somewhat of a fundamental change. I had designed all of the pages to be long and skinny. That way the directory could exist in a frame of other sites, or as a small box. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get a good scalable CSS design for the calendar. So, I've decided to go fixed width. Both the calendar and location pages will be 840 pixels wide.

I've also just started to play with Google Maps. That way I can include a handy link to a Location Map.

What I am doing at this point in time is just indexing events that take place at major venues in the community. My long term hope is that some venues actually decide to use this system as their event calendar.

Site of the Day

The site of the day program is now back on line. I made the Site of the Day program to highlight interesting sites. I would appreciate any comments on the program. Right now, I pretty much just take sites at random and call them a SoD. I thought about making the nomination process driven by the ratings engine. I also thought about allowing the public at large write the reviews, or adding comments to the review page.

Comments on the feature are appreciated.

Forum Function Disabled

In the upcoming days, I will remove the forum function from the Community Color family of sites. The basic idea was to put a forum up and see if people would use it. That did not happen. I am thinking of replacing the forum with either a local news feed or perhaps a blog/podcast indexer.

Feel free to drop comments on what you would like to see in a community directory