LOUDER

I’m a What Iffer: Week 2

Press Hits

Articles appeared this week about What if Des Moines on the website Silicon Prairie News and in the weekly Des Moines print publication Juice Magazine. The articles were great for generating interest in the project (emails, Tweets of support, etc). They didn’t drive any noticeable change in pageviews.

The interest from SPN and Juice was a big motivator over the second week. On a personal level, being a small part of enabling Tim Paluch to write what he wrote about our city has already made the project a success in my mind.

What if Des Moines Traffic

Visits and pageviews are down about 6.5% from the first week. While unfortunate, it doesn’t concern me (much). The quality of comments and submissions remained consistent, some folks I respect tweeted and retweeted about the project, and general interest seems high. I’ve been focusing my efforts on laying a foundation for the network and less on traffic for the individual Des Moines site. I have no doubt that an energetic campaign of stickers, t-shirts, Meetups, and shameless social media pimpage could drive traffic up significantly. The small but steady numbers are giving me exactly what I need: enough information to learn, experiment, and make connections, and not so much traffic and maintenance that I lose site of the goal.

Coffee

Do project people drink coffee because they like coffee, or do they drink coffee because they start out by meeting so many people in coffeeshops that it’s easier to just drink coffee instead of saying “oh no, I don’t care for coffee” eight times a week?

Learning

I’ve learned a lot about Des Moines in just two weeks. I’ve learned that some people feel Adventureland isn’t very handicap-accessible. I’ve learned that people have very fond memories of downtown movie theaters. I’ve learned that with enough prodding, Mars Cafe might just consider a downtown location (hint, hint). I’ve learned that even Des Moines’ most positive and upbeat advocates are willing to think both critically and imaginatively about the city they love. By listening and asking questions I’ve learned more about Des Moines in two weeks than I have in the last year. I want to make that happen for every community, big and small, in the whole U.S. Getting there. Getting there.

Too…many…passwords…

I spent the weekend setting up a multi-domain enabled Wordpress network. When it’s all said and done, it should be a piece of cake to add dozens of sites to the network all using one centrally managed Wordpress installation. Most importantly for my needs, network sites will be able to use a custom domain name (such as whatifdesmoines.com) to point to all of their content. I think this is an important part of the marketing of the project. You see a domain like “whatifdesmoines.com” or “whatifdrake.com” or “whatifminneapolis.com” or “whatifmiami.com” (yeah, I may have bought a few domain names) and you already have an idea of what you’re going to get. However, not every community is going to warrant a domain, and those communities will be able to live at [CommunityName].[ProjectDomain].com/net/whatever. I’d tell you the network address but it’s just a vanilla Wordpress install at this point, nothing to see yet.

Why Wordpress? It’s what I know. Simple as that. There are probably smarter and more efficient ways to build this network, but it doesn’t strike me as very smart to sit around waiting to figure out what that would be.

This isn’t my first Wordpress rodeo, but as someone educated in neither web development nor server administration, it was a learning experience. This is one of the most complicated Wordpress set-ups I’ve ever done and surprisingly the only major roadblock I ran into was from brain fatigue (thank you to Mr. Dan Shipton for pointing cd/var/www is not the same as cd /var/www — all for the want of a space). It’s also my first “grown up” hosting account, running a (dv) set-up on MediaTemple. Plesk seems less daunting than my first few encounters with cPanel.

Also: god bless nerds. There is a guide for everything out there if you’re willing to Google it long enough. EVERYTHING. “How do I make this version of this plug-in work with this version of Wordpress with these settings with this control panel?” OH, HERE’S A GUIDE JUST FOR THAT. Thanks, Internet Guy! I hope I’m wise enough to recognize when I’m doing something no one else has done with all of this stuff so I can contribute my own guides to the greater good.

BONUS! The actual inspiration behind this project was…

Futurama’s What-If Machine from the Tales of Interest episodes. Didn’t realize it at the time. But I’d definitely watched the episode with one of my favorite Fry quotes of all time (“What if that thing I said?”) the night before. So there you go. Watch more (good) TV, people!