jr conlin's ink stained banana

Problem is, people aren't all that likely to go online to see what's up. I'd start a mailing list instead …

Beware the ongoing time commitment. If you don't have someone lined up to do future updates, you'll be stuck with them. That may not be a bad thing, since one of the best neighborhood sites in Minneapolis is the one I spent six years working on (updates with every monthly meeting). The design isn't especially great, but the fact that the minutes from every meeting since 2000 is online is a very valuable resource.

I survived four of updates for my neighborhood association before moving away, and then they paid me to do updates for a couple more years. Finally a friend of mine converted the whole mess to WordPress and now the staffers can do updates themselves.

I don't know if it's the type of neighborhood site you're looking for, but check out "Willow Glen 2.0" on Ning: http://willowglen.ning.com/

JR maybe you can do a thing where you set up the backbone of the site and have someone update the "Community News" stuff externally from a Wordpress site or a Blogger thingy or something? So you know, you don't get married to it.

For a minute there I thought the URL was strawberrypancake.org which as a URL is great but as a neighborhood name is incredible.

Ooh, good comments all:

Hetta: Yep, that's one of the things I'm going to do. I figure the main site will be more blog than static since we want to have regular news like postings. Community is obviously REALLY important here.

Dave: Heh, you have no idea how many ongoing time commitments I've already gotten involved in. The funny part is that most of those are big hits at first, but then tail off rather quickly as they go into autopilot. (Thus why I'm thinking of using a lot of open source stuff.)

Brian: Yeah, I've thought about ning for a lot of this. I may integrate in a bunch of that but they're kinda keen on having their own site. They're moving the site now so I have no idea what's going to be available. (Obviously, I'm going to play favorites with some APIs.)

Justin: You hit the nail on the head. I'm just going to set the framing and give folks super simple ways to customize things the way they want. No need making things any harder on myself. Nice thing is that there's plenty of things like Flickr and other free junk I can tie in that makes it look like I'm smarter than I am.

Ah the joys of following the cutting edge. The way is pretty much clear, albeit a bit slick with blood. I'll try to ignore that.