How naïve I was when I wrote this.
Little did I know the troubles were just beginning.
* * *
Rewrite the entire post.
It is with great pleasure and an overwhelming sense of relief that I can finally unveil the Becoming Better Together project’s web hub.
The hub consists of 12 sites : the main site and 11 subsites. The subsites are listed in the featured image and can be reached via the menu in the far right column of the footer below.
I’ve built somewhere between 500 and 1,000 websites since 1997, when I used MicroSoft’s Front Page to write a website for the former Roanoke District of the Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, making Roanoke the first district in the Conference to have a website.
And I have never had one fight back as hard as this one has.
After having several builds break when we tried to add the online academy, even I was beginning to doubt Markus, my technical trouble shooter, and I would ever get this web hub built.
It turned out that problems with our original hosting service, GoogieHost, made what should have taken no more than 2 weeks take nearly 7.
I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that if you’re looking for a web host, stay away from GoogieHost.
Far way.
The farther, the better.
Despite appearances to the contrary, I can assure you the build estimate of 2 weeks is accurate.
For as of this writing, 18:20 on 26 Oct 2024, everything – absolutely everything – you can see in terms of the look and feel of the hub has been done in the 13 days 23 hours since we moved the hub to Hostinger’s web hosting service at 19:20 on Saturday the 12th of October; including the custom mobius strips on the right which Markus and I created for logos and favicons,
If your reach doesn’t exceed your grasp, you aren’t really trying to succeed.
You’re deliberately limiting your success by playing it safe.— LJ Stevens
I hate the new, to me, version of this blasted block editor.
It’s refusing to center the quote unless I type something like this directly under it.
When I told my ex-wife Birgit, who remains one of my best friends, about the hub, she said, “That’s you. Always going after the BIG things.”
She knows me well.
If my reach didn’t exceed my grasp, if I wasn’t always pushing myself to do more, among other things, I would never :
The final result of the insights provided by my multifaceted academic and professional background and pushing myself to look at the topic from every angle I could think of is the Becoming Better Together project and this web hub.
While not being explicitly religious, Becoming Better Together is firmly grounded in the Biblical teaching regarding how we are to treat the poor and other marginalized members of society, and inspired in part by Henri Nouen’s concept of “the wounded healer” as the one best able to help others through a similar situation.
Every single part of the hub plays an important role in the effort to create an on-going activity therapy program consisting of online resources, face-to-face leathercraft trainings sessions, and private crafting by the participants, and the opportunity to earn a bit of spending money selling their products in a multi-vendor online store,
If the 3 rules of real estate are : location, location, location, the 3 rules of viewing Becoming Better Together’s web hub are :
Don’t panic.
DON’T Panic.
DON’T PANIC.
There are at least 2 reasons to not panic.
The first is that the hub isn’t nearly as complex or as complicated to manage as it might look.
Far from it, once you get all the domains working and playing together nicely, a WordPress multisite is much like an old fashioned wagon wheel consisting of a hub, which holds the wheel together, and the spokes which translate the energy of the power source into movement.
So, too, with a 12 domain WordPress multisite like the Becoming Better Hub.
The main site is like the hub of the wagon wheel. It organizes the other sites, and focuses their efforts in a way which makes the project work the same way a wagon wheel hub holds the spokes together.
The sub-sites are like the spokes of the wheel. They bear the weight of the wagon and its load, and work together via the hub in a way that moves the wagon forward.
The energy needed to move it forward provided by the trainers, web masters, and volunteers who are interested in helping the homeless rebuild their lives.
The second reason to not panic is that I should not require a lot of help from Jaro’s staff to run the project.
While I will need an area to conduct the training sessions, a translator and, due to health related issues, help setting up and tearing down the training area, I probably won’t need much more help from Jaro.
Please, take note of the word “probably.” At the moment, I can’t think of too may areas in which I would need help. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
The most obvious bit of help I can think of is the use of paper and the laminator to make durable templates for the projects. Paper templates can’t be used more than once. So, the help creating reusable templates will actually help keep materials costs down.
The 12 domains and their purposes are :
The main hub. It will be where articles related to the project, announcements, and other general items will be posted.
There will be at least 3 main categories of posts:
I’m trying to set it up so that participants will be able to download the materials free; while others pay a small, industry standard download fee. Said fees to be paid into an online bank account setup for the project.
This is being worked on. And will probably entail setting up an e-banking account on Wise.
The main fundraising sub-site.
The goal is to have one or two regular auctions a year consisting of items donated by supporting businesses and others which could be auctioned-off for a medium to large profit.
When I was a fundraiser in Austin in the late 1980’s, during which time I was also an executive at CARITAS, Austin, silent and other auctions were a major type of fundraising event.
The Auctions subsite moves that concept into the 2020’s via the auctioning of reasonable high value donations that appeal to the general public.
Monies received from an auction will be deposited in an online bank account setup for the project.
Sadly, while this is the perfect time of year for an annual auction, due to the aforementioned problems trying to build the site on GoogieHost, there simply isn’t time to prepare everything for one. So, we’ll have to aim for the spring.
The main donations subsite.
This will be a single page site explaining the project and soliciting one time and on-going donations. The donations will be able to be made via direct bank transfer, PayPal, Stripe, and other well-established payment gateways.
Almost every page in the hub will have a Chesed link in the sidebar.
Having it there provides a consistent call to action which should result in some donations. Granted, they will be few and far between when the site is first launched, but they should increase over time.
As with the proceeds from an auction, the donations will be made into an online bank account setup for the project.
This domain is a secure, private social community like FaceBook.
It’s purpose is to provide a place for the participants and any professionals who become involved to have private conversations.
The site will also have groups much like FaceBook groups. The first two groups will be for the residents and professionals. This will allow the professionals to hold private conversations the participants can’t see.
Another feature of this sub-site will be private forums. Unlike the public forums in the Forums site, these will be member only forums for the participants and professionals.
The directory will be a resource for the participants and professionals consisting of listings for health related individuals and companies.
When I was a emergency assistance case worker for Travis County, the Department of Human Services (DHS) paid a woman $24,000 to compile an online resource directory that the caseworkers such as myself could consult to make referrals to our clients.
It took her a year to collect the information on about 24 organizations. Which comes to $1,000 per organization she had in her database.
I never bothered asking her for help because the requests had to be summitted in writing, and it took her over a week to respond. The majority of my clients needed help immediately, not a week later.
I gathered the information by asking every social work professional I interacted with, even if it was only once, for their list of contacts.
Instead of wasting my time and that of my clients, I used the knowledge gained from managing the computer store to identify the software I needed to compile my own resource directory.
I settled on an as yet unlaunched program called ACT! (Activity Control Technology), which I had access to because I was selling computers in Austin at the time.
ACT! was intended for sales professionals to track their activities, and is still available. I found it very useful to track my interactions with my parishioners when I was a pastor.
When I left Travis County DHS 6 months later, I gave Bud Grant, the head of the department, a 300 page printout of organizations in Austin which provided the services my clients needed and which, by extension, those the Department of Human Resources was charged with serving.
While I plan to ask everyone I can for information about health care professionals, companies, and non-profit organizations like I did in Austin, most of the information for this directory will be collected by scrapping websites for health and social services related professionals, organizations, and companies.
This is entirely legal. In fact, it is the way most online directories are compiled.
Having scrapped information on 20 or 30,000 companies, or more, in the global leather industry for a leather industry directory I’m launching later this year or early next year, I’m familiar with the technology and should still have an active scrapper to use for this project.
The topics in the forums in this sub-site will be related to homelessness and other marginalized segments of the population.
Topics will range from the good to the bad of both the issues faced as well as case studies of outstanding leadership and that which misses the mark entirely and adds to rather than alleviates the problems faced.
Unlike the private forums in Community, these will be public, and open to anyone.
The jobsBOARD will focus on jobs related to health care professionals, social workers, and other care providers, who will be able to post resumes and job listings.
Initially, this will be populated by jobs from a jobs board affiliate account that I’m going to setup after I’ve researched them enough to know which one to use.
Once it is established, it will also include the resumes and job listings of the health and social services professionals and employers who know of and want to use it.+
This is our private Kick Start-esque crowd funding subsite. While it will be online all the time, we will probably only run one jumpSTART campaign a year. Any more would be a bit much for our supporters to endure.
Having said that, while donating via Chesed would be best for tracking where funds come from, people will be able to make donations through jumpSTART at any time they chose to do so.
Again, all funds from a campaign will go into the project’s bank account. And will be used to fund the project.
This sub-site is a multivendor market in which participants can sell items they produce. Ech individual who chooses to sell via the Market will have their own vendor account.
The Market’s importance to the Becoming Better project has more to do with providing the motivation to continue participating in the Becoming Better project than earning money for the participants.
The motivating element is that the opportunity to earn a bit of money provides the incentive to do leathercraft on their own outside of the training sessions.
Without it, participants would lose interest once they had made a couple of projects. With it, they have a reason to continue.
Such long term involvement is where the long term benefits of an activity therapy program come in.
NOTE WELL :
The participants MUST have a way to collect any payments they are to receive. I would not handle church related funds when I was a pastor. And I am not about to handle the money a participant would receive via an online sale.
So, they either have a private means of being paid, or they deliver the items to their clients and are paid in cash by them.
PERIOD.
There will be no negotiations whatsoever with anyone about this.
The feeds in this sub-site will link to podcasts related to the homeless and other marginalized groups.
The feeds will be in German and other languages spoken by our target demographics.
And excellent example of such a feed is Dr Monica Stark’s Med4Hope.
Store is an Amazon affiliate site. It uses the theme Amazon themselves recommend for such a site.
This is the only monetized part of the Becoming Better Together Hub that I will link to my own online bank account.
It will probably not earn all that much. But quite frankly, I need to recoup some of the monies I’ve invested in the project up to this point in time. And Markus should be compensated for the hundreds of hours he has poured into the technical support I needed to get the hub this far.
Once this demo web hub and the two hubs that will support are finished, I’ll prepare the press and media kits necessary to do some guerrilla marketing via the free sheets and broadcast media.
Come to think of it, there is an area I’ll need help in : translating the press and media kits.
(I really should learn German, huh? … sigh)
If all goes well, I’ll have them ready before I have the heart procedure on the 2nd of December, and will, therefore, be available for comment should anyone want to follow up on the materials I send them.
Granted, that is probably being a wee bit overly optimistic. Even so, that’s what I’m going to try to do. Will be interesting to see if I can pull it off.
Meanwhile, please, accept my apologies for subjecting you to such an extended post. I did so because I know that some of you will wonder why I think a homeless person like me can pull this off.
The answer is quite simple, as demonstrated in the post, I have professional experience in almost all of the areas the project covers. And have excelled in each and every one of them.
Other than the health issues that Birgit keeps fussing at me about, there is no reason whatsoever to think I can’t do it.
After all I’ve, “Been there. Done that.”
It will be interesting to see if combining so many different items in the project will result in my reach exceeding my grasp.
CHEERS!
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