I was chatting with Kris Bruland (creator/owner of Handweaving.net) at lunchtime today and he mentioned that Handweaving.net gets 10,000 hits a day.  On a slow day.

This amazes me.  I had been thinking on a fairly small scale, like about 5,000 active users and an overall registered user base of about 30,000 users, if we were lucky.  That’s the subscription size of Handwoven.  But it looks like the weaving community is way, way, bigger than that…so there is much more potential than I had originally thought.  Whether we can capture it (especially with the international community) is another matter…but there are apparently more weavers between Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy.

Kris also said that integration with Handweaving.net shouldn’t be too hard, and offered to help our developer(s) with it if and when we got to that point – great news.  I’ll keep it in mind.

Spent last night disassembling Lady Di (my Leclerc Diana, the loom I was using before I bought the AVL) for shipment to New Mexico.  It wasn’t difficult, although the process of labeling every single part and bagging up all the screws in a bazillion different ziplock baggies did get a bit tedious.  Now I just have to figure out how to fit her back into her custom crate, which will be a bit of a challenge as I stupidly did not take photos when I unpacked her.  (Or rather, I remember taking photos but have been unable to find the files ANYWHERE.)  That will occupy another night or two, following which I have to figure out how to get the crate to the shipper; it won’t fit in my Prius unless I lay it flat, which I’d rather not.  It’s a bother, but it will be a relief to have the “second loom” out of the living room.

I have not, however, been idle on the site.  I got in touch with a Drupal developer yesterday who has a generic social networking site assembled out of 79(!) Drupal modules, and is willing to sell it to me for $500.  It comes with advice on setup and an evaluation/recommendation on the requirements once Marian (our user experience designer volunteer) completes them, which alone would be worth $500; so I think I’ll spring for it.  I’m still playing with the system, though – he has an evaluation version set up on his site so I have been playing around with configuring it and learning more about Drupal in the process.  I expect to be messing with it for another day or so before making a decision.

This prepackaged site will need extensive customization, of course, but it will save me some weeks of development, and it’s worth it to have an experienced developer on tap.

I’ve ordered two books from Amazon.  One is on developing themes for Drupal 5 – basically, customizing the user interface – and the other was recommended by Casey from Ravelry in his blog: Designing for the Social Web.  The latter sounds particularly interesting, and will supplement my understanding of social networks.  i spent four months working for a social networking company, but that’s not enough to develop real expertise.

I have also been investigating funding (which is mostly Claudia’s department, but I have one or two connections).  I think I can raise about $2500 through a connection with a friend, which will give us some wiggle room to hire lawyers and developers.  Claudia is investigating other sources of funds as well.  We anticipate doing a general appeal to the handweaving community to donate “cash or stash” – either money (which would of course be easiest/best) or donations of salable items that we can auction or sell off to raise money.  We hope this will raise some additional funds.

Finally, I am starting to investigate hosting services.  My current hosting service will not do for a larger-scale site; it’s targeted at small sites and smaller businesses.  I have no clue who the usual suspects are for hosting a medium-size social network, so am starting to ask around for recommendations.  if you have suggestions, please let me know.

Nothing terribly dramatic, but then progress sometimes isn’t.

Plan for the next few days:

• finish evaluating the social network Drupal package
• Try to understand Views, Panels, and Themes
• Start prototyping the project pages

Had dinner with a friend who’s a high-tech executive (marketing and business development mostly), and he gave me two very good pieces of advice:

(1) don’t make it more complicated than it has to be

(2) do things only when you need to have them done: not everything has to be done at once.

This is good advice, especially since I was feeling a little overwhelmed at the magnitude of the task.  So I sat down and brainstormed a list of all the tasks ahead of us – design and development, marketing, legal, business.  Then I mentally split them out into phases – prototype, design, development, testing, release.

What I’ve realized is that we are in the prototype phase, with maybe a little bit of design.  We’re not in development yet, meaning I not only don’t have to, but shouldn’t, be working on implementing the site.  One of our volunteers is a user experience designer and has offered to write up requirements for the site.  Until she does, no development can really take place – so I should quit feeling the pressure to code everything up NOW.  Right now is a time to relax, learn Drupal, prototype some of the site components that I know are going to be needed, and basically play around with the system, learning its ins and outs.  So I am doing precisely that.  I have created a Drupal test site and am working my way through the tutorials from the Drupal.org website, getting a feel for what it does and doesn’t do.

Other things that don’t need to be done right this very moment include things like incorporating, legal stuff, marketing stuff, etc.  Those can all be done once we’re closer to launch.

So right now, the three important items are:

1. Design the user flow and the feature content (Marian)
2. Learn Drupal and prototype known features (me)
3. Research funding sources (Claudia)

There!  That’s easy to manage.

In other news:

• The wood shop came back with a quote of $260 to make three not-very-complicated pieces of wood for my back beam.  I don’t think so.  I got in touch with a woodworking shop in Sunnyvale that offers private lessons (which can also be help with your own projects).  At $60/hr, I can get it done significantly cheaper than the woodworking shop would manage, plus I get the fun of playing with power tools!  (Don’t worry, I will remember to tie my hair back and keep random appendages out of the table saw.)
• I have signed up for an event with Ladies who Launch – an incubator targeted at women entrepreneurs.  The keynote speaker is the co-founder of Ning, a build-your-own social network startup!  I looked at Ning early on but decided not to use it as it doesn’t have the features needed to do project notebooks (the heart of Ravelry).  But it would be really interesting to see what she has to say about building social networks.  I am considering their incubator as well.
• I discovered a new chocolate shop, Chocolate Covered, in San Francisco!  I was going for dinner with some friends and happened to pass the shop.  I stopped in out of curiosity, not expecting much – most chocolate shops are pretty low-end – but this one was spectacular!  They had an entire wall full of different kinds of chocolate bars, all very high grade chocolate – I was amazed.  I spent some time talking to the proprietor, and bought a collection of very unusual flavors – from bacon (tastes surprisingly good! I liked it a lot) to beer to “tiger nut” (whatever that is) to poppyseed-and-cherry.  I’m going to taste them this weekend.  More truffle ideas!

Much progress on many fronts over the last two days:

• I posted to WeaveTech yesterday looking for assistance with the social networking site.  Several people volunteered to donate time, skills, and donations (mostly items to be sold to raise cash).  Other people gave detailed feedback on what they’d like to see, advice on business setup, and all sorts of things.  Of course, other people grumbled about the uselessness of the whole idea, but that’s fine: they’re not my audience.  There are enough people in the weavers’ group on Ravelry that I think the idea is viable.
• Someone pointed out that we need legal advice for the website before we set it up.  Makes sense to me; I’ve added a cheap-but-good internet/intellectual property attorney to my “to-do” list.  Fortunately we don’t need it until we’re fairly close to going “live”.  But it will definitely add substantial expense.  I can play developer, but I can’t pass for a lawyer even on TV.
• Got some ideas on where to get grants for funding, courtesy of Ruth, the listmom for WeaveTech.  Claudia (the business side of this project) is going to investigate further.  This is a Good Thing – I can fund the development side out of my own pocket (as long as it doesn’t get too expensive) but things like legal advice, incorporation paperwork, etc. have to be paid for and probably won’t come cheap.  So if we can get grants that will make our lives easier.
• Made some progress with Drupal.  I’ve downloaded Drupal 5.10 to my laptop and to the website, and have been playing around with configuring user roles and permissions.  I’m a long way from being able to sing arias, but I’m working through the tutorials and learning to play single notes.  In time, I’ll be able to belt out Wagner with the best of them.
• I have also sent out feelers to two Drupal consultants, asking if they can help architect the system.  Tell me what modules I need to implement which functionality, stand back, and watch me go.  A lot of Drupal website building is figuring out what modules are required and how to configure them; give me that information and watch me go!
• Packed off the proto-functional spec to two volunteers, one a user interaction designer and one a systems engineer.  Hoping they can help me build out the spec and make it easier to understand, build a robust development/upload process, and design a workflow that will make the site a joy to use.
• Finally, I have scheduled lunch with an entrepreneur friend of mine (the CEO of Balsam Hill, where I was contracting for a couple months this year), and am going to pick his brains about building a startup, and particularly building an Internet-based startup.  I’m also hoping his Rolodex includes other people who might advise us.

For two days, that’s not bad progress.

There are still a host of other things I need to do – finish spec’ing out the site, create a project plan, do more Drupal research, figure out how to coordinate volunteers, etc. – but they can wait until tomorrow.

I also got my sectional beam off to the woodworkers, and am waiting for a quote.  They’re going to replace the three wood sections around the metal core with thicker sections (to make the groove bigger).  It will probably take them a week or so, following which I can (finally!) get back to this doubleweave project.

I must say, I’m really enjoying this project so far.  It has many of the facets that appeal to me – coordinating lots of very different things, networking, and starting something new.  And being creative, of course.  It’s very challenging, and also lots of FUN!

Off to play with Drupal some more…