Okay, since several of the people on here are also on Rhydinica (and I'll inform those who aren't), I was wondering if we could get together and have a chat meeting to brainstorm about a few things. Like categories, patrolling for vandalism (though I don't see that becoming a big problem until the spambots find the thing), that sort of thing.

If anyone's interested, reply here and we'll try to figure out a time. And maybe hold it in the Mutual Endeavors chat, or on AIM for the non-ME members. Doesn't have to be this minute or anything. And anyone who knows any other contributors who can't read this, let 'em know about it?

Mark this day on your calendars, ladies and gentleman! As of just a few short minutes ago, our host at Bellwebs, the mastermind behind the design, our dear friend Mike, uploaded our site to our official domain. It's been two long years in the making, at least. I admit having a terrible sense of time. Goes along with my awful memory. Anyway!

Last night I was tinkering around with the test site, trying to figure out all the administration controls, and I got a little frustrated. Brain dead. Maintaining a website is hard work and requires a lot of effort, but that's what I'm here for, right?

( So I wrote Mike an e-mail... )

Ask and ye shall receive. I signed on tonight to find another handful of e-mails in response. One of which happened to be a notification telling me that our domain had been added to their server. I think that's what it was in any case. Some sort of fancy "Notification of the domain creation."

( Then some other personal e-mails from Mike himself. )

So I did sign on, and I read those e-mails. And after reading them I caught Mike in an IM again for further discussion. What I saw on the test site was FABULOUS, as I told him. It looks absolutely beautiful, and I can't think of any better way to improve it than it now stands. So ... he went ahead and uploaded us to the server.

That's right, my friends. We're official! mutualendeavors.org is now up and running, fully operational, and ready for further administrative tweaking. It needs a lot of work, yet. There are a large handful of blanks I need to fill in and that'll take time, but here we are! Finally! A site to call our very own!

Check it out: Mutual Endeavors on the web!

Good news! Though I've failed at writing the newsletter for the past two weeks, I do have some positive news to share with the Mutual Endeavors community. The last month of communication with Mike Bell has paid off. I wasn't online at all over the weekend, but when I signed on tonight I was pleased to discover a large handful of e-mails.

( The first two. )

The second e-mail contained confidential administrative information for the test site. He's been working long and hard, and I'm extremely pleased with his assistance. I really can't thank him enough for what he's done. After reading the fourth and final e-mail, I noticed that he was signed onto his AIM name and decided to talk to him directly for the first time since starting to work with him. We had a long discussion.

In fact, even while working on writing this update, I've been talking to him. Tonight has been one heck of a night for multitasking, I can tell you that much. I know I wouldn't be able to do all this on my own, and I can't stop thanking him for all the help! The good news is that I don't have to beg everybody for donations. At the rate he's offering to host our site, I can afford the yearly price all on my own. Everybody better be thankful!

( Furthermore... )

So what this all means, essentially, is that if all goes well we should have a complete Mutual Endeavors dot org website up and running some time very soon. I'm hoping for next week, if not sooner. I plan on toying around with the administrator functions he gave me. The system he's using isn't something I'm used to, but it looks very easy to figure out. Right now it's all very blue. As in color.

Mike says: "...before I go changing everything to red and white..which would take another full day's work, let me see what I can do with the header logo"

I sent him a copy of the logo Tin made for us, and he might play around with that to see what he comes up with. He also sent me a link to a gallery of thousands of different templates. He said he searched through a good 1400 of them to find the neatest looking type of layout for our site. I'm hoping to get everything matched up to the color scheme Mel arranged for us here and on the message board forum, but I'll take whatever I can get.

This is one giant step for Mutual Endeavors, and I couldn't be any happier. As soon as everything is settled and moved over to the domain name, I'll let everyone know. Stay tuned!

Friday morning, elf_fu and I were having a wee bit of a conversation on her personal journal. Ramblings became more ramblings, and she hooked me up with the e-mail address of the guy who runs bellwebs. I hate telephones, you see, and so I tried to contact him through the e-mail form on their site, but that was a failure for some server reason or another. In any case...

( I wrote him an e-mail )

There's been a reply e-mail lurking in my inbox since Saturday afternoon. I just got to it today.

( Mike wrote me back! )

So this is good news! I added the AOL screen name he gave me to my buddy list, so I should be able to see him. I'm not too keen on MSN and Yahoo, though. I could load them up, but too many programs running all at once like to eat at my system. That's neither here nor there, however.

I'm going to write him another e-mail in response and see how things work out. Major thanks go out to elf_fu for finding the information for me and starting the ball rolling. Let this be a lesson to you, my friends. A little communication goes a long way. I'll keep you all updated. Stay tuned.

Once upon a time, I remember working on websites offline. I remember having an FTP client. Working on coding the remaining old issues of Ubique's Weekly this morning (there are 30 more to go!), I thought to myself how nice it would be if I had an FTP program again. I'd be able to work on some test pages offline and upload them to geocities to see how they look and what-the-fuck-ever else. I don't remember. So I thought to plug "free ftp" into google and see what it gets me. To my not surprise, most of them are free trials of the utility.

I think I remember using CoffeeCup at some point. Good old CJ linked me to something, way back when. I downloaded it. Used it. Could have been that, but I think it was actually Cute FTP. The only other option that looks promising is SmartFTP. Then there are the hundred and one other supposed free FTP utilities out there. The major question I'm asking myself is: "Do I need them?"

I'd really like to start working on the official Mutual Endeavors website so that I have something to immediately upload when I'm able to buy some server space. I haven't looked at my PayPal account recently to see if any generous souls out there have donated anything or not, but I'm not in any real big hurry to beg. Except maybe for some help where coding is concerned. Let me go back to my previous statement.

There are a grand total of 55 old issues of Ubique's Weekly archived on the geocities site: UW Headquarters. The coding is a pain in the ass. If you take off the dot html part of the address, you'll be able to see the directory. A whole bunch of tedious and repetitive work, of which I have 30 more to code and upload. It's not difficult, but damned if the work doesn't fry the brain cells something fierce. The last person who volunteered to do it for me exploded in an array of gooey brain squish after a couple of weeks of doing it. I'm grateful for the help, but mental meltdown really isn't that fun, I know.

Anyway: Once I get all that crap coded, and once I get a host for our site, I'll be moving all the archives over. That's one thing. I really want to get rid of the stupid yahoo ads that eat half the page. I'd also like to be able to immediately upload new issues so people can "read the latest issue!" directly from the site. I'm hoping to cut back on e-mail newsletters entirely. That's a thought. Formatting UW is a bitch and a half. Then going back and recoding it for the archives? Not fun.

This leads me back to wanting to create an e-mail forum for people to fill out for updates. Some sort of website direct thing, you know? Something that permits the complete anonymity that most readers want, that gets sent to a handful of Ink Wire Associates. Still looking for people to fill in some jobs, by the way! Think I've pretty much hired on Mel for help with the technical graphic design stuff.

Which reminds me. I want to use the pretty background image you made for the layout of the site. That is an image, isn't it? I dunno. It's subtle, and I like it, and I want to sort of match everything up in the pretty department. So I may need some help writing the code. Translating from CSS to HTML and all that.

Wow. Look at me just go on and on. I'll shut up now.

Today I verified my PayPal account, but I still hate it. I've been trying to figure out how to make use of it, how to accept donations like Sortelli does for Elf Only Inn. I can't seem to find that same button. There are plenty of buttons available, but not the donate one, so far as I can find. That's only half of my troubles. I mean ... I don't even know how this entire PayPal thing works. It's secure, I get that. Beyond that? Foreign language. I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Godaddy.com does work with PayPal, and that's what I intend on using the majority of any donated funds for. I wouldn't mind spending some of those funds on making this Community journal a paid account, and removing the ads from our forums as well. Most of you know how much a paid LJ account costs. I don't remember off the top of my head. But I do know removing the ads from our forum runs about $7 a month.

These are just long term secondary goals. The primary goal is to get mutualendeavors.org hosted somewhere. Probably through godaddy, which is where I registered the domain name, as I've said before. I'm still looking into all the options over there, though. I plan on looking into the information elf_fu provided this week, as well as continuously researching the options at godaddy until it all makes sense to me. I'll keep everybody posted on any new developments as they arise.

edit: Donation button! Huzzah! Thank you elf_fu!

So, I really dislike PayPal. It turns out I do have an account, but it's never been verified. By the looks of things, I signed up three years ago, when I had my own checking account, when things were looking grim, and never got it verified. Tonight I tried to change my account information, but it looks like I'll have to wait 2-3 business days before anything's going to show up on the new bank statement for me to use to verify PayPal and lah dee fucking dah.

Tony made a wonderfully supportive reply in my last update post. He says: "Hey! Awsome for the start up. I, although I am dirt ass poor, think I could manage at least ten bucks a month for this wonderous purpose. It's not much, but if six and a half more people can do that much, we'd be golden." That's beautiful, but I don't even really need ten bucks a month. Wow, that's crazy talk!

As I previously stated, I'm not a web page design genius. I've got two handy idiot self-help books at my disposal that have taught me some basic HTML, but anything fancier than that boggles my mind. One of the options I'm looking at right now is offered by godaddy.com, and it's known as Website Tonight. For a little extra money than the basic server space rental, Website Tonight offers a large assortment web-building features free of charge.

( it's a large list )

You really don't have to read through all those. But maybe somebody out there knows more about the technical jargon surrounding web design than I do, because I only understand about a third of that. What I do understand is that it'll probably simplify the task of building mutualendeavors.org from scratch, and let me design it to fit the image in my mind. What I want to do is match everything up to the spectacular layout that Mel designed for us.

The option I'm looking into from Website Tonight offers all that plus 2 BG of disk space, 100 GB bandwidth, 200 email accounts, and unlimited email forwards. It's the 10 page deluxe plan. That runs $8.99 monthly or $8.10/month for 12 months. I talked to my husband about it tonight. He said to talk to him about it again tomorrow when he was more awake, because I was yammering at him about it before he went to bed.

If I can get PayPal to cooperate with me better, that'd be nice. Then I can beg you guys for donations. Though that didn't work out so well with the ad free option for the forum. Well. I'm rambling anyway. Just letting you people know where my thoughts are on all this business.

You can all thank my husband for being such a good sport and spoiling me. I convinced him to buy me a domain name for the year. Until this time next year, mutualendeavors.org is mine all mine. I put it to a vote this evening, as many of you are aware, and the majority finally settled on dot org. It just sucks that I had to cast the vote through instant messages. Really wish people would pay more attention to these community resources.

In any case, I'm looking into finding a host for our site. A lot of the options seem to be pretty expensive. Godaddy, where I registered the domain name, has some options for about $75 a year, at the very least. Tony directed me to a site that hosts domains for free, but I can't seem to implement the WWW dot portion of the site address into that option. Maybe it was just the way I registered the name. Or maybe it doesn't work quite the way I planned. I don't know. It'll be easier on my own peace of mind to work with godaddy, I think, but that again requires money.

Dot org pretty much implies that we're a non-profit organization, which is true, but at this point I'm seriously considering setting up a paypal account and begging for donations from our member base. The only trouble with that, as Louisa told me once, is that everybody in our member base is dirt ass poor. We're lucky we can even get on the internet, right? Well...

Give me a little time to research all our available options. This will go much faster if I get some help from you guys. I don't know a whole lot about shopping for web hosting groups. The cheapest available option will definitely be the best available option. I may have to go month to month and spend a little at a time. We'll see.

The things I do for my love of the game...

In light of the spiffy new design work elf_fu has been putting together for us here and on the message board, I took the time yesterday to think really hard on our old mission statement. I've narrowed it down to four paragraphs that I think explain what Mutual Endeavors is all about in the best way possible. The mission statement is currently posted on this community's user profile page. Read it over and tell me what you think. If there's anything I can edit to improve it, let me know.

Additionally: I like this layout so much that I'm considering altering the look and layout of the other webpages dedicated to our cause. Most of all, I need to talk to my husband to see about purchasing a domain name. I know I've mentioned this before, but I'm now considering going through with it more seriously. Though, I don't claim to be a web design genius. Neat and simple I can do, with basic HTML and a few other tricks.

One of my favorite website layouts is common as the rain.com | eros. I caution you all that it's a site dedicated to homoerotica literature. This link isn't going to take you to anything graphic, however. All you'll see is some pretty artwork and a selection of links. It's a very tidy website, and I'd really like to make something like that for Mutual Endeavors some day. Still debating on the .com versus .org thing, though.

So this is why I'm looking for a Webpage Archive Editor. Apart from the tedious work of reformatting all those past issues, I need some help designing a spiffy neat website for the group.

And wow... Look how far off the main topic I got. That's all I have to say.

Check this out. If you're looking at this entry from your friends page, I highly recommend you hit us up on the main page for the community and look at all the spectacular hard work that was put into making the Mutual Endeavors super pretty.

Everybody give a tremendous amount of thanks to elf_fu for volunteering for this job. She's done a wonderful job and I can't thank her enough for the effort she put into this project. My own personal hero! I couldn't have done anything like this myself. I'm honored to have a friend who knows more about tweaking CSS and journal layouts than I do.

ROUND OF APPLAUSE!!!

CONFETTI AND FLOWERS!!!

HEARTS AND KISSES!!!

I'm not joking. I can't thank you enough, Mel. Thank you thank you thank you so so so much!