sickness & wordpress.

sunday, january 21st, 2024.

Ah, beans.

I seem to have caught the flu from the little one, who seems to gather up all the bugs from school like a Petri dish. I had a good long streak of being healthy, but c'est la vie I suppose! I'll probably call off of work Monday and pick up my laptop to work remotely the rest of the week. Wish I had more sick leave to just be sick, though.

After the city council meeting on Monday, my friend and I decided on a name for our organization and I went ahead and registered the domain on Porkbun. Yesterday, I set up WordPress.com hosting for $96. It's a far cry from the Raspberry Pi hosting this website for the low cost of its power draw, but I wanted to make it easy for my friend and I to both post to it, plus whoever else might join our organization. I think it might be a tall order to get other not-software-engineer folks using git and a static site generator! 😅

I'm pleasantly surprised by the WordPress.com experience, though. Out of the gate, it comes with the ability to manage a mailing list of newsletter subscribers, schedule posts, host video content, create an RSS feed, collect website statistics, and probably a bunch of other little bells-and-whistles I haven't yet discovered in my two hours of twiddling around. Plus, you know, I don't have to stand up a machine or VPS and manage the hosting machine and keep it patched. That's pretty rad.

As far as getting the word out there, I'm not really planning on using social media. I'm hoping to put together a honed elevator pitch describing our organization, what we hope to accomplish, how to get involved, and a signup for the mailing list to keep folks privy to in-person meetings. Once that elevator pitch is up on the website, I'm gonna get hundreds of business cards printed out with the website URL and pass 'em out both individually and drop stacks of 'em at the local bike shops.

Basically, I'm gonna let this one spread by in-person word-of-mouth. If folks share our stuff on social media, all the better, but I'm not gonna spend my time cultivating a presence there. Better to focus on the website, meeting people in person, and organizin'!

Strong Towns put out a neat video yesterday about starting up a local group for advocacy and community involvement. Super worth a watch if you're interested in this sort of thing. One of the big takeaways I got from it was that organic, slow growth of a movement is super important. They mentioned the idea of "cataclysmic money," a huge infusion of cash for an organization before it's ready to handle it. Small bets and slow growth are the path to success. Definitely some lessons to keep in mind!

I'm real hyped to get this movement started!

Until next time, be well. :)