About two weeks back now I got into some trouble with my local mommy list serv group. There are almost 600 families on the list serv and some became so upset because I asked for recommendations about what areas outside the city to move to, that they want to have me removed from the list serv. Granted they wanted to that more so after I continued to post questions, but I never saw the post from the administrator asking me to stop posting those type of questions.
It’s unfortunate that the experience turned out the way that it did for both the list serv and myself, and that’s because I am now the holder of some wonderful recommendations that people sent to me and you can tell that they spent a lot of time writing their thoughts to me. I feel that someday there will be other families on the list serv who will need to move out of Baltimore for some reason but will have no idea where to go and I could help them. That concept had my husband mentioning to me one night that I should start a blog about moving so people can post their own thoughts and not be ridiculed for doing so. The blog idea could still happen, but it ended up expanding to do a wiki instead so there is not one webmaster. I love the idea! Life is busy and I’m not great at keeping up my blog, so having people add their thoughts and do the other advantages that a wiki has to offer is appealing to me.
So I have spent a few days now trying to get a wiki started on BoltWire because it gives you all these things that you can do for free, you just have to do a little work. I’m not scared of the technical work, I enjoy learning new things, however I am not able to wrap my mind around some important things that they are telling me to do. And there is no offer of any tips or places to go for help in each section. Like they assume that you know what they are saying and meaning.
I put out something about on my Facebook status and got some suggestions to try and some suggestions for other sites. I have looked into the other sites but they either want money or they don’t allow me to use my own domain. And that is a problem to me. How is Google going to pick it up if I don’t have a domain? To me it would look awful to advertise a long web address that will take someone inside a hosted site. Blogs come up and they appear on their own but they are not, but they are accepted that way. I don’t know enough about wiki’s to know if they are accepted that way. But regardless, when you sign up for a blog you know what your web address is going to be, I’m not getting that impression with the hosts that I’ve looked into.
So I am left with an idea that could help others through their recommendations. I wanted to called it MarylandInfo. And it wouldn’t be just about moving, but that is what I would have used to start it. From there I would have created a web of all kinds of questions involving the neighborhoods I’m looking into and what restaurants are there (for example). So eventually there would be more questions out there with opinions or recommendations and it would have grown, I just know it.
I am still curious as to whether I’d have to do advertising for it or if word of mouth and Google searches would have found it. But I would have signed it up with AdSense and tried to make some money from it. I am about to have a 2nd baby and I won’t be working any longer, so any added income could help.
WordPress is my comfort zone and would like to start a blog, and perhaps someday figure out how to move it to WordPress.org so I can have paid advertisements (hopefully!). But would the style of a blog be helpful enough to others. Can I have open access to writers? Can others ask questions and receive all kind of opinions or recommendations? Could a blog take on a life of it’s own without a main web master to post something every day? Decisions, decisions.
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