SMITH Magazine Relaunch
My friends at SMITH just launched a new version of their website with all sorts of fun ways for people to participate. SMITH is a magazine of stories, and has until recently been mostly a traditional edited publication. However, after Larry and Tim had such success with their Six Word Memoirs project on Twitter, they decided that they wanted to open up the magazine so that a lot more people could share their stories.
Larry and Tim approached me about helping them to create the software for this expansion early last year. They wanted to be able to create different story writing activities for the folks in their community, and add some social networking features like member profiles. The goal was to create a space where people could tell their stories, compare with others, and meet interesting and like-minded folks. Instead of being a magazine you read, it could be a 24/7 literary salon that you attend and participate in.
The package I delivered to the guys included not only the code that powers the story submissions, member profiles and administrative backend tools, but extensive documentation on a library of functions that were to be used for integrating with other pages on the site - powered by Wordpress, or otherwise. Each writing project that they create functions as its own little pod, and can be extensively customized. This way, the features can evolve and change as the community (and the associated gigantic database of awesome personal stories) grows, without having to create everything from scratch each time they want to do something new.
It is amazing to see the site now, several months after I delivered the final code. Tim Barkow is a coding genius and has taken the raw tools I gave him and has crafted a really exciting, inviting site. As someone who struggles for endless hours every single time I try to design a button, it is especially delightful to see my code dressed in such pretty clothes! It always wonderful to see people using software that you created to do interesting things.
Now, go check out SMITH and write a story or two of your own. And if you have an idea for a project like the one I did for those guys, drop me a line!
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