Dale's Weblog

WEGO – The Web Ego Project

Posted by dale on Thu, 11 Nov 2004 21:16:22 EST

What am I doing here? Well, Matthom has come up with this idea, WEGO. What is it? well…

The project and trend
I would like to start a trend, called "WEGO," that promotes inspirational work – whether it be people or content. In this case, it would be bloggers that would be mentioned that have inspired or influenced your own work, in some way.
The web is full of blogs that only speak of the author themselves. There is far too much ego out there, and not enough WEGO. After all, we learn together. We blog together. Let’s stop talking about ourselves, and start talking about those who have inspired us!
I would like this to get around the web, and have many bloggers participate.
All you have to do is title your headline, "WEGO – The Web Ego Project," and write your entry about a person who deserves an accolade for their web design efforts.
In fact, this could be done every few months. After all, there is not just one person who has inspired the masses. Everyone has many people/friends who help make their blogging a more worthwhile experience.

http://matthom.com/archive/2004/11/10/01/

I think this is a pretty cool idea. Hopefully through this we can all appreciate the work of others who have inspired us. Get a bit of humility happening ;)

What I was thinking for my first entry is talk about what and who inspired this web log. I won’t talk about a single individual, but about things that others have done to inspire me in creating this site.

Let’s start

This site is fairly new and would be my first dedicated blog site. It is separate from everything else. Its purpose is to let me talk about things that I find interesting and/or important. It allows me to share some of my insights with others.

As I’ve stated before blogging (http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/81) is a very personal thing. Your blog is about you, your perspectives on life. So although it is a personal thing, others have affected this site and how it works. So it all started when….

A few of my friends decided to start keeping a personal record of events of things or interest. Josh (http://www.joahua.com/) ran a site; I suppose you could have called it a humor website. He posted links, pictures, articles about things that had interest to his year group at school and friends. There were some times where some quite interesting things were posted, such as certain details about a certain PE teacher.

The site quickly became known to many, even the non-techies and started getting regular visits. It was quite an interesting site and I would say it had quite a different focus to his current site.

After that a few different versions of his blog site immerged. The most recent “old” one would have had most affect on this current site (it can be found here: http://www.joahua.com/mid04/).

Josh and I every now and then had some quite in depth decisions about things. At the time it was open source vs. closed source. My news system was some dodgy 3rd party thing and it didn’t do, well much. It was just a long list of text with a basic php front end. No commenting or permalinks. It wasn’t good.

Josh had his cool custom written news system with commenting and everything. So I decided to write my own. I slowly added features and it grew into a news system with commenting. This old site can be found here http://www.dalegroup.net/mid04/ (note there maybe broken links on that site)

One day I decided to dump the whole site and start again, and this is where we are currently. My development of this site started when I couldn’t easily post news and after seeing josh’s system I decided to develop on his idea.

Within that time Stuart (http://smkz.is-a-geek.net/) moved over to wordpress the 3rd party blogging tool as it had more features than his news system and if I remember correctly worked without needing global variables turned on in php :p

Josh got sick of his site, like I did with my old one. He decided to jump over to wordpress as it supported more features (trackback, better archiving, better admin panel etc).

My site was pretty new and I didn’t feel like changing, although it lacked many features that wordpress had. I decided again to develop it further and now it currently supports most of wordpress’ basic features.

Since then I started visiting photomatt.net and was pretty impressed with his setup. This site aims to have the same sort of (but not) appeal that his site does. Pity about the graphics. :p

Currently I am working on a new blogging system that will replace getnews (the name of the current one) with something that hopes to be more powerful, but most importantly more flexible, with a templating system like wordpress.

This site really needs a visual update and I plan on getting around to this too. I hope to take a few ideas from everyone.

• Matthoms fantastic use of mod_rewrite as well as his news headlines and “base” page.
• Stuart’s use of recently viewed links.
• Matthew’s (http://www.ucosty.net/) use of header links.
• Photomatt’s class and style ;)
• Some general features from wordpress.
• A commenting system based on Dunstan’s (http://1976design.com/blog/) site.
• Over all better interaction between each page.
• Idea’s based around the CMS used on a site developed by josh (http://www.platform7.info)

That is about all for now. I hope this post fits in well enough to WEGO. I encourage everyone else to write a post on the same idea ;)