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LEGOFan lives!
Despite a prolonged illness of the server crash variety, the patient is stable.
It’s not wearing much at the moment, just a hospital gown that shows off its
bare butt... but the heart is pumping, air is flowing, and I can’t stretch this
metaphor much further without getting truly disgusting. So I’ll stop.
LEGOFan.org Status Report, April 3, 2007
Earlier this year, LEGOFan experienced a hard drive failure, and all content was
lost. You can read the sad postmortem
here. Rather than dwell on the past, this is more about the future.
Specifically, where to go from here.
Several volunteers have stepped forward and raised their hands to help. We’ll
definitely be taking them up on their offer. Anyone else who would like to
volunteer, please contact me and I’ll get you on the discussion list.
We’ll be returning to the roots of what LEGOFan should be, and how to get it
there. The first step was getting the server rebuilt and new software installed.
That’s been done, courtesy of Dan Boger, who installed CentOS (a Linux variant
with a built-in LAMP stack). The next step will be to nail down the
architecture, then design, and then content.
At BrickFest this year, I ran a LEGOFan roundtable, and got a good idea of where
others in the community think the site should be steered, what it should focus
on. The response was fairly unanimous about focus and audience: new and
potential LEGO enthusiasts of all ages. Help people identify their LEGO-related
interests, and quickly get them to that information (either on LEGOFan or by
linking to other community resources). A secondary (but still important)
audience is existing enthusiasts like AFOLs.
Important considerations for the new site:
- No Forums (except a Q&A for anonymous users to ask authenticated answerers)
- Updated and easy to use web links
- Site should act like an online handbook with descriptive hover text for links
- “Voice” should be at about an 8th grade level... not jargon-heavy or dense, but easy to read and not condescending
- Easily navigable
- Short articles on the hobby with links to more detailed information (such as other web sites, wikis, etc.)
- Include fun content like minifig maker software, random MOC images, etc.
- The AFOL comic by Jake and Greg Hyland seemed to be a good starting point for the type of attitude the site should have
- Provide a place for LEGO Ambassadors to call home
- This is a good place for exclusive LEGO-generated content, like new product announcements, pictures, etc. (Note on this one: as a site owner of other LEGO resources, my preference is very much for LEGOFan to work WITH the community and not take content or eyeballs away from other sites. So when a new Star Wars announcement is made, it could be made on LEGOFan with links to more extensive info on other specialty sites like FBTB.net.)
- For those in attendance: what did I miss?
Jake McKee, whose nimble brain spawned the idea of LEGOFan (I think), was in
attendance and shared some of his goals and insight into what he’d originally
wanted it to be. His words were: “LEGO mashup.” Take all sorts of LEGO-related
content generated by fans and bring it together in an interesting method.
One of the main things about the site will be how to create and maintain
content. Steve Witt of LEGO has said repeatedly that he’d like to tie in the
concept of ILENN (http://www.ilenn.com, another site of mine) to bring other
LEGO news into the fold. There was some discussion of appropriate filtering and
community self-management, which I think are completely feasible. But before
going too far down that road, I’d like to hear other comments about this, since
I’m sensing potential for a conflict of interest and I don’t want to hijack LF
with my own pet project (long ignored though it is).
I also kind of liked the idea of a “user-generated comic maker” where pre-canned
comic elements could be combined to create a small comic strip or page. Contests
each week could choose which would be best to add to a permanent archive of
graphical comic help topics.
Other ways of keeping content updated would be to empower other LEGO community
content owners with the ability to submit their own “front-page” news items. I
feel strongly this is a direction we should follow. So if Peeron got a cool new
feature, Dan could post directly onto LEGOFan. Or if Rene added some nifty new
feature, Lugnet or 1000steine would be able to post directly to LEGOFan’s home
page as well. This could be achieved by either a special RSS feed, or admin page
with authentication, or both.
Items like the Community Window (and archive), AFOL comic, and so on would
definitely come back.
There is a lot of potential for the site, and we barely scratched the surface.
So I’ll open it up here for further discussion...
What do YOU think LEGOFan should provide to the community? What features would
you think appropriate for the audience(s)?
I look forward to reading your thoughts.
Thank you,
Kelly McKiernan
LEGOFan Guy
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: LEGOFan Lives, and wants your feedback
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| Hi Kelly, Thank you for the update. Do you have an idea of how long the site will be without content? The biggest problem I see is not having LEGOfan.org online with any content. I would like to see temporary html pages linking to various AFOL (...) (18 years ago, 4-Apr-07, to lugnet.general, FTX)
| | | Re: LEGOFan Lives, and wants your feedback
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| Hey Kelly, To me, we need two things: 1. Some kind of guide to "where to go first" for new AFOLs (pointers to main community sites, Brickshelf, Flickr, Bricklink etc) 2. A massive, user-updatable database of links for everyone else. I'd say you (...) (18 years ago, 4-Apr-07, to lugnet.general, FTX)
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