For those of you who dont know SliceHost is a Virtual Private Server hosting company that allows you full root access to a ‘slice’ and guarantees CPU time. This change was a long time comming and you’ll see the reason for it in the next few weeks

I am also going to start a ‘projects’ page, so that people can see what it is that I am talking about instead of me having to explain it to them one by one. The promised coding tutorials are also on the way. I’ll update you guys soon on the progress.

My old design was nice  but it was constricting and did not really allow me to move in any direction that I wanted. I wanted to bring in my feeds from around the internet in an easier manner. I wanted to be able to provide readers with more insight into everything that really goes on, so that when I randomly write a rant about a subject they wouldn’t be caught off guard.

I think I achieved this with this new design. Theres still a missing column in this top area that will be implemented soon. It will allow you to switch between pages, which will be used. I swear. It will also probably feature some kind of statistic about the page. I’m still playing with it. Ideas are welcome.

The design itself is cleaner, I’m using some colors that I always use. The layout is a re-interpretation of the Hemingway Reloaded by Startup365. I say re-interpretation because adding that third column and making it so that the page works with or without it basically took most of their CSS out of the picture. Still credit where credit is due.

The changes will be implemented in the coming weeks I just wanted to get the ball rolling with some fresh paint. New categories and pages will also be added, so that browsing the site is easier through the newly implemented footer.

This theme will most likely evolve as my topics evolve. A search function is also in the works.

A few years ago I was working with ModWorks Group, we worked with project such as Deskmod, PixelAttic and ModBlog and we also had a webdesign company called Ramped. I was happy there even if i was the last one to find out about anything. I was living in Iowa and I was a hermit, I never really go out anyways but in Iowa State I’d randomly take walks with friends around campus and what not, i had some freedoms i never had before.

One night i thought up of an idea of having a campuswide event system, where you would find out of what is going on in campus and maybe start our own parties and stuff. There was a popular blog on campus called Strangetalk and people did these gatherings already but it was more amongst the geeks than anything. So the idea wasn’t new, it was just organize it and have it readily available and have people talk about parties and what not. Have people discuss events. I was going to use all my deskmod / modblog knowledge for this. Then i thought bigger, what if, you have a page that divides campuses by their acronym, wed be iastate.whatever.com and University of Northern Iowa would be uni.whatever.com, we could share web designs and just change the university’s colors and stuff. Have one main page and from there go to many member sites where you could see locally whats going on, and also see what your friends are doing in other campuses.

This was around mid 2001 when i started with this idea. I called it Akronym and registered Akronym.com/.net/.org on September 26, 2001. I still own those domains. School got crazy, work got crazy, but i still talked about some day doing that site. I left Iowa State and returned home, without having done that site. There was one coincidence tho, somebody in Iowa State came up with a similar idea and did a site which was basically what i was envisioning.

• CampusAuthority

The idea of having one central site which fed from all the local sites was also not new, and i saw a site doing it aswell.

• IndyMedia

CampusAuthority later also had diffrent designs for diffrent campuses but they didnt feed off each other in one central page like IndyMedia does. But that wasnt a concern for me anymore because i was in Puerto Rico again and that whole campus frame of mind was gone.

I no longer worked with ModBlog but i still talked to a few people, one night i was checking the local sites here and i noticed there was a big gap in the local entertainment scene and i thouhgt, you know what, i could easily modify that CampusAuthority idea and make it a site about events in a city. Have people come in and submit the events, people subscribe to events, have an alarm system that lets you choose which of your friends can see what event you want to go to so you can plan your weekend out an then leave the computer and have fun. This was obviously targetted for this city and therefore had to be in spanish, but what could be a good, short, catchy name for that. MiWiken.com/.net/.org was registered November 11, 2003.

I immediately thought of the possibilities and did some mock ups and started coding parts of it (will edit this with pictures when i get home). I even added the (then alpha) Google Maps into the script through a little applet tool that used the api to make a little iframe with it, this was before google let you actually do this through the api itself.

Through all of this I got involved with work and with other stuff, but i always tried to talk to Gorman about the project, or asked him copyright advice and stuff, but Gorman is literally GorBot. He works and works and works. My instant messenges went un-answered, so did my emails. I never got to tell him about the idea, but sites started popping up around the web that reflected what i was thinking but didnt quite make it. They didn’t quite make the jump to that unexploited night-scene / geek-blogger arena.

Here we are now, MiWiken had a splash page for years, and never any content. I was looking for a good webdesigner that would help me with the project, looking for help, any help. A site this big needs lots of helping hands. So i kind of let it be and never worried.

So what is this MiWiken idea?

well now i can tell you and use examples which is an easy way through, I was very involved with ModBlog at the start so i knew how to make a good friend-of-a-friend network site that let you have good back-end code so you could change profiles and templates for everything. That is, essencially, ModBlog. Sadly modblog was a bit late to the party and therefore couldnt compete with the LiveJournals and MySpaces of the web, but it has way better code behind it. Gorman Powered, what can i say? check out these reference links :

• ModBlog
• Digg
• Craig’s List
• MySpace
• Last.fm

You have a interface where you submit events in your area like you submit stories to Digg, you get them listed by area and type like on Craig’s List. In that site you have a profile, the profile gives you a blog where you can change the template and display it the way you want like in ModBlog (its glory days), and you have a friend of a friend network through those profiles like on MySpace, but so much better than MySpace because it actually has hanging out with your friends included in the package, not just random pointless shouts. Finally, the icing on the cake. Gorman always talked about having a “Brain” for the next version of Deskmod, i never understood what he meant, until way later when i was playing with Last.fm. Last.fm traks what you listen to (i listen to a lot of The Cure) and gives you statistics but more importantly it gives you suggestions.

Suggestions by your peers and suggestions by an automated system that has no bias but just information of what people listen. Brilliant! Add that to the page.

You have the end-all page for social networking, really connecting on a person-to-person level, and making new friends. That is what i wanted to do with MiWiken. I called it Social Calendaring, and it answers to solve the “I wanted to go but couldnt find anybody to go with” issue that keeps appearing after every major event.

Three years ago i got that idea, and ive been dragging my feet with it. Just recently I was wondering what had happened to Gorman after he went to FileFront since he once asked me to send him a resume but that never went through, and i stumbled upon Ramped being the main page and ImThere.com being the flagship site. ImThere. That would be such an awesome name for MiWiken if it were to be released in the US.

What is ImThere? It wouldnt say, and the GorBlog didnt answer many questions either. I asked Chad (Chad Ingram, who i worked with at ModWorks and is now a head developer at Ramped), and when i asked him what it was about because i think i had a similar idea he said “hmm, tell me your idea, and ill let you know if thats it”. I went on a panic and I didnt know what to do, so i rushed to get to work on MiWiken again. Thinking for sure theyd kill me.

And here to why I am writting this. Ive had a great relationship with Gorman, Chad and the guys over at ModWorks/Ramped for many years. The whole reason I got into programming was because of Gorman and at ModWorks i learned what nobody has ever been able to teach me in years. Knowing the way Gorman and the rest of the guys code, I can never out match their coding and their site will be a tremendous success, but i am hoping that in writting this, and publishing it a little before the site publicly opens, therefore before i really know whats on the site, which i think is everything i posted above but better, I still have a fighting chance. That I will have ground to stand on if they decide to accuse me of tresspassing on their intellectual property. Which I doubt they will, and therefore, why i wrote this so far into the develpment cycle, after having known about the existance of ImThere for over 2 months.

Everything that is detailed in this post is pure speculation on what the contents of ImThere.com will be, I dont have any knowledge, proof or “inside information” on this.

I wish them the best of luck and i will certainly be THERE (not at the launch party cause thats expensive >.>) but ill be refreshing my page a lot just like the old Deskmod.com days.

The following links lead you to Gorman’s projects which i was discussing here:

GorBlog (http://blog.g0rman.com)
ImThere (http://www.imthere.com)
ramped (http://www.ramped.com)